[ SECRET POST #2861 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2861 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 052 secrets from Secret Submission Post #409.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

Romance/erotica clocks in over $1 billion sales per year. The next genre down iirc is crime/mystery, which earns around half that.

But your second point is the most interesting to me because it might explain why a lot of people consider anything where the main focus isn't romance to be gen. Because there's A LOT of romantic threads and elements in crime and mystery fiction, but because it's not the focus it doesn't get called romance. Same with many other genres (YA, SFF, etc.).

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

I think publishing houses deliberately play down the romance elements of their output because it's not cool, even though most fiction contains romance.

Romance is a women's thing. It will put men off buying. It's not prestigious.

Yet romance not only sells, most books actually feel odd without some element of it. Thus the polite cover up.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

"most books actually feel odd without some element of it."

Because it's a huge part of the human experience, and books reflect the human experience.

And that's coming from an aromantic.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

And then some genficcers get annoyed when a plotty fic with a strong romantic theme is "mistagged" as gen. But that's exactly what published fiction does. For example, a crime novel with a strong romance story line in it is never put on the romance shelf.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

I realize it's not the be-all-end-all, but as a huge representative of somewhere people buy fiction, Amazon doesn't even have a General Fiction category OR a Romance category as separate and distinct entities.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

SA

I tell a lie, Romance is its own category outside the Literature & Fiction category. Which also says a lot.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

It does say a lot.

It's making me laugh, in fact. Romance is not literature!!!!

It's ingrained snootiness like this, even in Amazon's category divisions, that meant that I deliberately didn't read any novel marked romance for many years, believing romance to be a ridiculous, niche genre.

Perhaps they even do this deliberately, to make reading less threatening for a certain style of reader? At the same time, making other books by implication not-romance, they boost the snob factor of general literature, even though those books also probably contain romance in them.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

To be fair, I think the separation may have more to do with the size of the genre than anything else. Mysteries and Sci-Fi/Fantasy gets their own category too.

However a look at the first page of Genre Fiction returns mostly romantic-centric books, so you have to wonder about the classification at all.

There still isn't anything close to "General Fiction". Which makes sense, because most fiction, barring avant-garde experimental stuff, is about something, so "General Fiction" in and of itself sounds like a nebulous misnomer.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

Genficcers will usually use the "published fiction isn't fanfiction" line. In fact, I seem to recall dreemyweird using that exact line a couple days ago.

But it's like, okay, so you'll accept hints of romance in a book you buy at Barnes & Noble but you won't accept it in a fic? Why? If it's in the background in both cases, then what makes the difference?

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

No difference at all, except that their egos are huge enough that they imagine fanfic writers will bend over backwards to their demands whereas published authors won't.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

And even when it does it doesn't always get the tag. I've seen people complaining about "stealth romances" before, and I've seen them myself - a romance book with genre trappings that for some reason won't admit it's a romance. so even in original fiction, people mis-tag. :)

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

Romance as a theme can exist in a wide variety of genres. If the plot turns on the other genre, it gets classified as such. It doesn't mean anyone tried to shove it in stealthily -- on the contrary, the book would get a wider audience and more marketing if it was sold as a romance.

And if you think the author has any say whatsoever on the genre the publisher decides to sell the book under, you're very much mistaken. We don't decide, they do, based on where they think the book will sell best.

No one 'mis-tags'. Genfic, if such a thing truly exists at all -- and I don't think it does -- is something different for everyone.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

I've had a book sent back for R&R because it wasn't what that editor (and the publisher they worked for) deemed romance-centric enough and that the other plot threads were drowning it out. I'd have labelled it pretty clear-cut romance and it sold to a different publisher as exactly that without making the changes the first house wanted.

So yes, agreed that it's not the writer who's responsible for how/where their books get marketed. One publisher's "thriller with romantic elements" is anothers "romance."