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)