There's so much that we can learn by looking at both romance novels and the people who write them. The community of romance writers is a microcosm of American society. It's full of controversy, it's full of people who want the best for the world. It's also a place where imagination can help us envision the world that we want.
Yeah, it's a place where utopia is imaginable. That's always what I have loved thinking about the purposes of romance and of entertainment more broadly. But the idea that there could be a world in which women's pleasure is taken seriously. Exactly. This is the Culture Study Podcast and I'm Anne Helen Petersen. And I'm Christine Larson, professor at University of Colorado Boulder, an author of Love and the Time of Self Publishing. How romance writers change the rules of publishing and success.
As you know, each week we take a piece of the culture that surrounds us and we really look into it from as many angles as possible and we're trying to figure out what it says about the world we live in. And today is part two of a conversation about romance novels. Back in June we talked to romance novelist Nisha Sharma about tropes, about diversity and representation on the page, about whether you should be concerned when reading romance novels makes you question your love life, so many things.
Part three of this series will be out next month and it'll be all about the business of selling romance. But today we're looking specifically at the readers and writers and the publishing industry itself. So I am so excited to talk to you Chris about the work that you have done analyzing this industry, the larger romance community, the ethos of care and of work that is all around romance writing.
And then also because you are a cultural scholar as well, we can think about the purposes of romance and why romance is the way that it is and some of these larger questions that our readers and listeners have posed for us. So let's start with your book, Love and the Time of Self Publishing. Tell me how it came about because I really love this story.
Oh yeah, that origin story. So I was a journalist for a long time and then I wanted to study how digital technology, social media was changing journalism and the messages that we heard in the world. So like many other women in their 40s, I had little kids, but I wanted a life change and I started going to grad school to study these things and get my PhD. And during that time, my second year of grad school, I was blindsided by a divorce that I did not want to or expect.
And I found myself after I got everybody stable. I had two little kids, I have twin boys, they were eight at the time. I finally sat down one day to do my research, which I had put aside for a few months and I couldn't write.
I never had writer's block before and I just couldn't get excited about what I was studying with journalism. And that day sitting and staring at this blank screen, I remembered that an author I had interviewed told me that only romance writers were making money in the new world of digital publishing. I found 2012, 2014. And I thought, well, that's interesting, I'm going to dive into that. Maybe that's a project that will get me going again.
And I was so fortunate, I began to just cold call romance writers who were self publishing. They were unbelievably generous. They were excited to help explore why romance had become more popular than ever. And the women I met really in some ways, they don't know this, but they kind of helped me rebuild my life because they were so inspiring.
And they had been through so much themselves and they were still writing and raising families in some cases. And they were just so strong and smart and helpful that I could not stop studying them. So let's see, you did, it was at like 70 80 in depth interviews with authors, right? Yes, I talked to 80 authors and 20 or more editors and other publishing executives and experts. And you said on a survey that got more than 4,000 responses, is that right?
The survey is a testimony to how interested romance writers are in their own business. I sent it to 10,000 people, every member of RWA at the time, romance writers of America. And I got a 42% response rate, which is unhurt. I bet you brag about that, it conferences, right? You know what, I'm kind of scared about it because I will never be able to get that kind of response again. But it's a testimony to the authors themselves.
You know, to me, it also speaks to the fact that so many writers were so eager to talk to you in generous with their time and that extends to the survey as well that I think people want to talk about it. They want this work to be taken, you know, it's not just like taken seriously by men, but also like it's interesting how you make living by writing books.
It's really interesting. And I think that it's understudied. And so having a chance to talk shop essentially is really fun. And when I was a scholar, there wasn't as much acknowledgement about how eager people actually were to talk about these kind of nitty-gritty components of the way that they do their work.
Well, I have to confess that romance writers are an especially easy group to study because they have 40 years of tradition of helping each other and helping other women writers and also sharing openly information about their business about how much they earn about their secrets of writing a great story. They're used to sharing all this. And so they were very interested and responsive, which is great for a researcher, as you know.
Yeah, when I was rereading the intro this morning, there was this part of it where you talk about how supportive and how eager different romance writers were to share the tricks of the trade with each other, particularly navigating going independent.
