Sexily ever after: how romance bookstores took over America

From The Guardian:

Five years ago, there was just one. Now bookshops exclusively stocking romance novels are everywhere – aiming to ‘undo generations of shame’

When Jonlyn Scrogham decided to open a romance novel bookstore last year in Louisville, Kentucky, the 37-year-old had modest expectations. The space she rented was tiny; her annual sales projections were small, too.

Though she had been an avid romance reader for decades, she wasn’t sure how many others shared her excitement. She worried that people would think the concept was silly, or that not many people would visit.

But not long after A Novel Romance opened in July, she said, customers were showing up from Tennessee and Virginia, saying they had traveled three or four hours just to visit. Within two months, Scrogham was already halfway to what she had projected would be her annual sales total. And all of this happened without her spending “a single dollar” on marketing.

“It’s all been driven by Instagram, TikTok, word of mouth and Facebook,” she said. “People coming in, and the romance community talking to each other.”

Scrogham is part of a quiet but rapidly growing trend. At least eight other dedicated romance novel bookstores opened across the US in 2023, in cities from Wichita, Kansas, to Belfast, Maine. At least three more have opened so far in 2024, in Florida and in Utah, with another planned in Portland, Oregon.

“People are driving from states away – people who are seeing us online and want to come,” said Jaclyn Wooten, the founder of Blush Bookstore in Kansas. An employee said that one customer described flying in from Baltimore on a private jet. “All the businesses around us are like, ‘What is going on over there? What are they doing?’”

As a genre, romance is defined by its focus on a central love story, and by its promise of a “happily ever after” for its main characters – or at least, in more contemporary novels, a “happy for now”. Romance connoisseurs often refer to the amount of sex in the novels as a book’s “spice level”, which from ranges from quite mild to very spicy indeed.

Six years ago, there was only one romance bookstore in the US: the Ripped Bodice, in Los Angeles, named after the “bodice ripper” historical romances of the 80s and 90s. But as romance publishing has boomed, with US print book sales increasing 117% over the past three years, romance fans are opening up more brick and mortar stores to meet the demand.

Annual print sales of romance novels more than doubled in the past three years, from 18m in 2020 to 36m in 2023, driven in part by BookTok, according to Circana, a consumer analytics firm.

Over the same time, the number of romance-focused bookstores in the US grew from just two to at least 15, with a handful more in Canada and Australia. Many of them have names that play on favorite romance tropes, like Grump and Sunshine, Meet Cute and Slow Burn Books. Their decor – often heavy on the pink – is playful and celebratory, designed as a backdrop for TikTok and Instagram content.

The stores stock a wide variety of popular romance genres, from the Regency-era love stories that inspired Bridgerton, to contemporary novels about hot hockey players, to “romantasy” series like A Court of Thorns and Roses, to a wide range of LGBTQ+ romances. Despite book bans in some US states, 1m LGBTQ+ romance novels were sold between May 2022 and May 2023, a 40% increase compared with the year before, according to Circana.

When the sisters Leah Koch and Bea Hodges-Koch began raising money for the Ripped Bodice in 2015, the idea of a romance-only bookstore had plenty of doubters. Some family members and friends thought the idea was too “niche” to succeed, Leah Koch said. A few older romance novelists criticized the store’s cheeky name, arguing they were portraying the genre in a bad light. Some critics suggested a bookstore focused on sexy romance novels was an affront to religious values.

But the idea also struck a chord among romance fans: the sisters raised more than $90,000 from supporters on Kickstarter to make the Ripped Bodice a reality.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

She’s the Queen of Football Romance. (No, It’s Not Taylor Swift.)

From The Wall Street Journal:

The queen of the football romance is not Taylor Swift. It’s Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

Phillips, whose tenth lusty NFL novel comes out next week, is widely credited with starting the sports romance genre more than three decades ago. She is a 79-year-old grandma who lives in Naperville, Ill., “where the Chicago Stars have their headquarters,” she says. The Chicago Stars don’t actually have a headquarters because they aren’t real, but that’s immaterial to the Americans who’ve purchased more than 2 million of these gridiron books.

While scrutiny of the relationship between Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift buzzes around the stadium when the Kansas City Chiefs play the San Francisco 49ers at this Sunday’s Super Bowl, in the alternate universe of football romance novels, their love story is hardly that exceptional.

“I was ahead of Travis and Taylor,” Phillips says. “They’re copying.”

Phillips isn’t the only one writing football romance. Big hits include “The Wall of Winnipeg and Me” by Mariana Zapata, a 2016 enemies-to-lovers story about an NFL defensive end’s assistant who gets tired of washing his “extra-large underwear” and quits. Romance novelist Alexa Martin, wife of former NFL defensive back Derrick Martin, modeled her hero after Travis Kelce in her 2019 novel “Fumbled,” the story of the Denver Mustangs wide receiver “T.K. Moore.” (“His world is football, parties, and women.”)

In Phillips’s Chicago Stars series, quarterback meets opera diva, quarterback meets feisty detective, quarterback meets portrait painter, quarterback meets particle physicist—different quarterbacks, same meet-cute energy. “Simply the Best,” her upcoming novel published by the HarperCollins imprint Avon Books, pairs an NFL agent with a failed chocolatier.

Simply the Best” arrives two days after the Super Bowl and a day before Valentine’s Day. It is fitting timing for Phillips, who has turned imaginary NFL pairings into a bestselling career. The author, with 25 books translated into more than 30 languages, pegged the book’s release to the holiday. Tay and Trav were a bonus.

Phillips, whose literary spiciness ranks at more than one chili pepper but less than three, is a fan of the outlandish encounter, like a romp with former Chicago Stars wide receiver (first name Bobby Tom) involving Neapolitan ice cream (“Heaven, Texas,” 1995). She put one heroine in a beaver suit on a lonely road in a move that grabs a football star’s attention (“Natural Born Charmer,” 2007). She stranded her backup QB in the snowy Colorado mountains with a pair of boxer shorts, sneakers and a shivering naked lady (“When Stars Collide,” 2021). She even had a girl detective with “blueberry Pop-Tart eyes” steal her love interest’s Super Bowl ring and plant it on a corrupt prince’s yacht (“First Star I See Tonight,” 2016).

. . . .

“I wasn’t interested in writing the soldier or the cop or the cowboy, but the athlete just struck me as such a great thing to write about because I could play with the stereotype of the dumb jock,” says Phillips, who has also written non-sports historical and contemporary romances. Her first sports romance was a 1989 novel, “Fancy Pants,” about a pro golfer and a fallen society belle.

