Vixenwriter

As some folks may be aware, Amazon has been informing those small publishers who sell POD books through their service they must use Amazon’s POD service, BookSurge.

From the Wall Street Journal: Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon’s Web site.

You can read more about it here, here at slashdot and

Here at Publisher’s Weekly: Over the last year, BookSurge has been trying to cut into the market share of pod leader Lightning Source and is using the selling clout of Amazon to generate more business. “I feel like the flea between two giant elephants,” said the head of one pod publisher about the upcoming battle between Lightning Source and BookSurge/Amazon. He said although the deal with BookSurge will be more expensive, he has no choice but to make the move since most of his authors expect their titles to be for sale on Amazon. He added that his company will also continue to use Lightning Source for printing as well. Amazon’s BookSurge mandate extends to traditional publishers as well as to online pod houses.

I’m waiting to see how this shakes out. I have a great deal of concern obviously as Samhain and EC are both publishers who use POD technology. Samhain I know is working on it and informed authors via the author loop on Friday of the situation. I know via the articles above that Whiskey Creek books have had their buy buttons disabled already but my checks of my books at Amazon have so far shown my books still available including pre-orders. I’m hoping we can hear answers soo so that anxious authors can at least know what the future holds and start to prepare one way or the other.

Via Booksqure and then Book Club Girl - Funding for RIF (Reading is Fundamental) is cut in the 2009 Federal Budget You can get involved through this link. And by cut, I mean their book distribution program has been totally de-funded.

From Kay McSpadden’s article in the Charlotte Observer: Despite the overwhelming research that shows literacy is the most important skill for any child to acquire for future success, President Bush’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2009 eliminates the Inexpensive Book Distribution administered by RIF. Authorized by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (SEC.5451), the Inexpensive Book Distribution program is not funded by earmarks and has been supported by Congress and every administration since 1975 until this one.

There are a lot of children in this country who don’t have huge libraries in their neighborhoods. Their schools are underfunded and they don’t have support at home for reading. It’s programs like RIF who have supported and encouraged kids to read and in doing so, gives them tools to overcome these stumbling blocks.

From RIF’s Site: RIF programs offer enriching activities that spark children’s interest in reading. And every child involved with RIF gets to choose and keep new books, at no cost to the children or their families.

Although RIF programs are run in a variety of communities, some of RIF’s most important work occurs in communities where students are at great risk of educational failure. Wherever kids are served—at schools, libraries, childcare centers, Head Start programs, parks, community centers, health clinics, migrant camps, or domestic shelters—RIF can make a difference!

This article by teacher Kay McSpadden is illustrative of just exactly why a program like RIF is important. It’s a small thing to most of us with bookshelves to the ceilings, but to a kid who never had a book to call her own until they got one from the RIF program, it’s huge.

The above quote is from George Orwell’s, Animal Farm - one of my favorite books of all time. I’m going to twist the context a bit for the purposes of, well to make my point. (as in, yes I know the original context of the quote and it doesn’t translate here precisely but I love the quote so I’m gonna make it work)

All publishers are not equal. Period. I’m sorry if that hurts people to read but it’s common sense. All shoe companies are not equal either. Nor are all coffee shops or pencils or whatever else. Aside from the basics of personal preference, there’s a pretty big gap in quality between some publishers.

As an author - it’s your job to use your common sense to note this. There are danger signs - for instance, does your editor or other representative of the company return your correspondence in a reasonable amount of time? Now of course different issues require different speeds of response. But you know, if over a long period of time, it takes months to hear back on issues if at all, that’s a problem.

I write for several different publishers both NY and small press and all my editors get back to me within 48 hours on important stuff. I consider that professional behavior. I don’t consider not responding to author’s emails when you’re an author liaison to be professional. I don’t consider the oversharing of personal information when you’ve messed up professional. I don’t consider publishers or editors personally attacking each other, their competition or authors to be professional.

Also, late payments occasionally may not be an issue, but late payments as a rule? Not a good sign. Authors put on ‘blacklists’ for bringing up issues - a bad sign, even if you’re one of the authors on the good list. You never know when the tables can be turned on you.

Poor customer service is an issue, a big one. (Martha Punches at EC is a goddess! I love her to death, she’s fabulous fabulous fabulous). If your readers can’t get books, if the books are in bad shape and they can’t be returned, if reader correspondence dealing with real issues is ignored - red flag.