And I sent a quote from you to my text thread that I share with a bunch of other independent, sub-stack writing journalists because we, and the reason we have this text thread, I have never met any of the women on this thread in person, but we talk every single day.
And even though we're writing kind of in the same sphere, you could think of us as in competition, but I don't think we think of each other as in competition, but we help each other and have always been eager to help each other because it's a way forward that feels sustainable when the rest of the industry feels so incredibly precarious.
And so I really, like I just saw so many parallels between what you were seeing and it makes sense since you were originally thinking about what was happening with the free landification of the journalism industry that led you to this work.
Yeah, and what I found in my own freelance career was that social networks were unbelievably important. It was through a writer's group where people were incredibly generous with contacts with editors that I began writing for places like the New York Times and US News and World Report just because other writers were really generous in sharing their contacts.
Yeah, and those were maybe not coincidentally almost entirely women who helped me. So I was seeing the same thing that you're seeing in your networks and the same thing that we see with romance writers. For people who don't read romance, why are these fine dudes? Like why do they matter for our society? Why is this important? Even for people who are like, don't necessarily like denigrate romance, but are like,
why should I care about romance? People should care about romance because romance writers teach us a lot about how we can work and survive and thrive in this gig economy. So on the one hand, this is a book about how romance writers found each other and succeeded over 40 years, but at a deeper level, it's really a book about labor networks and self-organization and mutual aid.
So if you're an independent creator of any type, whether that's a writer or musician, an influencer, a streamer, independently employed lawyer, and if you want to be treated fairly as an independent worker, you really need to build the kind of community that romance writers developed.
Because it just that it's feminized, it's a feminized form of labor that this different mode of work developed. You know, I really appreciated in the book how you talk about the way that we organize work, the way that we have organized work historically doesn't have to be the way that we organize work. There are other ways that we could have figured out as our status quo of how we think about and organize labor in our lives and even just like how we reward it, and that that's happening.
It has happened, perhaps at a necessity, but also maybe because of other factors in the romance community. Is that like, is it just because it's an undervalued form of labor? What's going on, do you think? Yeah, a lot of things were going on. And just like romance novels are a world where we can imagine how things might be different. Romance writing labor is a world where people did imagine how things can be different.
Yeah, and I found that the social networks of romance writers were very open and that people who had succeeded best-selling authors are happy to chitchat with up and coming authors. And I think that reflects the way women's work has operated for decades. And I should pause and say when I say women's work, we have to remember that white women, white middle class women worked in very different ways from black women or other minoritized communities.
So there's a lot of subtleties there that I go into in the book. But for most of these, almost for all of these communities, women have always worked in a piecemeal fashion, literally done piecework, taking in work while they're raising their children. And they've always helped each other. We think about quilting bees or we think about women caring for each other's children so people could work. And that kind of cooperation and openness is reflected in the way that romance writers work.
And I often say that the gig economy should really be called the women's economy because we have always worked without health benefits, without employment security. And as you pointed out, the way that we still envision work is really based on a particular model that was started at the turn of the century, the idea of working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years, with someone at home that is a wife who's taking care of everything else.
And that model has been reimagined more broadly, but also especially by women. And then one thing that you didn't mention is that like, but that is implicit is that in these scenarios, you know, part of the reason that you want to help other women who are writing romances is that you think of the sphere of the publishing industry as a place where there are not just one winner, right?
And that is the reason that we are not all in competition and that if one person wins everyone else is a loser. It's like there is a lot of space for all of us to win and to create, you know, material to create narratives that people want to consume. Like it's not a winner take all scenario. Well, that's interesting. That's exactly how romance writers have always approached the industry.
And that's the room for everyone. Yes, which is contrary to how a lot of writers and how the actual the traditional publishing industry actually works. Yes, the traditional publishing industry operates on a superstar model. They would much rather sell one million copies of one book than a few copies of a million books. So romance writers have really worked against that trend for a long time and we especially saw that in the rise of self publishing.
Right. And because self publishing says if I create material, there will be an audience for it essentially. Right. If I like, there is enough audience to go around to all of these different places. Instead of the publishing companies decide who is worthy, which, you know, and we can get into this in our later questions, but like who is worthy for so long? Was exclusively white authors writing white narratives. Right.
