Chapter 16, John Markert’s survey of international romance publishing history (twentieth and twenty-first century), provides a bird’s eye view of the production forces that power the genre’s development. Markert calls attention to the role of upper management as “gatekeepers” in the field and the rise and fall of different romance “lines” while he recounts previous studies of the industry-side of the genre. He shows how different publishing houses launched or altered their romance offerings in response to each other’s successes, focusing mainly on print but with a brief look at the digital/e-book landscape. It is a concrete narrative that is a needed corrective to the often-abstract understanding of romance as a mass commodity. (16)
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American romance publishers released a mix of contemporary and historical novels during the 1940s and 1950s. These novels were released in limited number to round out a house’s list; they were not expected to generate any real profit. During the 1960s, American houses, while they continued to release some contemporary romances, increasingly shifted to historical romances since Harlequin was “flooding” the market with contemporary novels. This shift to historicals became even more pronounced after Harlequin gained wider distribution in the United States market in 1970 since few publishers in the United States felt they could compete head-on with the strong outpouring of contemporary romances by Harlequin. The shift to historical novels in the United States was accelerated by the successful entry of Avon’s historical product in 1972, and Avon’s new brand of romances moved the historicals from the sweet to the sensual (meaning sexual content that was more explicit and erotic), which to this point in time was markedly absent in either the contemporary or historical romances. (356)
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Romance aficionados and industry sources credit Dell’s Candlelight Ecstasy line with changing the content of the romance novel in the 1980s, much as Avon is credited with initiating changes that affected the content of romance novels in the 1970s [...]. One key difference, however, is that while it took a half dozen years before the Avon novels started to be imitated in any number, the market was soon awash with Ecstasy-like romances. (360)
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Dell, unlike Avon a decade earlier, “recombined” the existing romance theme by introducing more than one content variation. Many editors appeared unsure exactly which innovation appealed most to readers, or even who the readers now were. The result was a potpourri of lines over the next few years that attempted to marginally differentiate themselves by focusing on a different dimension of the new themes; for example, Second Chance at Love featured divorced women; Intimate Moments and Finding Mr. Right focused on other thematic variations: Intimate Moments honed in on career-oriented females; Finding Mr. Right pivoted around the heroine’s choice between two equally suitable males. (360)
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Most mainstream publishers were toying with digital at the close of the 1990s but abandoned their efforts after the dot.com bubble burst in 2001 [...]. This left the field open to small digital publishers who took advantage of the opportunity to establish a strong presence before mainstream houses started, belatedly and somewhat lackadaisically, to (re)enter the field after 2010. (362)
From the introduction to the volume:
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