Phillips started in romance writing when the genre was viewed with more casual snobbery within the book industry. There were no authors on Instagram asking their fans for suggestions or TikTok readers sobbing over the ending of their favorite book. People with a guilty pleasure for romance couldn’t keep saucy titles hidden on a Kindle on their morning commutes. 

Early on, she says, the accepted wisdom in publishing was that sports, actors and rock stars didn’t sell to overseas romance readers. But she wasn’t traveling in insider book circles. “I was writing in ignorance,” she says. “It was such a blessing.” 

The mother of two boys loved reading all genres and tried her hand at romance writing with a friend when the kids were young. Once she started getting published, she joined other romance writers who were collecting street addresses and building mailing lists for their newsletters. “We started interacting with readers long before the publishers caught on,” says Phillips. 

Now such close fan relationships are a key to the blockbuster genre. Nearly 40 million romance novels were sold in print last year, up 8 percent from the previous year and on top of 52 percent growth the year before, according to the market researcher Circana. 

Sports romances are a part of the story, with ice hockey especially popular right now. “Icebreaker” by Hannah Grace—the pen name for an author who keeps her face secret from her readers—is a 2023 blockbuster about a figure skater and an ice hockey team captain that has sold almost 1 million copies in print. Golf takes the spotlight with next week’s release of “Fangirl Down” from bestselling author and TikTok fan favorite Tessa Bailey.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

Romance Books Made Me a Feminist

From Women Writers, Women’s Books:

This is the story of how I discovered my feminism through reading romance novels, and how that discovery ultimately led me to make writing them my career. 

I still remember when I read my first romance. The year I moved to Montreal, I got a job at a raw juice store in an industrial part of the city. Since the business was mostly based on deliveries rather than in-store purchases, I had a lot of spare time. Too much. My duties for the day took all of fifteen minutes, and the rest of the time I was only needed for the rare instances that someone wandered into the shop. As a result, I quickly slipped into mind-numbing boredom… Until I had the bright idea to read a book.

I was a voracious reader as a child, but with the various demands of life, I had forgotten that passion. I hadn’t read a book from cover to cover in almost a decade, because I hadn’t found anything that grabbed my attention. I’d spent a lot of the last years traveling and focusing on music—my first creative love—and it didn’t feel like I needed another hobby. I concluded that I just didn’t care for reading anymore, and that I’d left that particular pastime behind with my childhood.

In reality, I just hadn’t been reading the right books.

The real reason I had abandoned my reading pursuits became clear the day I stumbled upon my first romance novel as I sat behind the till at that juice bar. It was a paranormal romance—vampires, of course. My eyes were as big as saucers as I read the first spicy scene, and I remember thinking, “I didn’t know books could be like this!” From that day, an obsession was born.

As I sped through multitudinous series, I was amazed time and time again at how relatable the stories were, even those with fantastical settings and supernatural characters. The authors seemed to understand me and what I found exciting and sensual. The female protagonists had struggles I related to—fears, hopes, and desires I understood. The male protagonists were actually enticing to me, and the love stories were compelling.

I quickly found a new appreciation for my day job. Now, I resented when customers came in, because it meant I had to put my book down. (Though I was sure to paste on a smile and be polite, despite my voracious need to read.) I read on the train to and from work. I read when I got home at night, until it was time to go to bed. At which point, I stayed up too late reading some more. I hadn’t known it was even possible to be so obsessed with something.

Throughout this period of single-minded fixation, I thought deeply about why these books affected me the way they did. I had read plenty of fantasy and adventure in the past, even the occasional love story, but none had piqued my interest the way these had. They were exciting, they were binge-able, they were sexy…but it was more than that.

Then it came to me. These books were written by women, for women. All the subtle descriptions, references, humor, and scenarios were written from the female perspective. They told women’s stories—women’s desire, women’s fantasies, women’s pleasure. The simplicity of this realization shocked me as I considered the implications.

It was no wonder I hadn’t been interested in many books or movies in the past, because the entire media world is presented for the male gaze. We’re taught to regard things with a female focus to be silly, contrite, and embarrassing. If you like rom-com movies, you are subject to eye rolls and groaning. If your favorite color is pink or you played with Barbies as a child, you’ll be lumped in with “other girls” as if being “like a girl” is somehow a terrible fate to befall a…girl.

As for me, I’d been unable to enjoy most supposedly female-centered movies not because of some internal bias, but because those films are primarily written by men who don’t understand or care what it is to be a woman. It’s due to that unbalanced perspective that Hollywood is full of such blatant misogyny. Though I had stopped watching films with crude jokes at the expense of women long ago, I didn’t fully realize the magnitude of the imbalance until I found romance. 

Reading romance became more than just an escape for me; it became a rebellion. It became a place to gather with other like-minded, empowered women. It became a way to support women-owned businesses and women entrepreneurs. It became a place to explore the female perspective and expand my horizons without fear of judgment. It became a place to support others, and to feel supported. 

Did you know that romance novels are a 1.4 billion-dollar-a-year industry? Did you know the next best-selling genre, mystery, earns only 700 million? So why is it that most bookstores have a pitiful romance section in a dark and lonely corner in the back? Why is it that romance novels are considered “trashy” and women are often shamed for reading them? 

Based on those statistics, it seems to me that the patriarchy—and the need to disregard and ridicule women’s pleasure—is an even stronger force than capitalism itself. Which says a lot.

Let’s bust the myth that romance novels are trash. To write romance, not only do you need an interesting plot like any other novel, you need to have a deep understanding of human nature and dynamics. In another genre, you might be able to get away with writing a series of thrilling, suspenseful events being experienced by a fairly two-dimensional, static character, but in romance, character development is everything. It’s imperative to explore their deepest motivations, fears, and desires—otherwise the romance itself won’t feel believable.

. . . .

The deeper I get into the romance world, the more I realize the revolutionary nature of the genre. Romance is inherently feminist, not because it’s trying to be overtly loud and defiant, but simply because it exists. Women write these books for other women to read. Of course, men are welcome if they want to be part of the community, and we embrace them. But we don’t exist for them, and many men find that threatening.

But guess what? We don’t care! We’re too busy reading our spicy books to care. And damn, that’s liberating.

The income earned from book sales goes to women, the industry is primarily run by women—from publishers, agents, and editors, to cover designers, publicists, and of course, authors and readers themselves.

Link to the rest at Women Writers, Women’s Books

10 great openings to romantic novels – and can you place them all?

From Helena Fairfax:

How important is the first line in a romantic novel?  In these days of “Click to look inside!”,  if the book you’re thinking of buying doesn’t have an immediately arresting opening, does that make you put it back on the cyber-shelf?  If you can get a free sample download for your e-reader, is the opening passage more important than ever, before you commit to buy?