With straight protagonists. Yeah. Exactly. So the way that the work is organized also has all of these other trickle down effects that we're going to talk a lot about. Right. So we put out a call to our listeners for questions. And we kept it really general. And I mean, I knew this before we have so many listeners, readers of culture study who are very well versed and very interested in romance.
So we got tons of submissions and they really ran the gamut. But we figured out some questions that I think are particularly well suited to you. So let's get to them. This first one is from Hannah. I have always loved romance novels. But when the pandemic hit, I became fully addicted to all books with a romantic focus.
I am a cisgendered single woman in my late 20s. And my other female friends have also admitted to romance novel obsessions, no matter their relationship status or sexual orientation. Yeah. As far as I know, none of my male friends are reading romance at all. I think they're just all playing video games.
Why aren't men reading romance at the same rate as women has always been this way? To what extent is the boom in romance novels tied to how women are taught about heteronormativity and the patriarchy, which often contrasts with the reality of being a woman living in the 21st century? All right. So can you give us like a little bit of a taste of the answer to the first part of this question? I know there have been like, yeah, many books written on this.
Like who who has been reading romantic narratives will use as like a larger and prola historically, and how has that changed? So I'll back up a bit and I'll say that the publishing industry has always devalued women's writing from as long as American publishing has been an industrial endeavor. Women's writing has always been super popular and devalued as less important than male writing. And that is still true today.
So women's row actually romance has been very popular for more than a hundred years. And it has always been women who who read it more. And part of that is because culturally, emotions and emotional life have been devalued by male culture and been considered part of the women's sphere. So men are socialized to put their time and attention to other kinds of important endeavors and important reading. That is still true today and we see this in the fact that men read much less fiction than women.
They read in general less than women do as that's especially true in romance. 82% of romance readers are women. About 18% are men. More men are reading romance now though. And I think that's in part because young adult literature, YA literature had a boom about 15 years ago. And both young men and young women became more interested in reading in general.
Yeah and it connects to me with like even the way that they very simply identified a lot of weepies back in like the 1930s, 1950s as women's pictures. That's right because the emotional world that access to the emotional world in these pictures and coming out of Hollywood was like specifically identified as women's films. Even though what was more of what we think of as like the romcom, which was then called the screwball was universally appealing.
I also think too, and this is so broadly sketching but like so much of what is imagined in the romance novel is a different way that things could be right. It's a world where again, as we talked about before, where women's pleasure is taking seriously, where women are able to reconcile desires for family and sex and partnership. And in some cases work and under patriarchy you don't get those things. And maybe dudes, not all dudes, but some dudes are like, why do I need this fantasy space?
Everything's fine. Oh yeah, everything's just fine. Or they've convinced themselves everything's fine. Well, one of the pioneering scholars of romance, Janice Radway wrote a book called Reading the Romance in 1980. And she did come to the conclusion that one of the reasons that romance was so popular with women readers is because it did give them this space of resistance.
And this was coming out of the women's movement and the women's movement was portrayed as big protests and people burning their bras and stuff like that. But there was a massive number of readers and just women who that wasn't accessible. That wasn't a way that they could work on changing the culture because they're embedded in families. They like their families, but it was a way that they could get time for themselves to imagine a different world. And that's really important.
Yeah, and that always reminds me too of like the phrase that often comes up in scholarship of melodrama of women's pictures and weepies in the 20s, 30s, 40s. There were wasted wet afternoons, right? Like the idea that a woman could go waste an afternoon crying at the movie theater in her own sphere, right? That felt like revolution or what you could carve out for yourself.
And I loved reading it when I was in grad school reading Janice Redways reading the romance because for me, you know, this was 10 years ago, this is before this current what I think of as this current romance boom. And I still had a lot of hang ups about like I associated romance very strongly with like Harlequin romance and had class stuff going on there.
And also some like pretty basic feminist politics that were like, oh, these novels are retrograde in some way and thus like they're not worthwhile and what Redways able to recover there in those interviews is that even if the narratives themselves might seem retrograde and patriarchal in all these different ways, the act of reading itself is doing something different.
I think that's that there's an element of that going on even today, right? Right. But also that way of viewing reading like oh, oh well, we can't read romance novels because they are retrograde.