At the same time - this is your business too! That means, you share responsibility.

So as unpopular as this might make me, I’m going to suggest that authors really need to do their damned homework. Now, it’s one thing if you’ve sold and suddenly things go south. But once things go south, a wait and see attitude is far better than continuing to submit new work when no one answers your correspondence for years at a time. And if you get paid late over and over and you keep subbing new stuff - you either need to find a way to make peace with that or not sub new material.

I know the desire to get published but if it makes you blind to red flags, you have to, at some point, realize you share responsibility when the publisher you ignored those red flags over goes bad.

Also? You have a responsibility to be a professional as well. Turn your stuff in on time. Meet your deadlines. Address any issues professionally. Be as easy to work with as you can (and that doesn’t mean you’re a doormat). Market yourself.

In the end, I want to say I hate it when bad companies do stupid stuff and then everyone thinks all epublishing or small publishing is the same. It’s not. Samhain is not Venus, nor has it ever been so. When I first sold a book to Samhain they were new, so I watched and waited to see how they’d do. I knew they had a woman at the helm who knew how to run a successful publishing company and when I saw edits and watched the process, I was impressed enough to submit something else. My editor is supah fabulous, my checks are on time and my books show up when they’re supposed to where they’re supposed to. I can market effectively because I get advance release dates on digital and print.

As much as I love writing for them, if they stopped paying me on time or stopped answering my emails or generally started acting hinky, I wouldn’t write there anymore after my contractual responsibilities were dealt with. Sometimes you’re hemmed in and you can’t pull something because the behavior is bad but not bad enough to violate the contract - that sucks, I’ve been there too and I did my homework. So you make the best of it, call it a painful lesson learned and don’t send any more work their way.

No one is perfect. No contract is perfect, no author is perfect, no publisher is perfect. There are publishers who are better fits for different people. But there are things that simply shouldn’t be tolerated - not getting paid is a big one!

This isn’t a trend and it’s not indicative of all epublishing and small presses either. It’s indicative of bad business practices catching up to companies and sadly, hurting authors. That’s the part that sucks. I know many authors, smart, savvy authors, who write for a company who seems to be on shaky ground right now and it makes me sad.

Your Question: What I’m wondering is how you see the current market of erotica and erotic romance. Do they still have a lot of growth potential in them, have they reached the saturated mark yet, or, for those of us still in the beginning stages of our writing careers in these market, has the boat already sailed and the wake is closing over our heads if we’re not Olympic-level swimmers out of the gate?

LB (or SuperLaura as we’ve started calling her)Well, erotica and erotic romance have definitely tightened up over the last year, but that happens with every subgenre that explodes out of the gate. I have sold first-timers into the NY erotic romance market as recently as a month or two ago, so there is still opportunity out there.

Erotic romance and erotica will always have a more “fringe” marketplace than mainstream romance or even mainstream sensual romance, so the number of slots that will be allocated to erotica and erotic romance are not limitless. But certainly these markets are more robust now than they ever have been. The question is what YOU want to write… if you have erotica in your soul and you’d have to stifle your voice to tone down the heat, I think you should go with it. Recognize that it could be tougher to place your MS than if you were writing something more mainsteam like romantic suspense and just do it anyway. I don’t think you should give up on anything you want to write because of the whims of the market. As long as you can accept that some subgenres are harder to sell than others sometimes, then that is your choice to make. Honestly, no manuscript, regardless of genre, is “easy” to sell, so I think you should write what you feel moved to write.

Your Question: Do you think it’s important for an author to be flexible and adapt easily to the changes in our genre or to stick to one sub genre and master it?

Well, in a perfect world I think everybody should get to write what they want but since when is this a perfect world? Some subgenres are more popular than others–all you have to do is go to a bookstore to see that this is true. I think we can all understand that it would probably be easier to sell a historical romance set in London than one set in Warsaw and that the market for romantic suspense is probably bigger than the market for futuristic romance. With that said, sometimes an author’s voice doesn’t always translate well across certain subgenres and themes.

Flexibility can be a great thing but so is being a real master of your subgenre.

Laura Bradford, when she’s not fielding emails, making phone calls, reading manuscripts and wielding her superagent powers, is also a very good dancer and she makes me laugh and happens to be one of my favorite people in the world. You can find her at the Bradford Literary Agency.