I’ve been wrestling with this dilemma for what seems like forever, since I’m just putting the finishing touches to my contemporary romance.

. . . .

I’m happy with the rest of the book, pretty much, but just struggling with the first page and stressing that people will look at the first paragraphs and put it straight back down.

So that got me thinking about great openings to romantic novels, and how others have succeeded where I am singularly failing.  Below is a list of ten great openings to a romantic novel – and note, all of these were written in the days before the internet.  The pressure of an eye-catching start wasn’t even on for these authors, but to masters of the pen like these it was all part of their craftsmanship.

Can you place all ten novels?  Some are easier than others.  You’ll find the answers below!

1.      Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.  He had attended a surprisingly easy calving, lanced one abscess, extracted a molar, dosed one lady of easy virtue with Salvarsan, performed an unpleasant but spectacularly fruitful enema, and had produced a miracle by a feat of medical prestidigitation.

2.      I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.  That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and a tea-cosy.

3.      Ennis del Mar wakes before five, wind rocking the trailer, hissing in around the aluminium door and window frames.  The shirts hanging on a nail shudder slightly in the draft.  He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes it in blue…he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist had been in his dream.

4.  On they went, singing ‘Eternal Memory’, and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.  Passers-by made way for the procession, counted the wreaths and crossed themselves.  Some joined in out of curiosity and asked, ‘Who is being buried?’

Link to the rest, including the answers, at Helena Fairfax

Anna Biller on How the Gothic Gives Voice to Women’s Pleasure—and Pain

From Electric Lit:

“There are rules for contemporary literature, and I’m breaking a lot of them for a lot of people,” filmmaker Anna Biller told me by phone. Her debut novel, Bluebeard’s Castle, rejects the minimalism that recent fiction sometimes conflates with seriousness: nowhere, here, will you find the anesthetized protagonist, the dead-end job, the lukewarm relationships, or the “cool first person” tone used of late to capture the alienation of the modern subject. Instead, Biller’s book embraces excess from cover to literal cover. Its heroine Judith’s feelings are almost as enormous as the gowns she wears to breakfast and the English castle she buys on a whim with her hunky but probably evil lover. Costume balls are thrown. Daggers are wielded. And just look at that cover!

. . . .

In reviving the delicious manias of 18th-century Gothic novels and 1960s dime-store romances, Bluebeard’s Castle pays homage to genres that were often (and often pejoratively) associated with female readerships in their day. Indeed, the pleasures and perils of womanhood have always been the twin obsessions of Biller’s oeuvre. As a filmmaker, she painstakingly recreates the dreamy costumes, sets, and cinematography of bygone eras, from ‘60s Hollywood (The Love Witch) to the sexploitation movies and mags of the ‘70s (Viva). The result is a gorgeous, distinctly female gaze—but one unafraid to depict the mainstays of women’s suffering, from objectification to assault.

Even against that backdrop, Bluebeard’s Castle is Biller’s darkest work to date. Her reimagination of the French fairytale follows modern-day mystery author Judith as she falls hard for Gavin, a member of the peerage who promises her the world. But once they marry, Gavin’s charms sour, his worsening acts of cruelty seeming to channel the femicidal history of the medieval estate they call home. As Judith begins to fear for her sanity—and her life—Bluebeard’s Castle indicts a society that dares to call itself modern while violence against women remains routine.

. . . .

Chelsea Davis: The Bluebeard legend is hundreds of years old. I was curious what attracted you to using it as the blueprint for a novel set in the present.

Anna Biller: It was actually a tragedy that happened to somebody that I know who got involved with a very, very bad man. And her life ended.

I was thinking about all the research on how many women are killed by their partners today—it’s such a high number. There was a story last year about a couple that went hiking. The woman went missing and they did this big search for her. When they combed the woods for her body, they found four more bodies that they weren’t even looking for. Their killers were all their boyfriends and husbands.

Growing up, I was always really interested in fairytales, and in the connection between the Bluebeard fairytale and the modern serial killer thriller. The Bluebeard stories were originally from the point of view of the woman, and it was only maybe in the ‘60s that it shifted, especially in movies. Suddenly, the point of view is all from that of the killer—especially in the Giallo films, like those of Mario Bava, and then in Hollywood films. It became very, very sadistic, and that’s still what we have: it’s the slasher, or the thriller. They say these movies are feminist, because there’s one woman who survived at the end, but in those older movies, you didn’t have to see a bunch of your friends be brutally murdered. I don’t think that’s a happy ending.

So that’s all in the book.

CD: What you’re saying is that femicide is still the status quo, not the exception. We’d like to think of extreme violence against women as being a thing of the past, but it’s not.

AB: That’s partly why I wanted to set my book in the modern age: I don’t want people to think “Oh, this is how it was in the 1950s or the ‘40s.” That lets us off the hook.

People also think of feminine women as dated, of femininity as being out of fashion. But I see more and more young women who really want to doll themselves up. They’re not doing it for a man; usually they’re doing it for fun with their friends, or to make themselves feel good. It’s in pop culture, it’s in music video culture, it’s on TikTok, but it’s still not in recent movies or books.

CD: I wanted to ask you about feminine fantasy more broadly. You’re so committed to a traditionally feminine aesthetic in your films, and now also in this novel: the lavish clothing, the sweet food, the hunky man. And each of these pleasures is actually really fun to read about. But they also end up having a dark side—the sugar crash after the desserts, or the man who ends up being, you know, completely evil. Do you think that women’s fantasy is doomed to endanger us?

AB: No, I don’t think it’s always doomed to endanger us. But do I think the Gothic is about women being entombed within a castle that’s owned by a man, under his rules and regulations. So, the Gothic is about being imprisoned within patriarchy, and about the woman either making peace with that, or escaping it.
That’s why those old-style novel covers are so evocative—the kind of cover that I copied with my book jacket, which shows the woman fleeing from the castle. It already tells the whole story, that cover: she’s fleeing from this wealth, this security, this pleasure, this dark fantasy that’s exciting. The man means pleasure, but he also means control. Are you willing to play the role of the little perfect doll to a man, and have all the money, have all the pleasure—but also be under his control? Or do you want independence, which could also mean poverty and loneliness?

Jane Eyre is a perfect example of that. Jane can go back to the castle in the end and be with Rochester because he’s maimed and blind, and therefore, they’re equal. He doesn’t have power over her because he has to depend on her to be his eyes. But if he weren’t maimed and blind, well, she couldn’t stay there with him because he’d continue to dominate her.

