As writers, musicians, online content creators, and other independent workers fight for better labor terms, romance authors offer a powerful example—and a cautionary tale—about self-organization and mutual aid in the digital economy. In Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, Christine Larson traces the forty-year history of Romancelandia, a sprawling network of romance authors, readers, editors, and others, who formed a unique community based on openness and collective support. Empowered by solidarity, American romance writers—once disparaged literary outcasts—became digital publishing’s most innovative and successful authors. Meanwhile, a new surge of social media activism called attention to Romancelandia’s historic exclusion of romance authors of color and LGBTQ+ writers, forcing a long-overdue cultural reckoning.
Drawing on the largest-known survey of any literary genre as well as interviews and archival research, Larson shows how romance writers became the only authors in America to make money from the rise of ebooks—increasing their median income by 73 percent while other authors’ plunged by 40 percent. The success of romance writers, Larson argues, demonstrates the power of alternative forms of organizing influenced by gendered working patterns. It also shows how networks of relationships can amplify—or mute—certain voices.
Romancelandia’s experience, Larson says, offers crucial lessons about solidarity for creators and other isolated workers in an increasingly risky employment world. Romancelandia’s rise and near-meltdown shows that gaining fair treatment from platforms depends on creator solidarity—but creator solidarity, in turn, depends on fair treatment of all members.
Without exception, every author I spoke with talked about how the romance community of writers, readers, and other fans—which many affectionately dubbed “Romancelandia”—offered the emotional and professional support needed to thrive in an uncertain, digitally disrupted cultural industry. At the same time, this was no hearts-and-rainbows story. The network never served all authors equally or fairly. For far too long, authors of color, LGBTQ+ authors, and other marginalized writers reaped less advantage from the network than white, heterosexual authors—I would come to call this persistent pattern inclusive access/unequal benefits. Tensions would come to a head in the near implosion of Romance Writers of America in 2019, offering valuable lessons in network repair and social justice. This inclusive access/unequal benefits tension seemed to reflect other networks I’d seen, in journalism and academia. As one Black author told me, in this way, Romancelandia “is a microcosm of America.” (2-3)
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my explorations of Romancelandia expanded to include eighty in-depth interviews with writers, editors, agents, and industry observers along with a survey of 4,270 romance authors and a network analysis of their advice patterns. Over the years, I also engaged in countless informal interviews with readers, writers, and other Romancelandians at conferences and online. (3)
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I spent eight years examining romance writers both qualitatively and quantitatively. I conducted interviews with eighty romance writers and publishing professionals between 2014 and 2023, many of whom I spoke with several times over the years. I made an effort to oversample traditionally marginalized authors, seeking out Black, Latinx, LGBTQ+, and male authors (see appendix 2 for methodological details).
My research took me around the country, to four national Romance Writers of America conferences (in New York, San Diego, Denver, and Washington, DC) and a romance novel symposium at the Library of Congress. I also spent five surreal days at the massive Romantic Times Booklovers Convention in Las Vegas, where I enjoyed countless informal talks with romance readers, critics, and writers, some in costume.
Meanwhile, I worked extensively with several archives. At Bowling Green State University’s Browne Popular Culture Library, I sifted through forty years of recordings from RWA conferences and looked at every issue on file of Romance Writers Report, RWA’s internal magazine, as well as five years of PANdora’s Box, its newsletter for published authors, and RWA governance records. (19-20)
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Part I maps out Romancelandia as a site of feminized labor, explaining how writers, readers, editors, and others fit into the community. Part II flashes back to the founding of RWA and the roots of Romancelandia, exploring the origins of the network’s ethic of care, the position of readers in the network, and the situation of BIPOC and other marginalized authors. Part III examines Romancelandia in the digital era, showing how romance authors were early entrants into online communities and digital publishing, and describing how publishing has changed [...]. Finally, I explore Romance Writers of America’s 2019 implosion. I show how social media helped expose and repair Romancelandia’s failures of care and consider what comes next for the group’s informal networks. (21-22)
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for the purposes of this book, I define the romance genre as a category that 1) focuses on optimistic love stories concerned with the happiness of (still, mostly, for now) women in a man’s world, 2) whose themes change with the times and that 3) provides a site of feminized cultural labor. (26)
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These three themes—family, strong ties, and self-organizing for mutual aid— recur throughout this book because they directly shaped the unique network structure of Romancelandia and its underlying ethic of care. (32)