Storthall, the cultural theorist from England argue that there are different ways to read. So there's the dominant reading. There's the dominant story and there's the resistant way of reading. And so as readers, we get to interpret this however we want. And yeah, maybe they get married and there's a happy ending. But also the woman gets a job or she gets to buck some cultural trends and change the system while keeping sex and love and imagining that as a positive thing.
Yeah, and this resistant way of reading has been especially important for black readers because there were so few romances that featured black protagonists that publishing industry was really did not imagine happy endings for black women until quite recently.
So they've always been doing this resistant sort of reading. Would you say that these resistant modes that like or what you could uncover in the text through a resistant reading that it's become more explicit and a lot of the more recent romance because I said in a lot of like queer romances, historical queer romances,
much more sex forward historical romances where before you could like imagine that maybe they were having sex like, but now like you just know that they are that sort of thing. Yeah, what do you think? So I'm not sure I would say that the resistant reading or the liberation reading is totally dominant because at the end of the day of romance is a story about two people who meet, who are attracted to each other, they encounter difficulties and they end up together.
So that is a very heteronormative story. So you will we will always be able to criticize romance narratives for that and we should. But at the same time, the liberation reading is there and probably more dominant than it was actually now I'm contradicting myself, but you've made me think so that's a good conversation.
And you know, because I am not as well versed, you know, I melody the producer of our show has given me a beginning syllabus that she calls like not even like putting your toe in the ocean. It's like driving to the beach like that's how cursory it is and I'm so excited to be on this journey, but also a lot of the really great stuff that she has given me or that others have suggested to me. Our books that are doing this really interesting cool stuff.
And for me, I don't know how representative that is when there's so much out there. Does that make sense? Yeah, well, you know, like they say you've read one romance, you've read one romance and it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's going to be a lot of romance using the same trope or the same settings. But then there's completely different, a completely different world that uses totally different tropes. And so if you're a sci-fi lover, you could just read romance sci-fi.
If you are a fantasy lover, you can, you know, just read romanticy. It's very hard to dip your toe in because there's just so much. So this is a great segue to another question, which comes from Marie. It's been awesome to see more diversity in mainstream romance publishing, more lesbian, gay, bisexual, and neurodivergent characters, and more mental health representation, for example. What can the romance industry tell us about our society based on who is and is not represented in the genre?
Okay, so Marie specifies mainstream romance publishing, but is it safe to assume that the roots of this representation comes from more marginalized writers who are making waves and self publishing? That is absolutely true. Actually, as far back as the 50s or a Neil Hurston was saying, well, publishers will publish anything that they think they can make money off of. But publishers also assume that the reader, they imagined, the reader only wanted to read sad minority stories.
They only wanted to read about the black struggle. And therefore, she wrote traditional publishers are not interested in publishing black romance. Or at the time she also said, Jewish romance or any romance of a group that's just supposed to be oppressed and miserable all the time, we should only publish books about that sad, struggle story.
Self publishing completely broke through that completely got rid of those narratives because traditional publishers still they were very locked into this idea of who their reader was. And what their reader wanted. And romance writers said, no, I've got these manuscripts that I haven't been able to get published because I have two black characters or because I have queer characters or just because the gatekeepers didn't think it would sell.
And they sold like crazy so much so that many romance writers today don't even want to have a traditional publisher because they're doing so well and self publishing. And that really eventually put has pushed traditional publishers to change. Yeah, because they're like, oh, these people are making money. What if we do this as well?
Well, and it strikes me, I mean, the publishing industry is so conservative and by conservative, I don't mean necessarily like politically conservative, although there is that as well. But I mean conservative as in they have such a limited idea of what a reader would like.
And this entire genre is based on people imagining worlds that aren't their own, right? Like there is so much space to be pushed into, right? And so someone who like me who's like, I'm not interested in fairies and then reads all like spends a whole week of my life just reading about fairy romances.
Like there's just so much room to grow if you're just pushed in slightly a different direction and it's hilarious to me that the people who hold the purse strings who take risks all the time on other types of writers as long as it's a dude usually right? They wouldn't understand that there's a lot of room for experimentation in the genre. And traditional publishers haven't really understood the readers the way that romance writers understand their readers. And that made a huge difference.