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

PG checked out the publisher of Ms. Biller’s book and discovered Verso Books.

Since PG, living a sheltered life, had never encountered Verso, he checked out the publisher’s website.

Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world, publishing one hundred books a year.

. . . .

Brief History

“Anglo-America’s preeminent radical press.”—Harper’s

“The scale of the achievement of New Left Review and Verso, which turns forty this year, is now clear.”—Nation

“A rigorously intelligent publisher.”—Sunday Times

New Left Books was launched by New Left Review in 1970, and took as its logo the Tatlin Tower—a planned monument to the Third International. Focusing initially on translating works of European political and social theory, economics and philosophy, the list during that decade included Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Lucio Colletti, Henri Lefebvre, Georg Lukács, Ernest Mandel, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre and Max Weber, as well as major original works by Perry Anderson, Terry Eagleton, Tom Nairn and Raymond Williams. NLB’s list challenged established opinions both in the United States and the Soviet Union, and their respective satellites, as well as providing important critical analyses of China, India and South America. The publishing house was always intended to be far broader in its reach than NLR. An early bestseller was Against Method by Paul Feyeraband.

Verso—the left-hand page—was launched as a paperback imprint at the end of the seventies. Since becoming NLB’s sole imprint, Verso has published landmark books by Tariq Ali, Benedict Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Robert Brenner, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Mike Davis, Isaac Deutscher, Paul Feyeraband, Norman Finkelstein, David Harvey, Eric Hobsbawm, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Rebecca Solnit, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Erik Olin Wright and Slavoj Žižek. New translations have included Jean Baudrillard, Régis Debray, André Gorz, Jürgen Habermas, Rigoberta Menchú, Roberto Schwarz and Paul Virilio.

The New Left Review rang a heavily-muffled memory lurking in the foggiest part of PG’s brain.

He checked Wikipedia and discovered the following:

As part of the British “New Left” a number of new journals emerged to carry commentary on matters of Marxist theory. One of these was The Reasoner, a magazine established by historians E. P. Thompson and John Saville in July 1956. A total of three quarterly issues was produced. This publication was expanded and further developed from 1957 to 1959 as The New Reasoner, with an additional ten issues being produced.

Another radical journal of the period was the Universities and Left Review, a publication established in 1957 with less of a sense of allegiance to the British communist tradition. This publication was more youth-oriented and pacifist in orientation, expressing opposition to the militaristic rhetoric of the Cold War, voicing strong opposition to the 1956 Suez War, and support for the emerging Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

Establishment

New Left Review was established in January 1960 when The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review merged their boards. The first editor-in-chief of the merged publication was Stuart Hall. The early publication’s style, featuring illustrations on the cover and in the interior layout, was more irreverent and free-flowing than later issues of the publication, which tended to be of a more somber, academic bent. Hall was succeeded as editor in 1962 by Perry Anderson.

In 1993, nineteen of the members of the editorial committee resigned, citing a loss of control over content by the Editorial Board/Committee in favour of a Shareholders’ Trust, which they argued was undemocratic.

. . . .  The journal was again relaunched in 2000 . . .

Of course, The Age of Aquarius and “Far Out!” Drug-addled aesthetes wielding Marxist theories who were going to change the world! A heady mix of flower children, Vietnam, napalm, getting high and dropping out.

PG was wondering what sort of intellectually pretentious publisher would regard a “femicide” book and its author as worthy of serious attention when she creates lurid paragraphs like the following:

“The man means pleasure, but he also means control. Are you willing to play the role of the little perfect doll to a man, and have all the money, have all the pleasure—but also be under his control? Or do you want independence, which could also mean poverty and loneliness?”

The Queen of Romance in AI

PG promises this is the last of today’s AI writing posts.

Prompt: Provide a fictional plot outline in Danielle Steel’s style and themes.

ChatGPT4

Title: “Shadows of Yesterday”

Plot Outline:

  1. Setting and Introduction:
    • The story unfolds in modern-day New York City.
    • Introduce the protagonist, Isabella, a young, ambitious, and successful magazine editor facing personal and professional challenges.
  2. Isabella’s Background:
    • Isabella comes from a wealthy, but emotionally distant family.
    • Flashbacks reveal her struggles with her demanding and critical mother, shaping her relentless drive for perfection.
  3. Career Challenges:
    • Isabella is up for a major promotion, but faces stiff competition and workplace politics.
    • Her professional life is a whirlwind of high-profile events, glamorous parties, and celebrity interviews, masking her inner turmoil.
  4. Romantic Entanglements:
    • Isabella’s love life is complicated, caught between a comfortable but unexciting relationship with a longtime friend and a passionate, unpredictable affair with a charismatic entrepreneur.
  5. Family Crisis:
    • A sudden family tragedy forces Isabella to reevaluate her life choices.
    • She returns home to confront unresolved issues with her family, particularly her mother.
  6. Self-Discovery and Growth:
    • Through these trials, Isabella embarks on a journey of self-discovery.
    • She begins to understand the importance of balance in life and starts to question her relentless pursuit of success.
  7. New Love Interest:
    • Amidst her personal growth, Isabella meets a new love interest – someone who challenges her perspectives and offers a more authentic and supportive relationship.
  8. Climactic Decision:
    • Faced with a pivotal career decision, Isabella must choose between her lifelong ambition and a chance at genuine happiness.
    • This decision is complicated by a surprise revelation related to her family’s past.
  9. Resolution:
    • Isabella makes a bold decision that prioritizes her personal happiness and true self over societal expectations.
    • The story concludes with her embarking on a new path, finding a balance between her career ambitions and personal life.
  10. Themes:
    • The narrative weaves through themes of self-discovery, the complexity of family dynamics, the pursuit of success, and the search for love and personal fulfillment.
    • It highlights the often difficult choices women face in balancing career, family, and romance.

This fictional outline is inspired by Danielle Steel’s style, known for her emotionally rich stories that explore family, relationships, and personal growth set against the backdrop of contemporary life. The plot combines elements of romance, drama, and self-discovery, typical of Steel’s bestselling novels

End of ChatGPT4

Since PG is not an expert on the works of Ms. Steel, he’ll leave comments on the accuracy of the plot outline to those who are.

For PG, this series of “Provide a fictional plot outline in (well-known author’s) style and themes” AI experiments is the first indication that AI might be a potentially-useful tool for authors.

It strikes him that AI might be helpful for beginning authors writing in various genres. PG checked the Romance Writers of America website and this is part of what he found:

The Basics

Romance fiction is smart, fresh and diverse. Whether you enjoy contemporary dialogue, historical settings, mystery, thrillers or any number of other themes, there’s a romance novel waiting for you!

