Love the Market: Discourses of Passion and Professionalism in Romance Writing Communities

Publication year
2016
Pages
273-295
Comment

This chapter explores how writers become romance workers, examining the discourses circulating in RWA and amongst writers that enable both published and aspiring romance authors to create and maintain a legitimated subject position.

First, I consider the place of creative labor in the current economy, how romance writers are placed within it, and how organizations like RWA shape these placements. [...] Writers' focus on professionalism, then, becomes a way to legitimate romance writing as a practice, making claims to respect based on the image of authors as business people. [...] This professional identity, however, also depends on the continued generation of pleasurable affect, sustaining writers and giving value to their books [...]. In the final section, then, I examine how talk of love offers authors another kind of relation to writing - one understood to be outside of the structures of the market (yet which serves their role as workers) - and legitimates their artistic identity in an industry that often seems out of their control.

The material I am drawing on in this chapter comes from a larger project on the romance writing and publishing community in a major Canadian city (and in North America more generally) from 2008 to 2010. (276-277)