Because she is made of awesome. Just sayin.

Your question: I’ve been working on something for Laura for a while now. It’s an alternate earth/paranormal and is so big I’ve split it into three books. When do you stop editing and just submit the thing? I want it perfect. But if it’s not something marketable, am I wasting time by continuing to tweek, tweek, tweek it?

LB: Well you always want to make something as polished as possible before you send it off to an agent, but sometimes there is a fine line between polishing and obsessing. And it is possible to tweak your voice right out of your work. I have no way of knowing whether something is marketable until I see the material, so I can’t really give you a straight answer.

If you love the work, I think you should give it every opportunity to find a home, whether it is in NY or elsewhere. If you believe in it enough to think it deserves publication, you have to just bite the bullet at some point and let some kind of industry professional see it. Believe me, there is no shortage of people out there who are dying to tell you whether they think something is marketable or not.

Your Question: How would a typical day in the life of Laura Bradford be?

LB: It varies, of course. Most days I start out with a task list and then inevitably a call comes in, or a contract, or a problem of some kind that shoves itself to the head of the line. Generally I start by day by sorting through my email and prioritizing first anything from a client or editor. If I am pitching a new project, I will make those calls first thing. After that, I will work on client material. On any given day, I have about 8-12 pieces of client material that needs my attention–could be a proposal for the next book in their contract, could be an option, a new manuscript, an edited manuscript due for delivery that they want me to read through. All of this can take the entire day, and does. Then there are contests to judge, questions on Lauren Dane’s blog to answer, pitch letters to write. I also need to keep up with my electronic queries, so they don’t pile up too much. It stresses me out when I see that I have 100+ unopened queries in my inbox, so I work hard to keep that under control. I read hard copy submissions at night, usually.

Laura Bradford is a literary agent who is, as I’ve mentioned a few times, made of awesome. She has her own shop - Bradford Literary Agency and works incredibly hard for her clients (I can totally attest to this fact)

She answered a great many of the questions so I’ll post two of them for now and follow up as I get them. Thank you so much to the totally fabulous, shiny and sparkly Laura Bradford for your time!

1. is she looking for anything in particular in submissions at the moment as regards to genre?

LB: No, nothing in particular at the moment. Anything commercial (as opposed to literary), any variety of romance, mystery, urban fantasy, women’s fiction, YA. I like material that is really fresh and different… unusual settings and themes. Unusual mixes of genres.

2. On Laura’s site she welcomes electronic query letters but not electronic submission. Am I reading that correctly? No subbing the synopsis & 3 chpts by e-mail?

If she doesn’t really think the book clicks with what she’s selling these days, will she, if possible, make a recommendation to another agent that she thinks might work out better?

LB: It is really hard to read off the computer screen all day, which is why I prefer to limit electronic queries to query letters only (without sample chapters). As for 3 chapters being enough, if I am hooked by the sample, I will definitely ask for more. If I am not hooked by the first 3 chapters, then that is a problem. If the voice really, really works, I might still ask for more on the off chance there is a plot problem that can be fixed.

As for recommending another agent if I pass, I really don’t do that. If the MS was good, I’d want it for myself. If I pass on it, it usually means I don’t think it is ready for publication. If I don’t handle the kind of material you’ve sent, which is another reason I’d pass, I would generally tell you.

I know better. I know I shouldn’t read the letters in the RWR and yet every month I do. And I’m honestly never ready for the depth of audacity on the part of some of the people who write in to gasp and moan and put their hand on their foreheads and cry about the direction of romance.

This month’s little ditty is written by Linda Swift Reeder - who quickly assures us she’s not a prude and then follows up by calling erotic romance porn and women who have sex or who use curse words in these books sluts. This follows three months of letters crying about the “gang member” language on the part of heroines (including one written by a fairly well known pararomance author only signed in her real name and makes no reference to her writerly persona). Yawn. Won’t someone think of the children. *weeps* Yadda yadda.

I’m bored by the attacks on my morals by people who don’t know me. I’m agitated far more by what equals attacks on my readers. I mean, to consistently assail books my readers buy which contain curse words and sex scenes is at attack on romance readers and I’m not a genius or anything, but I love my readers and I can’t imagine why these folks attack them.