Definition

Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. 

A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as they want as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.

An Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love. 

Romance novels may have any tone or style, be set in any place or time, and have varying levels of sensuality—ranging from sweet to extremely hot. These settings and distinctions of plot create specific subgenres within romance fiction. 

The same types of expected elements can be found in all the genre fiction that floats into PG’s mind – fantasy, sci-fi, YA, horror, mysteries, etc. His is impression from his personal AI experiments is that one of the things AI can do is generate some interesting ideas for rules-based subjects.

Genre Juggernaut: Measuring “Romance”

From Public Books:

Late this past summer, The Ripped Bodice, a dedicated romance bookstore in Culver City, Los Angeles, opened its Brooklyn location, and fans of the genre swarmed in as if for a Taylor Swift concert. Braving 90-degree heat in Park Slope, a diverse mix of mostly millennial readers formed a line all the way down to the corner just to get into the shop. When preparations began for a book signing by bestselling nonbinary romance author Casey McQuiston, readers bearing copies of McQuiston’s books created an even longer line, reaching halfway around the block an hour before the author arrived.

The immense interest in romance fiction and the diversity of authors and readers driving its current success have become increasingly apparent. As Melanie Walsh discussed in this series last year, the publishing industry keeps much of the most important and revealing data about which books people are reading “purposefully locked away, … basically inaccessible to anyone beyond the industry.”

But while the producers of books like to guard their secrets, readers are often willing to share. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Price Lab for Digital Humanitites—where our team studies contemporary tastes and habits of reading—we’ve been using the Goodreads social book-collection site to access data about books and reading from this more open side of the field. Among other things, the reception-side approach lets us classify books the way readers do themselves, rather than simply accepting the genre labels assigned by publishers or librarians. We’ve studied thousands of avid readers and the hundreds of thousands of books in their collections. And what we’ve learned is that romance is not just one literary genre among others.

Instead, romance is the juggernaut of contemporary literature, standing out from all other genres in its sheer scale and in the wild diversity of its subgenres. Scholars and teachers have long dismissed the genre as a narrow, hypernormative form of fiction catering to happiness addicts. But, in the world of the genre’s actual readers, romance is a vital part of the literary system: large, complex, and dynamic.

. . . .

Why look to Goodreads for this kind of information? It is an ancient site, at least by social media standards. And, since its acquisition by Amazon a decade ago, Goodreads has managed to alienate even some loyal users with its cluttered format, creaky site architecture, obtrusive parent company advertising, and persistent vulnerability to bad actors abusing the review system to advance their own careers or trash the careers of others. Even so, its membership has kept growing, recently surpassing 100 million. It remains the world’s richest repository of self-reported information on reading: what people read month by month and year by year; how their tastes become broader or narrower over time; and how they respond as readers to new trends in publishing or to broader social and political developments like Black Lives Matter and the COVID-19 pandemic.

A defining feature of Goodreads is that it lets users organize their books into whatever groups, or “shelves,” they like. Their collective shelving preferences often differ significantly from industry labels. Our team gathered the user-generated shelving data for some 600,000 books, corresponding to the libraries of 3,200 highly active Goodreads users.

What jumps out immediately from this data is the enormous scale of romance. Users file books on their romance shelf nearly as often as they do on the shelf for fiction itself (and far more often than on that for nonfiction).

Table 1: The top six genre shelves on Goodreads, based on user-generated shelf data for 600,000 books.

These numbers count books as, say, fantasy, even if they only land on the fantasy shelves of a few readers who use the shelf feature in Goodreads. To focus on the books that readers associate most closely with a genre, we set a rule only to count books when that genre claims at least 10 percent of their top 10 shelf assignments. That may sound like a low bar, but it actually rules out all but the most strongly genre-related books. In the romance category, for example, Ian McEwan’s sweeping metafictional love story Atonement is excluded, since its romance shelving score is only 9%. Pride and Prejudice, the most canonical of all marriage-plot novels, achieves only 14% romance shelving. Even the purest or least hybrid romances one can think of—books like Emily Henry’s Beach Read or Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Date—are only shelved as about 50 percent romance.

Classifying all the books into genres based on this 10 percent rule, we still found that the romance category contains far more books than other leading genres: twice as many as fantasy, and three times as many as mystery. Nothing else comes close.

Table 2: The top six shelves on Goodreads, using the 10 percent filter described above.

Romance is not only the largest genre category but, according to our analysis, the most distinct and well-defined. We constructed a network based on the top 10 genre-shelf assignments of all our books, including everything from Australia and college to gothicroad trip, and football. We then ran a community-detection analysis, which helps us find shelves that tend to cluster together: for instance, college and football connect to each other more often than they connect to Australia. We used a computational tool called Louvain detection to look at all of these connections and cross-shelvings, studying each closely to see what sorts of shelves comprise the detected groups.

Link to the rest at Public Books

Lessons in Love: Romance Authors and the Power of Labor Solidarity

From Publishers Weekly:

Love is in the air for publishers. As I write, five of the top 10 New York Times fiction bestsellers are romance. In the first half of 2023, print unit sales of romance titles soared 34.6% over the same period last year, while in 2022, romance unit sales grew 52.4% over the previous year, according to Publishers Weekly.

Publishers are scrambling to explain love’s new bloom. Is it the BookTok bump? The Colleen Hoover effect? The Big Five’s belated recognition that characters of all races, sizes, and sexual orientations deserve their happily ever afters?

Maybe. But after studying romance authors for nearly a decade, I believe the surge is driven by romance writers themselves, and their unique solidarity as a labor force.

It might seem counterintuitive to think of romance writers—or any authors—as a labor force. Writers work alone. They don’t have a regular employer or paycheck. Nevertheless, romance writers realized long ago that there’s strength in numbers. In the late 1970s, these writers—mostly women, mostly white, almost universally disrespected by the book world—sought each other out by letter and phone call to share scarce industry intel.

In 1980, Black romance editor Vivian Stephens formalized this grassroots network into Romance Writers of America. For 40 years, the group dramatically improved conditions for romance writers, pushing for better contracts, transparent royalty statements, and on-time payments.

Sadly, not all writers benefited equally: RWA’s failure to fully include diverse authors contributed to the group’s spectacular implosion in 2020. Nevertheless, for four decades, RWA spread an ethic of mutual support that still infuses the romance writing community. My research found that an astonishing 74% of romance authors connect with each other online, over the phone, via email, or in person at least once a week. Half connect every day. This tradition of close, frequent connection means that advice and innovation spread like wildfire among romance writers.