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Although 15 percent of RWA’s members in 2017 identified as authors of color, only 6.7 percent of Golden Heart winners during that time identified as such (three Asian American, four Black, one multiracial). Authors of color were also disproportionately unlikely to win a RITA, the awards for published novels. From 1981 to 2019, no Black author ever won a RITA, prompting a public outcry and major reforms within RWA, which I’ll describe in chapters 6 and 9. To underscore the problem, in 2012, author Nicki Salcedo, who is Black, submitted a manuscript featuring Black and brown characters to the Golden Heart awards. It finished in the bottom 25 percent. The next year, she removed all mention of the characters’ races. She became a finalist. (87)
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One example makes it glaringly clear why romance authors as a group so desperately needed a stronger voice in publishing. On April 28, 1996, a seventy-four-car freight train derailed in southern Kansas, dumping ninety thousand Harlequin and Silhouette books. Although the publishers informed book-stores that the books weren’t coming, Harlequin failed to let the writers know and instead let authors discover accidentally that their books were not in stock. Harlequin still had so little respect for its writers as professionals that they simply failed to tell them of the train wreck. (91)
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romance readers differ from other fandoms in three specific ways. First, the boundaries between readers and writers are extremely fuzzy, so readers enjoy remarkably open access to authors. Second, readers share a stigmatized social position with authors. Third—and perhaps as a result of the first two—readers and authors very often form genuine friendships, with both sides investing “relational labor” that pays off in book sales for authors and emotional satisfaction for readers. (96)
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bias in the publishing industry planted the seeds of exclusion in Romancelandia. To push back against it, Black authors joined RWA but also formed their own support networks. (116)
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Throughout the 1980s, they’d fought to establish themselves as professionals. As the 1990s began, romance authors came to see themselves more and more as entrepreneurs, running their own businesses. Published authors began to focus more intently on promoting themselves as brands, improving their marketing and publicity, and negotiating better contracts. (149-150)
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Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing bypassed many of publishing’s middlemen. This boosted romance author income and powered a proliferation of stories by underrepresented authors, who could finally give long-denied happily-ever-afters to a much wider range of characters—Black, gay, lesbian, bisexual, full-figured, middle aged, neuro-divergent, and more. This chapter also probes Romancelandia’s advice network more deeply, detailing how open-elite advice patterns fostered innovation. Finally, the chapter explores how a new set of gatekeepers—technology platforms—have given creators new power while also creating new inequalities, demonstrating the ever-growing need for mutual aid among a broad range of platformized workers. (157)
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Between 2009 and 2015, the number of romance subcategories, issued by the Book Industry Study Group, grew from eighteen classifications (including African American, historical, and paranormal) to twenty-four classifications. No other fiction genre saw as much growth and change in categories during that time. These categories continued to proliferate, growing to fifty subcategories in 2023, including trans, polyamory, bisexual, and later-in- life. (161)
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Algorithms, like AI, tend to reinforce preexisting cultural patterns, so they often make it harder to find marginalized authors. “As a Black author on Amazon, it’s harder to find my books,” LaQuette, former RWA president, told me. “If you type in my name, you’ll find three or four books by white women before you actually see a book of mine,” she said. I did. She was right.
Amazon’s recommendation function posed the same problem, LaQuette told me: “In the recommendations, white authors appear on my pages. I don’t appear on theirs.” (176)
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To be sure, Romancing the Runoff and its organizers represent only one node in the sprawling network of Romancelandia—a node actively committed to progressive causes, which certainly doesn’t represent all romance writers or readers. Then again, virtually all romance writers are social disruptors in some way, unsettling gender roles and ideas of happiness, and forming powerful communities. In that way, Romancing the Runoff reveals the power of romance authors united for change. (204)
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In a way, this book reads like romance itself, following a classic arc. The meet-cutes in early Romancelandia, including the founding of RWA and Romantic Times; the hardships of what Pamela Regis calls “corrupt society,” like sexism, racism, and exploitation of writers; the growth and thriving of solidarity and unity, despite conflict, like Romancelandia’s gains in the publishing world; and the point of “ritual death” when all hope of a happy ending seems lost (RWA’s implosion). Will Romancelandia get its optimistic, emotionally satisfying ending? (205)
Here's the abstract:
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It's been reviewed in Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus. The book was published around the time the RWA filed for bankruptcy, so this article by Christine Larson (archived here) can maybe serve as an extra coda to the book.
Here are some excerpts from the book:
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