We see more about that. Yeah, so in the book, I write a lot about romance landia, which is the fandom, the vast and sprawling romance fandom. And that fandom includes all romance writers because every romance writer started out as a romance fan. And Janice Ratboy pointed this out to like 40 years ago that romance writers and readers have a uniquely close bond.
If you go to a romance conference, you will stand in line at Starbucks behind a bestselling author and they will be happy to chat with you. If you go to Comic Con, you wait in a long line and pay to get somebody to sign your book. And this bond between readers and writers is one of the several factors that made self publishing so successful for romance writers.
I once interviewed Marie Force, who is a very well established self published romance writer and she said, publishers didn't want my books. The only people who wanted my books were my readers. That works out that way, doesn't it? Exactly. Exactly. So our next question is pretty foundational to this episode about whether or not there's even a boom in the first place. This comes from Moth and Melody is going to read it.
Are more romance novels actually being published? Or is the audience for them just more visible due to them being online like book talk and booktube? If more books are being published, does this correlate with the lack of widely distributed mid-tier romance that comedy movies?
All right. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this because I think as with all of the publishing industry, it is notoriously difficult to know how many books are being published or sold or bought because of the differences in physical books, audio books, Kindle books, self publishing. People ask me all the time how, like, for books that I've published, how is it selling? I was like, I have no freaking idea. Like literally no idea.
And so we have some sales numbers to show that at least with what we're able to get that there has been an increase in the last few years. But what about the proportion of romance published compared to other genres? Like, what is your thinking about tracking here? I cannot tell you the answer to how many books are published because romance books are published because nobody can.
Nobody's in the sense. Nobody can. And I've tried. I've been studying romance writers for seven years. So the reasons why I can't answer that question. One is the publishing industry is less interested in how many titles they publish than how many books they sell. So, and again, as I said, they would rather sell more copies of fewer books. So it's actually hard to even get from traditional publishers the numbers of how many books they published this year versus last year.
And you can get those figures, but I don't have them in front of me. But a vast number of romances are self-published now. Because as I mentioned earlier, a lot of really big authors are not that interested in traditional publishing. So there is no way to count the number of self-published romance. Believe me, I have tried. But Amazon sells the vast majority of self-published books. And they're very, very stingy about releasing any figures at all.
Yeah. So like the individual authors might have some insight into how much they have sold vis-a-vis Amazon. But you as someone studying would have to reach out to all those authors in order to get a larger picture. And that's just impossible. It's impossible there. People have tried. But what I can tell you is about sales. And we do know that from traditional publishers, these figures are tracked.
We have seen massive growth year over year since the pandemic. So at a time when book sales in general are shrinking, we're seeing 20% growth. Sometimes as much as 50% growth in sales. And some of that is driven by huge best sellers like Colleen Hoover. And some of it is just that there's so much romance out there that once people get hooked, they stick with it.
There's a whole sea. What do you think about Moths theory that this increase in romance novels correlates with the lack of new rom-com movies? That's such a great. I really want to have a long conversation with Moths someday. Because this is a fantastic question.
I would, first of all, I think that's a question well worthy of more academic study. I only study the publishing industry. And I know that from my much more superficial work in other cultural industries, different forces drive the publishing industry than drive the movie industry.
And there's been a massive, massive change in the way that we watch movies in whose funding movies. And while there may be contraction in the number of like rom-coms that have mass distribution to movie theaters, we see it we're seeing an explosion on Netflix and Amazon and Bridgerton.
Yeah, that's a room. It's several movies right? So yeah, yeah, no, I agree with you. And I think that as the film industry, what we think of as like movies that go to theaters has stratified into like super cheap micro production that then make a lot of money. And then these massive ten-pole blockbusters that then we have this impulse like all of the energy around rom-coms doesn't go away. It goes into. Move somewhere else.
Yes, it goes into series cable, straight to VOD movies, hallmark movies, which there's more than ever before. And other networks have tried to emulate the hallmark movie formula. And then I do think that there's probably some spillover here like, oh, I can't like, you know, when I was growing up, some of my rom-com energy or like my romance energy was really firmly directed towards like watching whether it was like, I don't know, my best friend's wedding on repeat, right?