Labor law forbids solo contractors, including authors, from sharing compensation figures: it’s considered price-fixing. Indeed, to avoid antitrust suits, RWA devotes a page of its website to explaining antitrust law and discouraging members from discussing rates.

No matter. Romance writers have openly shared royalty rates and contract terms for decades. Today, on social media, email chains, and elsewhere, romance writers frequently share best practices for promotion, marketing, and reader relations. Other genre authors tell me this kind of openness is unusual. One SF writer said getting others to share income data is “like pulling teeth.”

Of course, other author organizations lobby for better contracts. But these groups typically restrict membership to traditionally published authors, which limits innovation. Romance writers famously welcome newcomers: RWA admitted unpublished authors from the very beginning. And a commitment to training new authors still pervades Romancelandia’s countless online groups and the many smaller romance organizations that splintered off from RWA.

This sense of solidarity benefits established as well as aspiring writers. Based on guidance from newcomers (often authors of color shunned by the publishing industry), traditionally published authors adopted the tactics of self-publishing, helping drive the indie romance explosion. The boom drained revenues from mass market publishing and empowered romance authors to demand better treatment from publishers.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG doesn’t know if “labor solidarity” is an entirely accurate term to describe RWA and similar organizations. Authors are not employees of romance publishers. They are independent actors who are not protected by labor laws, nor are they under any obligation to show up at a workplace designated by a publisher, spend any specified days or times writing for a publisher, etc., etc.

Typically, if a business entity is hiring someone to perform work as an independent contractor, the business cannot tell the contractor how to produce the goods, services, etc., that the contractor is delivering to the business entity AKA Principal.

If someone hires a carpenter to build and install a set of cabinets in a garage, the carpenter buys the wood, nails, screws, etc., to be transformed into cabinets and uses his/her own tools to build the cabinets, makes the decision to hire, whatever additional help the carpenter believes will help finish the job more efficiently or complete the job without any additional help.

If the homeowner hires the carpenter as described, the carpenter does not become an employee and the homeowner is not subject to the various laws and regulations that an employer undertakes when an employee is hired, including filing wage reports with government agencies, deducting and paying state and federal taxes from the employee’s compensation, etc., etc.

PG has gone on too long, but romance writers, for all their many virtues and accomplishments, are not laborers working for an employer. They are self-employed entrepreneurs creating a product and selling it to the highest bidder or otherwise utilizing their creations in any way they think best.

Labor solidarity got PG thinking of some of the classic working-class songs Woody Guthrie wrote.

Would You Turn the First Page of this Bestseller?

From Writer Unboxed:

Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.

. . . .

Here’s the question:

Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.

So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 cents for the rest of the chapter every time you sample a book’s first page. In a sense, time is money for a literary agent working her way through a raft of submissions, and she is spending that resource whenever she turns a page.

Please judge by storytelling quality, not by genre or content—some reject an opening page immediately because of genre, but that’s not a good-enough reason when the point is to analyze for storytelling strength.

How strong is the opening page of this novel—would it, all on its own, hook an agent if it was submitted by an unpublished writer?

Henry’s eyes are burning into me from across the living room. “Your summer is going to suck.”

There’s an echo of snorts from my teammates, the loudest coming from Mattie, Bobby, and Kris, who all told me something similar when I said no to joining them in Miami this summer.

“Inspiring words, Turner,” I shoot back at my unimpressed roommate. “You should become a motivational speaker.”

“You’ll be sorry you didn’t listen to me when you’re stuck doing manual labor and team-building activities at staff training next week.” Henry continues to flick through the Honey Acres brochure, his forehead creasing with a frown the further he gets into it. “What’s night duty?”

“I have to sleep in a room attached to the campers’ cabin twice a week in case they need anything,” I say casually, watching Henry’s eyes widen in horror. “The rest of the time I sleep in my own cabin.”

“It’s a no from me,” he says, throwing the brochure back onto the coffee table. “Good luck, though.”

“Could be worse,” Robbie muses from across the living room. “You could have to move to Canada this summer.”

Were you moved to want more?

This novel was number one on the New York Times paperback trade fiction bestseller list for October 22, 2023. Were the opening pages of the first chapter of Wildfire by Hannah Grace compelling?

My vote: No.

This book received 4.2 out of 5 stars on Amazon. Considering the “merits” of this opening page, I’m guessing it’s the author’s fans who propelled this to the number one spot. But would it have passed an agent’s muster if by an unknown writer?

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

PG was about to opine, but was brought up short by the fact that he knows nothing about the romance publishing world after Romeo and Juliet, which he read when he was in college. William Shakespeare was a surprise guest lecturer and was terrific once you got past his heavy accent.

ChatGPT Analysis of the Typical Structure of a Danielle Steel Novel

Danielle Steel is a prolific author known for her romance novels and family dramas. While the specifics of her novels can vary, there is a typical structure and formula that she often follows to create her compelling stories. Here’s an analysis of the typical structure of a Danielle Steel novel:

  1. Introduction of Main Characters: A Danielle Steel novel typically begins by introducing the main characters, often with a focus on the female protagonist. These characters are usually well-developed with distinct personalities and backgrounds.
  2. Setting: The novels are often set in glamorous and affluent locations, such as New York City, Paris, or San Francisco. The setting is used to create a sense of luxury and escapism.
  3. Conflict and Challenges: Early in the story, a major conflict or challenge is introduced. This could be a personal tragedy, a romantic setback, or a family crisis. The conflict is what drives the plot and keeps the reader engaged.
  4. Romantic Elements: Romance is a central theme in Danielle Steel’s novels. The protagonist typically encounters a love interest or has a complicated romantic history. The development of romantic relationships and the obstacles they face are key components of the story.
  5. Family Dynamics: Family plays a significant role in Danielle Steel’s novels. The protagonist often has a complex family background, and family relationships and dynamics are explored throughout the story. Family secrets and conflicts are common plot points.
  6. Overcoming Adversity: As the story progresses, the characters face various challenges and adversities. These challenges could be personal, professional, or related to their relationships. The characters often demonstrate resilience and strength as they navigate these difficulties.
  7. Resolution and Happy Endings: Danielle Steel’s novels are known for their feel-good, optimistic endings. After overcoming the obstacles and challenges, the characters typically find happiness, whether in their personal lives, careers, or relationships. The novels often conclude with a sense of closure and hope.
  8. Themes of Love and Friendship: Themes of love, friendship, and the importance of human connections are prevalent in Danielle Steel’s novels. The characters often rely on the support of their friends and loved ones to overcome their challenges.
  9. Epilogue: Many of Danielle Steel’s novels include an epilogue that offers a glimpse into the characters’ lives after the main events of the story. This provides readers with a sense of closure and satisfaction.
  10. Prolific Output: Danielle Steel is known for her prolific writing, and she has a dedicated fan base. Her novels are typically not very long, making them easy to read, and she has released multiple novels each year throughout her career.