At this point I’m not even angry. I’m just sort of saddened by the lazy intellectualism this sort of letter shows.

I don’t think it’s jealousy that drives this sort of letter. I think there’s an expectation by people of Reeder’s ilk, that one’s opinion should be more than just an opinion - it should simply be the way *everyone* thinks and feels. This plays out in politics and every day life as well.

Some people don’t handle change well so they latch on to whatever they can to hang their anxieties. Erotic romance, sex, confident women - it’s all just a place to go when you can’t deal with your own insecurities.

There are indeed many romance novels that don’t contain graphic sex and bad language. There is indeed a middle ground in romance as well as the extremes on both sides (and I mean extreme as in polarity from the middle not in character). But people like this never rely on facts, they go straight for histrionics because that’s all they know. It’s lazy, but it’s prevalent.

There are many books I don’t read. Many genres that dont’ work for me. And many that do. I tend to turn my brain off whenever anyone starts wailing about “the children” or “our daughters” or “we as X women” because cripes, there are as many kinds of women as there are kinds of books.

I don’t think it’s sex she needs, or royalties, or whatever. I think it’s a damned open mind she’s in desperate need of and an ability to accept and understand she’s not the arbiter of what anyone but herself reads, does and says.

Books are amazing. Preferences are amazing. So put the two together why don’t you? Like what you like, don’t like what you don’t. It’s so very simple and completely unnecessary to attack what other people read and write.

So my editor, Angela James, is participating in AAR’s auction to benefit Hands On New Orleans. This is such a good cause and I heartily encourage everyone to run over to ebay to participate - there are many different items up for auction including a critque from the aforementioned Angie.

I’m totally biased of course, but I happen to think Angie has a fine hand at editing so she’s worth a bid!

This is a long one and it’s totally based on my perceptions of small and epublishing houses.

Recently, we’ve seen the demise of a few epublishers. Some people like to use this as a platform to crow about how epublishing is risky. Some people like to use this as an excuse to blather on and on about how they’re all mistreated and misunderstood and to make it seem like normal business practice to not pay authors, to sign contracts that are monumentally one sided like NET contracts or to make it okay to address the public as a publisher in all caps while screaming about hormones, sexually promiscuous family members or some other conspiracy.

There are basic things to guiding yourself through the publishing maze. First and foremost is a freebie - COMMON SENSE. Truly, your mother was right. Common sense will save a lot of heartache in so many ways. Despite what some in this business attempt to tell you (usually from a soapbox while holding a spotlight on themselves) there is no “one true way” to this business. There is simply the best way for you. This is about how I do it. Others do things differently. Your mileage may vary.

Firstly - folks, I know how much waiting sucks. God, do I know. I feel the pressure as much as anyone else does to hear back and get manuscripts contracted. But this is something you can’t be penny smart and pound foolish over. Yes, you can submit to a new epublisher and most likely hear back in a very short period of time and get your book out very quickly. This will feel good. At first.

And then you will realize why waiting is part of the process. Because, and I can tell you this from experience, the difference in sales is monumental. The difference in name recognition (which is after all, what you’re trying to build) will have far more impact if your book is read by more people than less people. That’s basic math. I don’t mean to sound harsh. I don’t have any beef with start up epublishers as a general principle. But there is a reason why you’re going to wait months to hear back from Samhain or EC (just as an example - there are others out there, I just write for them so I can speak with some firsthand knowledge) and just days from other epublishers. Demand usually means an established reader base.

If you go with a start up or with a very small publisher, do it with your eyes open. Just as an example: I submitted Giving Chase to Samhain when they were very new. It was a risk for them to take something totally different from me and for me to sub to a start up. But I did my homework and I knew Crissy Brashear was a smart woman who’d done a lot of great things for EC before she started Samhain. I also looked at who was writing for them and I asked a few folks what their experience was. I subbed and went through the process before I sent them anything else and I’ve been thrilled. EC was established long before I started writing for them and had a group of excellent authors writing there (many you see writing for major NY houses now).

CONTRACTS: Here’s where things get tricky because the things I personally hold to be important may not be important to you. There is no one true way, but you have to read that contract carefully and don’t let your eagerness to sell a book overcome your common sense. This is just some basic stuff based on things I find important.