Like there was some of that that was going on. And I think if that's not available to you and you do find it in books, then maybe it stays in books and drives that market a little bit more, but it's, I don't think it's as simple as, yeah. Okay, so we got a lot of questions about book talks involvement. For people who don't know, book talk refers to the community of readers and reviewers on TikTok, which can often make or break a book by word of mouth.
And just lead to an explosion of interest in a book. Let's hear this question from Mary. Do you think that the existence of book talk is actually helping to destigmatize the genre of romance for the broader public? And is that something that we actually need or is it enough to feel safe and seen by other members of the romance reading community? Fascinating question. So how would you chart if we had to like stigma, chart the stigma of reading romance over the years?
Yeah, oh, well charting the stigma. That's a, that's a big question. Right. But what's interesting is that this stigma of romance, which was a huge in the 80s, romance is the world's most stigmatized genre. Everyone loves to make fun of romance and romance writers. Scholars have written about this. The Simpsons, there's a funny episode where Marge Simpson is writing a silly romance. So that that stigma dates back a long time.
What's interesting about the stigma now though is that it really infused this younger generation of readers. So readers in their teens thought about romance as these bodice poppers at their grandmother read. Yeah, but then through TikTok, they've been exposed to, oh, romance is not what I thought it was.
Romance is like smart, funny, witty characters. And book talk has been huge in the rise of LGBTQ plus romance because suddenly the all these young readers who thought romance is just for, you know, boring straights. Trying to think of a nicer way to say that above wide. Yeah, they're like, oh, I see it's really different than I thought it was.
And then that creates this virtuous cycle where younger readers want things and they want more of these great books. And they're actually willing to go out and buy them. And so publishers are totally responding to what's happening on book talk. Do you think that people just generally not just younger people, but even older people are more open about reading romance now than they used to be?
I think they are. One, because there has been so much coverage in the media about how romance has changed about the fact that it is this rich place base to imagine happily ever after is for almost anybody. And it's fun. So yes, I think that has spilled over, but the growth in romance readers that we've seen in the last five years really since the pandemic has largely been in the 20 something age group previously romance was most read by women in their late 30s, 40s.
And now it's a younger demographic. That is so, so interesting, right? Because like late 30s, 40s is like, especially if you're married or maybe not married, but dissolution with romance, like with real life romance, right? And with your options, whereas 20s, I think now there are more people who are like, oh, I'm already dissolutioned. Or maybe I could imagine a different space.
Also, 20s, like sometimes we disarticulate this from reading habits to I think someone's 20s is often a difficult time to find or recover a joy of reading that you might have had as a teen when you had a little bit more space to read. And so having someone who says, take this and that gets you hooked and allows you to make those spaces in your life, like that's a real blessing in your 20s, at least it would have been for me.
Yeah, definitely because so much of our reading in college and high school is like, oh, we have to read this. It's the last thing you want to do for fun. And I say that as an English major. I know, right? So, okay, we have a question that is so perfect for you that I almost feel like this person like wrote it for you. But, okay, so this is from Meredith. Our romance writers more likely to attempt to control their own fates through self publishing and using social media to acquire loyal readers.
I'm wondering also how Kindle Unlimited plays a part in all this. What are the financial ramifications of having your books and Kindle Unlimited versus not? Right, so we've talked a little bit about this controlling their own fates through self publishing. I would love to hear more about the Kindle Unlimited part of this conversation. Oh, that's great. I just wrote a paper about that not long ago. So Kindle Unlimited has been great for some authors and absolutely terrible for others.
It's been great for the authors who find readers who wouldn't have known about them and then want to consume all of their books. It has not been great for authors who have maybe one or two books out. They're aspiring romance writers. They've self published a couple of books. They don't have a big catalog. So that's been, it's very, very hard because there's so many books, mostly self published on KU. It's very hard to break through the clutter.
And this will not come as a surprise to anyone. Amazon actually benefits from that clutter. Because now if you want to succeed on KU, Kindle Unlimited, you really need to buy ads from Amazon. So Kindle Unlimited has created these income streams for Amazon that do not benefit the authors. Yes, sell a book. Amazon makes money. The publisher makes money. If it's self published, there's no publisher.