Overall, Danielle Steel’s novels follow a formulaic structure that combines elements of romance, family drama, and personal growth. While the specific details and characters may vary from book to book, her signature style and focus on themes of love and resilience remain constant, making her novels popular among readers seeking heartwarming stories with happy endings.

OpenAI disputes authors’ claims that every ChatGPT response is a derivative work

From Ars Technica:

This week, OpenAI finally responded to a pair of nearly identical class-action lawsuits from book authors—including Sarah Silverman, Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad, Chris Golden, and Richard Kadrey—who earlier this summer alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on pirated copies of their books.

In OpenAI’s motion to dismiss (filed in both lawsuits), the company asked a US district court in California to toss all but one claim alleging direct copyright infringement, which OpenAI hopes to defeat at “a later stage of the case.”

The authors’ other claims—alleging vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment—need to be “trimmed” from the lawsuits “so that these cases do not proceed to discovery and beyond with legally infirm theories of liability,” OpenAI argued.

OpenAI claimed that the authors “misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”

According to OpenAI, even if the authors’ books were a “tiny part” of ChatGPT’s massive data set, “the use of copyrighted materials by innovators in transformative ways does not violate copyright.” Unlike plagiarists who seek to directly profit off distributing copyrighted materials, OpenAI argued that its goal was “to teach its models to derive the rules underlying human language” to do things like help people “save time at work,” “make daily life easier,” or simply entertain themselves by typing prompts into ChatGPT.

The purpose of copyright law, OpenAI argued, is “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” by protecting the way authors express ideas, but “not the underlying idea itself, facts embodied within the author’s articulated message, or other building blocks of creative,” which are arguably the elements of authors’ works that would be useful to ChatGPT’s training model. Citing a notable copyright case involving Google Books, OpenAI reminded the court that “while an author may register a copyright in her book, the ‘statistical information’ pertaining to ‘word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers’ in that book are beyond the scope of copyright protection.”

“Under the resulting judicial precedent, it is not an infringement to create ‘wholesale cop[ies] of [a work] as a preliminary step’ to develop a new, non-infringing product, even if the new product competes with the original,” OpenAI wrote.

In particular, OpenAI hopes to convince the court that the authors’ vicarious copyright infringement claim—which alleges that every ChatGPT output represents a derivative work, “regardless of whether there are any similarities between the output and the training works”— is an “erroneous legal conclusion.”

The company’s motion to dismiss cited “a simple response to a question (e.g., ‘Yes’),” or responding with “the name of the President of the United States” or with “a paragraph describing the plot, themes, and significance of Homer’s The Iliad” as examples of why every single ChatGPT output cannot seriously be considered a derivative work under authors’ “legally infirm” theory.

“That is not how copyright law works,” OpenAI argued, while claiming that any ChatGPT outputs that do connect to authors’ works are similar to “book reports or reviews.”

Link to the rest at Ars Technica

As PG has mentioned previously, he believes that using a relatively small amount of material protected by copyright along with far larger amounts of material not subject to copyright protection for the purpose of training an AI and not for the purpose of making copies of the copyrighted material qualifies as fair use.

Even absent fair use, such use is not a violation of copyright protection because the AI is not making copies of copyrighted materials.

PG has mentioned other analogies, but one that popped into his mind on this occasion is an author who reads hundreds of romance novels for the purpose of learning how to write a romance novel and then writes a romance novel using tropes and techniques that many other romance authors have used before.

From Wikipedia:

Precursors of the modern popular love-romance can also be found in the sentimental novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, by Samuel Richardson, published in 1740. Pamela was the first popular novel to be based on a courtship as told from the perspective of the heroine. Unlike many of the novels of the time, Pamela had a happy ending.

. . . .

Women will pick up a romance novel knowing what to expect, and this foreknowledge of the reader is very important. When the hero and heroine meet and fall in love, maybe they don’t know they’re in love but the reader does. Then a conflict will draw them apart, but you know in the end they’ll be back together, and preferably married or planning to be by page 192.

Joan Schulhafer of Pocket Books, 1982

A great many of the most financially successful authors PG knows are romance authors.

From Friends to Lovers: The Fanfic-to-Romance Pipeline Goes Mainstream

From Vulture:

Ali Hazelwood, a New York Times best-selling author of the romance novels The Love HypothesisLove on the Brain, and Love, Theoretically, found her literary agent in January 2020 in an unusual way. Instead of the long process most authors undertake that involves sending out countless letters seeking representation, it was an agent who reached out after reading stories Hazelwood had written on Archive of Our Own, a popular fan-fiction site. Her stories focused on a relationship between the saber-crossed Star Wars duo Kylo Ren and Rey Skywalker, a pairing often abbreviated to Reylo. Once Hazelwood posted that she was considering reworking her fics to publish them, Thao Le from the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency sent a message encouraging her to submit. They’ve worked together since, and today, Hazelwood’s career comes full circle with the publication of From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi, an official collection of Star Wars short stories that includes one by her.

That pathway to representation was an inversion of the one experienced by Lauren Billings and Christina Hobbs almost a decade prior. Back in 2011, the author pair — who publish as Christina Lauren — felt they needed to hide from their agent the fact that they had met while writing Twilight fan fiction. At the time, E.L. James avoided emphasizing that her blockbuster erotic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, had begun as a Twilight fanfic titled “Masters of the Universe,” which gave Billings and Hobbs the impression that the publishing industry wouldn’t take fan-fiction works as seriously as original content.

When they finally told their agent, Holly Root, she was delighted and took a book based on one of their fics, Beautiful Bastard, to publishing houses. It sold in just 12 hours. The pair have since published nearly 30 novels, and they’ve hit the New York Times best-seller list multiple times.

Once considered a frivolous endeavor undertaken by sex-obsessed amateurs, fan fiction is now fully in fashion, enabling romance writers — and their publishers — to celebrate (and capitalize on) their Archive of Our Own roots. In July, Julie Soto, who writes Harry Potter fan fiction envisioning a relationship between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy, published her debut novel, Forget Me Not. The upcoming titles My Roommate Is a VampireYou, Again, and The Hurricane Wars, as well as multiple 2022 releases, have their origins in Reylo fanfic; so prevalent is that pairing that it’s become a meme in romance fan spaces to imagine Adam Driver walking into a bookstore and seeing himself on the covers of dozens of titles.

