“Between the kitty litter and the toothpaste, on a lonely aisle of your supermarket, they cry out for love. Highlander Untamed! Unleash the Night! To Pleasure a Prince! The Boss’s Wife for a Week! Willingly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded!”
So begins Brian Miller’s piece in the Seattle Weekly, A Billion Dollar Romance Novel Industry, And its Lonely Black Author.
Miller profiles the Seattle romance novelist Edwina Martin-Arnold and in the process gives us a peek into the world of Romance publishing.
How big an industry is it:
The genre accounts for 26.4 percent of all popular fiction sales
It annually produces around 6,000 titles
Harlequin, the godzilla of Romance publishing sold $471 million worth of books last year
40% of all Romance books are sold at the big box retailers like Safeway, Wal-Mart and Costco.
How diverse of an industry is it? Not very.
“Among these coded book covers, where yearning maidens cling to strapping lads with gilded locks, it’s nearly impossible to find an African-American face. Nor any Latina features, nor any Asian figures, nor any sign that love exists for nonwhite women.”
The Romance Writers of America (RWA) claim around 9,500 members, “but a spokesperson draws a blank when asked about the ethnicity of its authors and readers. While there are plenty of market-research factoids available…the RWA’s race demographics are curiously blank.”
The “race demographics might be curiously blank” on the writer side but on the reader side, at least for Harlequin, their targeted demographic are the seriously white. You might remember that earlier this year Harlequin inked a multi-book deal with NASCAR for a 16-book paperback series, all of which will have Nascar settings, and include cameo appearances by a real-life Nascar driver.
Seattle Weekly also has a gallery of 11 romance novel book covers to supplement the article.
New York Times story back in February on the Harlequin/Nascar deal.
Previous Book Patrol post The Harlequin Romance and Nascar: A Marriage Made in the Boardroom