It Takes (at least) Two: The Work to Make Romance Work

This entry was created prior to the conference, so the DOI wasn't working. I assume it will go live after the conference.

Here's the abstract:

Digitalization has motivated romance novelists to move from traditional to self-publishing online. However, engagement with flexible and responsive, yet precarious and biased algorithmic systems online pose challenges for novelists. Through surveying and interviewing the novelists, and using the lens of feminist political economy, we investigate how digitalization has impacted the novelists’ work practices. Our findings detail the increased agency afforded by self-publishing online, which comes at the expense of performing new forms of work individually, collectively, and with assistance, otherwise performed by publishing houses. We focus on the immaterial, invisible, and unpaid work that the novelists and the ecology of workers surrounding them conducted. We make recommendations for designing digital labor platforms that support the work practices of self-employed digital workers toward a more sustainable, collective, and inclusive future(s) of work.

---

In 2018, we attended the Romance Writers of America Annual Conference, where we participated in workshops and talks about the impact of digitalization on the industry, which informed this research. We collected data from January 2021 to April 2021 after approval from our university’s Human Subjects Review Board. A novelist from the conference became our first study participant. We used snowball sampling, asking participants to tell other novelists about our study. Several participants shared our recruitment script with other novelists by directly messaging them, posting it on novelists’ social media groups, or sharing it on their social media profiles.

---

We had 124 survey respondents, of which 50 agreed to be interviewed. Of those 50, 40 listed the United States, and 3 listed Canada as their country of residence; the remaining 7 listed a different country. We reached out to these potential interviewees to see whether we could find a good time for an interview. While many responded to our call, due to scheduling and pandemic-related constraints, we ultimately ended up with two participants from Canada, 12 from the United States, and 1 from Europe. Thus, this study is heavily skewed towards North America.

---

Participants described digital self-publishing as providing more control over their own work which we break down into four types of agency: managerial, creative, financial, and informative.

---

Self-publishing removed the restrictions imposed by publishing houses; however, it put constraints on the novelists’ work, this time coming from the decisions encoded in the algorithms of the platforms they used.

---

Digital self-publishing provided writers more control over their novel production. However, at the same time, it also added forms of individual and collective labor that the novelists had to perform—labor that publishing houses would otherwise conduct in traditional publishing. Novelists engaged in relational labor by building and maintaining their reader community [...]. Novelists engaged in maintenance labor by supporting other authors in the romance industry (sometimes known as “Romancelandia”), akin to care work. Novelists also performed identity labor of managing the personal and novelist identity online. In this section, we describe each form of labor in turn and explain how conducting them was important to achieve successful professionalization and monetization online.

---

All participants published novels under pen names, instead of using their real ones. Some used pen names worrying that if people knew they wrote romance novels, it would have a negative impact on them and their family members. [...] Others wrote under pseudonyms due to the stigma associated with writing romance [...] Many participants wrote in different romance sub-genres. They talked about using multiple pen names in order to write in diverse sub-genres, simultaneously. [...] Participants of color mentioned using white-sounding, middle-aged, female pen names because readers expected their writers to be like them—white and female.

---

We found that new workers had emerged, assisting the novelists with self-publishing online. Some workers provided paid assistance and were employed, working on a specific task for a certain duration of time and getting paid for their work. Other workers provided unpaid assistance and were part of the novelists’ social network of family members and friends and even readers. This ecology of paid and unpaid workers made it easier for novelists to leverage online technologies to self-publish their novels.

---

Our participants of color described experiences of marginalization and managing their identity to appear white in order to appeal to readers. They limited potential relationship-building with their readers to avoid the risk of revealing their real identity and consequently losing their audience. They could not use online tools to build the types of relationships as other (white) authors to recruit and maintain a loyal audience.

---

While white participants reported using pen-names to separate their writer identity from their personal one, our participants of color undertook much more significant identity management. In addition to adopting white-sounding pen names, they mentioned about how race influenced their story lines and characters. Digital platforms, and the need they create for writers to engage with readers, surface questions of how they become arenas in which some are excluded while others are privileged based on whether it is possible for everyone to engage equally (e.g. whether everyone can use video for conversations).  [...] Romance novelists continue to confront issues of racism within the community, and our research suggests another dimension to this reckoning, which shows how the tools writers use perpetuate or even exacerbate discrimination.

---