Think about several things: Length of rights. How long will the publisher own rights? Are you okay with that? I have book contracts for all sorts of different terms. In truth, this, to me, is about relative power. When you’re new, you don’t have a lot. Also, how important was it to me to sign with the publisher? Did I think they’d do something with the rights? Did I have a way to get them back if my book went out of print? Etc.

Here’s one thing - people don’t sign a contract where you have to pay to have your book up for sale. Seriously. A reputible publisher isn’t going to charge you to list the book at their website, or to make you pay the credit card fees or anything like that. It’s ridiculous and totally scadalously unfair to authors. There are costs authors have to bear in certain circumstances in certain contracts (front and backmatter sometimes although that’s one of my particular issues, some other authors don’t care) or if you pull a book you might have to pay for the editing or the cover art, READ YOUR CONTRACT BEFORE YOU SIGN IT. If you ask questions and aren’t dealt with professionally, that’s a big red warning flag. They might refuse to budge, but a publisher who flips out when you ask questions is not professional.

Percentages - in ebooks there’s a pretty standard range that’s about 40% (give or take a few percentage points one way or another). If it’s very low, and we aren’t talking about a NY publisher who is also putting your book out in digital form, you might really think on it. If they can promise you a hell of a lot of sales for 5%, it might be worth it. But how many sales does that have to be? Because you’d have to sell roughly eight books to one at a standard rate.

Distribution: what is the distribution like? Where do they sell your book? Can people find it? What do they do to help people find it?

Look at their website. Is it easy to navigate? How easy is it to buy a book? Because let me tell you, some epublishers have the worst freaking point of sale situation ever and it does effect sales. I won’t buy from some epublishers because of how stupid ridiculous it is to get the book to my hard drive. Is it updated frequently? Is it horrible to look at with terrible colors? Do they give focus to three authors while everyone else’s books are hard to find? (because folks unless you are those three authors, that sucks). Do they only take paypal or some other form of payment not everyone will be able to use or want to use? Do they have a page for individual authors? I have my mom go to the site, if she can navigate it, it’s pretty easy. But that’s just me.

How does the staff conduct themselves? Because seriously? As an author seeing publishers and editors get out in public and make ridiculous statements and do stupid stuff makes me cringe. And it’s not just confined to a few publishers either and this puzzles and enrages me. I don’t want to know about your personal beefs with other publishers. I don’t want to know about your personal beefs with your authors. I don’t want to know about your personal problems at home, your money problems or whatever fungus is growing between your toes. STOP OVERSHARING. My god. You may be having money problems or problems at home and I’m sorry for you. But the author loop, your public blog, the business loop and other people’s blogs are not the appropriate or professional place to share your business. It makes you look unprofessional. It hurts sales for the authors at that house and nothing pisses me off more than when someone’s behavior messes with my bottom line. I work hard and I don’t think it’s fair when I hold up my end of the deal to have someone come and blow that all to bits with unprofessional behavior.

There are other things - promotion, advertising, covers, EDITING! Read what they put out. What is the quality of the books they publish? If you write for a house who puts out crap and who doesn’t edit, you’re going to look bad by association. EVERYONE can benefit from editing and sometimes, even great authors get rejected. A house that accepts everything isn’t one readers are going to be able to count on. A house with crap editing isn’t one that people will have a good perception of. This affects your bottom line. It also affects your overall reputation.

CAN YOU ASK QUESTIONS AND HAVE YOUR CONCERNS ADDRESSED? This is not solely a problem with start ups or those epubs who’ve gone out of business. I’ve had a very negative experience and I’ll never go back again even though others are happy there. LISTEN TO YOUR GUT. You aren’t a troublemaker for bringing up concerns. It’s how you conduct yourself that’s the issue and I’ll get into that part another day. But if you feel like you can’t even ask a question, that’s a red flag. If there are authors who are in the good graces of the publisher and anyone who asks questions is put at the bad kids table, that’s a red flag.

However, preferential treatment IS NOT NECESSARILY A PROBLEM. It’s a reality. I have no problem with it because of course any smart publisher is going to keep slots open for their big sellers. Sales matter and they help mid listers and newbies too. Big names attract readers. This is a good thing. It’s how you make your own name. What you do with the attention is up to you. Publishers who take care of their big sellers AND make opportunities for others are a good thing. Publishers who show preferential treatment to punish people are a bad thing. This is something you need to decide for yourself.