And you make money. But in buying ads to promote your book on KU and cut through the clutter, only Amazon makes money. So can you zoom out a little bit and say like, why would an author opt into Kindle Unlimited? Exposure. Got it. KU is basically a streaming service for books. You pay a flat fee every month and you get to consume as many as you want. And that is fantastic for romance readers because romance readers read way more books than any other readers in America.
They'll read often several books a week. Whereas the average American reads a few books a year. So KU does have this sort of captive audience of people who really just want things that are available on KU. It reminds me of how we think about something like Spotify. Right? Like a band wants their music to be on Spotify.
And it means to get potential exposure to land on like a playlist that will then maybe get them some revenue. But and maybe also generate enough of a fandom that then people will buy their tickets. Right? To see them touring, which is how they actually make money. But they're not going to make money just having their music on Spotify. So it depends, like, see how it would really depend on the level of success that someone has. So like, are any of like calling Hoover's books on Kindle Unlimited?
I actually don't know the answer to that. But what I do know is a lot of authors will put one or two of their books on KU for the minimum amount of time, like three months. Hoping that it will drive them to buy the rest of their catalog as actual books. So that's a strategy that they'll use. One reason that a lot of people don't like to use KU is because when you put your book for sale on KU, you have to go exclusively with Amazon for the period of time that your book is there. So right?
A lot of romance writers are increasingly objecting to that model. I was talking with a well-known author named Courtney Milan about this last year. And she said at that time she was not putting her books on KU, even though she, she as a well-known author could make a lot of money on KU because she does not want to support Amazon's near monopoly in this area.
Right. So other than individuals like that, is there any sort of organized effort to push back against that sort of power being leveraged by Amazon? Yes. So romance writers of America during the time that I was working on this book, RWA became a pretty controversial group. Very, very long story short, they were torn apart by the fact that they were just too slow to catch up with this massive cultural awakening.
And for many years, just did not do as much for their authors of color and their other historically minoritized authors, as we now know they should have. And that led to this breakdown and RWA now has less than half of the members that they once had because of this rift. That said, RWA was and still is one of the only large organizations that can stand up to Amazon. And they have.
Amazon will return RWA's phone calls. They will not return a phone call from most authors. And RWA and organized romance authors have been influential in making some small but important changes at Amazon, like making it easier for authors who for some reason their books aren't appearing for those books to appear. And Amazon's algorithms do not show black authors nearly as often as they show white authors even when they should. RWA has worked really hard on that.
The author's guild has also been really instrumental in standing up to Amazon's monopoly power. Yeah, I think that it's one of those cases to where an ideal with this all the time, honestly, with substack, which is where this podcast is published, like you have these tools that make it easier to rest back control from the industry at large. But sometimes you have to push back against the maker of those tools.
It's ironic. Amazon makes it a lot easier to self publish and to control your own destiny as a romance writer and to accumulate the power that would not necessarily have been yours if you were trying to navigate the business at large. But at the same time, like they are an incredibly cutthroat capitalist organization. And so to rely on that organization as your tool is always going to be very fraught.
Yeah, one author I spoke to compared Amazon to it's like you're a tiny kitten being cutled by a giant gorilla. You're happy that you're being cutled by this gorilla, but it could crush you at any moment. This is a great note first and on, except I have one last question for you because we did a whole podcast about romances and I didn't ask you one of your favorites.
So it doesn't have to be your all time favorite. Just one that comes to mind that you really love that you would recommend to listeners. Well, I'll just say most recently I read cat Sebastian's we could be so good, which is a historic. It's a male male romance and it's set in the early 1960s in the newspaper world of New York City. And as a major journalist, I just loved it. And as a reader, cat Sebastian is amazing with dialogue and character development.
That is a fantastic recommendation. Christine Larson, thank you so much for joining me. Where can people find you if they want to hear more from you? And where would you recommend that they buy your book? Well, I buy my book wherever you like. I would be delighted. Yeah, it's called love in the time of self publishing. You can find me at ChristineLarson.com. And I would love to hear from you. Amazing. Now, if you were a paid subscriber, you'd be getting the ask and anything segment right now.
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