How Romance Writers Rewrite Publishing’s Rules

How are romance writers — and the recent romance boom — chipping away at the norms of Big Publishing? Does self-publishing lead to more diverse authors and characters? How has Amazon both expanded and limited the market? That’s what we’re grappling with in today’s episode.

Back in June, romance novelist Nisha Sharma broke down all the tropes and trends of contemporary romance. Next month, we’ll have the owners of a romance bookstore explaining the the big (and complicated) business of romance-only bookselling. And today, we have Christine Larson, author of Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, walking us through the labor dynamics of romance publishing. If you like thinking about different ways of organizing labor, you’ll find all of this fascinating — and if you’re a romance fan, it’ll make you think a lot about which books end up in front of you and why. You’re gonna love it.

Show Notes:

• Find Love in the Time of Self-Publishing here and learn more about Christine’s work here

• Janice Radway’s foundational scholarly work on romance: Reading the Romance

• Chris’s recent romance rec: We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian

• A good summary from 2021 of what went down within the Romance Writers of America organization

• Since we recorded this episode, RWA has filed for bankruptcy

We’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:

• WHAT’S GOING ON WITH PODCASTS! This is kinda meta, but we’re doing a whole episode about the current state of the podcast industry, so you can take that general theme in any direction you’d like.

• Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)

• Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-house

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• Artificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)

• The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)

• Contemporary ideas of self-care

• Buy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand market

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

For today’s discussion: Did this episode change your thinking on creative labor? What’d we miss? And if you have personal experience with self-publishing, we’d love to hear your perspective!

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