I’ve started to write five different entries today but deleted them all. Damn filters. Sigh.

In general - a letter from a president of a professional organization that contains the phrase, “Who told you life was fair” will always sound condescending. Why? Because it is condescending. Clue: You’re not my mother and I’m not nine years old. I’m also not paying my mother dues (although she claims she’s paid hers). For the record - I happen to be a career focused romance writer. You can ask most people who know me, I’m very careful about the choices I make, about where and what I write and when. My career is extremely important to me so don’t waste my time with “who told you life was fair.” If you ask for feedback from people and you actually get it, well, that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? Or was the point that you only wanted to hear what supported your particular perspective. If so, perhaps it would be more accurate to call for “feedback on proposed rule changes that conforms with my perspectives” because well, life isn’t always fair, as you so correctly point out and not everyone is going to agree with us. So feh.

Something else and as a matter of FYIage, this is not actually related to the above point but something else I read earlier today - epublishing. I love epublishing. Or at the very least, the epublishers I write for. If there’s interest I’d be happy to talk about my experiences - positive and negative. Got a question - ask it and I’ll do my best to answer it.

Epublishing gave me my start. Ellora’s Cave took a chance on me and helped me build a career. Samhain contracted a book in a totally new genre for me and has been amazingly supportive of me an an author. My editor Ann Leveille has made me a better writer each time I’ve gone through edits. The same goes for Angie James, my editor at Samhain. And yes, I do go through edits and I don’t know any authors who haven’t done edits at an epublisher. As to whether or not they’re the hardest edits I’ll ever do, I can’t say. I’ve got a lot of books left in me so who knows what will come down the road? In any case, every book has its own challenges.

My epublished books are, in fact, real books. I work hard on them and I put as much effort into their writing as I do the books aimed at New York. In turn, what I write for New York is just as good as what I write for epublishing. I’m not “too edgy” for New York. When I get rejected it’s not because “New York isn’t ready for me” or whatever. (clearly it’s because they don’t recognize my brilliance)

I want to resist the us v them mentality (and in a way, that is related to my first point). I’ve seen a lot of defensiveness from epublished authors and I understand why. I do. But it’s not necessary. In the first place, the only person whose opinion matters is the one who looks back at me when I’m brushing my teeth (this morning with this new toothpaste with green tea that sucked big time but I digress). Do I know I’m doing the best job I can? After that, do my editors think so? Do my readers think so? Does it matter to me what someone else who doesn’t know me or what epublishing entails thinks of me? Not a bit. Well unless it affects me professionally, and that’s a reality sometimes, but still, as a human being you can only control so much. You can’t control the fact that “I’ll get to it soon” doesn’t actually mean the same thing in publishing that it means in a restaurant or in your daily life. You can’t control the petty ignorance that allows some people to make themselves feel better at your expense by belitting your publisher, genre, mode of publication, age, dress size, etc. You can’t and you know what? It’s not worth the time anyway.

I want, as a professional seeking to advance my career, to expand my base. To write for more places and reach more readers. Hell yes I want to sell to New York! Yes, I want my books at the Top Foods (by the way, I LOVE it when I see my fellow authors there like Lisa Renee Jones’ fab new Blaze for instance). There’s a kind of distribution I will have when my Spice book comes out that I don’t have now. That’s a fact. The only value judgements about that fact are those I let anyone else imbue upon it. It will reach more people in many countries. It will be an audio book and it will be translated into several other languages. That’s freaking cool and I love it.

Does that mean I reject epublishing? Not at all. I love Samhain and EC and I love the ability to write with more freedom. Because I’ve earned it. By that I mean, they took a chance because in fact, they have the ability to take more chances on unknown authors. I ran with it and I’ve been blessed with a nice bit of success and because I have a track record, I can have the freedom to push the envelope. I treasure that. That isn’t to say New York doesn’t offer the chance to push the envelope - but they have financial and other constraints which make the wheels turn slower and it takes longer to make a track record. Again, a fact and the only value judgements are those we give ourselves.

I’m sick to death of watching this sort of west side story situation. WE ARE ALL ROMANCE AUTHORS. Our strength is in our diversity. That’s also a fact. Give it whatever value judgements you wish.