Top publishing houses including Hachette, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House are making a clear push in the space, with proper package and promotional rollouts. Marketing materials have embraced — critics might say too much — fanfic-style tropes such as “enemies to lovers,” “only one bed,” “fake dating,” and “fated mates” that match the tagging system found on Archive of Our Own. (The odder yet nevertheless popular “male pregnancy” trope hasn’t achieved quite as much mainstream traction.) The Love Hypothesis even features fan art on the cover.

The appeal is understandable: Fic writers bring knowledge of how to market a story and build an audience, a boon for editorial houses. The fans authors have gained writing fic will buy books, in some cases carrying them to the best-seller list. For writers who demonstrate a facility for telling a certain kind of story, the process of transitioning into writing traditional books is as much a matter of format and structure as anything else.

Not that those are trivial elements. Romance novels rarely run longer than 100,000 words and typically have a three-act structure. Fan-fiction stories can run hundreds of thousands of words and take a meandering approach to plot. There’s a learning curve. “When you’re writing a romance, there’s a beginning and an end. You have a plot and emotional beats,” explains romance author and fan-fiction reader Adriana Herrera. “With a fic it’s more episodic. There’s a different flow to it.”

Beyond the structural nature of adapting their work, fanfic writers often have to reskin IP-based elements. Some fanfic writers, Hazelwood and Christina Lauren included, rewrite their fics before publishing them. It’s a process known as “filing off the serial numbers,” which involves more than simply changing the names. That’s how Hazelwood’s Reylo fanfic became The Love Hypothesis: While her fic “Head Over Feet” put Kylo and Rey in an academic setting instead of a galaxy far, far away, when it came time to revise the story for book publishing, she also added an antagonist, condensed characters, combined scenes, and raised the stakes with a tight timeline, all changes that gave it a more traditional narrative arc.

Hazelwood describes rewriting her fiction as “harrowing,” explaining that it was far more difficult than writing an original book. Christa Tomlinson, an indie romance writer, says it took her months to transform a fic based on WWE into a story about a SWAT team. Building original characters — their quirks and distinct traits — proved more difficult for her than developing a plot. She chose the law-enforcement world because it allowed her to keep the sense of “camaraderie and brotherhood” from her original fic while moving it out of a wrestling milieu. Some of the plot had to change as a result, though Tomlinson kept the bones of her story the same.

Not all fic writers are benefiting from the boom — yet, at least. Publishers have made some progress diversifying their love stories, but disparities remain. In a dynamic that mirrors traditional publishing, white fic readers don’t widely consume stories about characters of color written by people of color. That leads to fewer opportunities for those writers — even as they embrace the same styles and stories as their white peers. Similarly, queer love stories, especially those featuring two male leads, are wildly popular in fan-fiction libraries, but the Big Five publishing houses haven’t repackaged these stories the same way they did for Hazelwood or Billings and Hobbs.

Link to the rest at Vulture

8 Books That Deliver Behind-The-Scenes Drama

From Electric Lit:

I don’t know about y’all, but I love rewatching a performance after I learn that something catastrophic has gone down behind the scenes. Whether it’s the iconic 1997 Fleetwood Mac performance of “Silver Springs” in which you can watch Stevie Nicks put a curse on Lindsey Buckingham in real time, or a film like What Happened to Baby Jane, which featured an on-set rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford so legendary that Ryan Murphy had to make entire tv series about it.

When I began researching my debut novel Do Tell, I already had a longstanding love for the films of classic Hollywood. As I learned more about the backstories of the actors, directors, and studio executives of the era, I found myself revisiting the classics and pinpointing the intersection between performance and personal life. There’s something very satisfying about watching The Long, Hot Summer and knowing that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward are about to destroy their respective marriages in the name of one of the greatest love stories in Hollywood history. 

Do Tell follows Edie O’Dare, a gossip columnist who thrives in the gray area between personal and public when it comes to the stars of Golden Age Hollywood. Edie’s livelihood is dependent on her ability to piece together what’s happening off-set—which stars are sneaking off together, who’s feuding, or why that last-minute swap of leading starlets had to happen. I love novels that explore the disparity between what the public is meant to see and what really went down. If you’re like me and you live for the drama, here’s a list of my favorites that show us the mess off-camera, behind the curtain, and backstage. 

Playhouse: City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert’s story of a rundown New York City playhouse during World War II is a delectable treasure. Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar, so she heads to the city to live with her eccentric aunt who works in showbiz. Not the Broadway kind of showbiz though—the Lily Playhouse is running on castoff showgirls, recycled costumes, last minute scripts, pennies, and prayers. At the playhouse, Vivian discovers a found family with her aunt Peg and her live-in “secretary” Olive, along with the eccentric cast of characters that inhabit their world. I love how unapologetic Gilbert is with Vivian’s exploits and mistakes, because, of course, she makes the sorts of mistakes any nineteen-year-old would make if given the opportunity to run amok in the bars and clubs of New York with a legion of beautiful actors and actresses. City of Girls is a perfect novel: transportive, entertaining, and empathetic.

Reality TV Show: The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun

Have you ever watched a reality dating show and wondered to yourself: Why aren’t more of these contestants queer? I have the book for you! Alison Cochrun’s The Charm Offensive follows Charlie, a high-profile tech developer hoping to do some PR rehabilitation by appearing on a dating show. There are dozens of women who are meant to be competing for Charlie’s affection, but, oops, he seems to have a lot more chemistry with the show’s producer, Dev. While Dev works to create a romantic storyline for Charlie on-screen, he also has to do a lot of one-on-one coaching off camera to get Charlie up to leading-man status. What follows is a tender-hearted story about navigating through love, sexuality, mental health issues—all in the spotlight of the public eye. It’s the perfect romance for anyone who’s ever binged a dating show and thought: maybe the best on-screen chemistry isn’t always hetero. 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

The Deadly Beauty Regime: Historical Practices of Risky Cosmetics

From Culture.org:

From the mountainous region of Styria, Austria, to the high society salons in Mayfair, London, the quest for beauty has taken humans on a dangerous journey.

This journey, spanning centuries, has been marked by the use of deadly substances such as arsenic, radium, mercury, cantharidin, petroleum, and X-rays as cosmetics and remedies.

Arsenic: The Austrians’ Potion of Beauty

In the mid-19th century, Styrians in southeast Austria were known for their unusual practice of consuming arsenic trioxide, also known as ‘white arsenic’.

Arsenic was not just a feared poison but was used as a medicine and a beautifying agent.

The Styrians reported increased stamina and enhanced complexion, attributing their rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes to arsenic consumption.

Arsenic’s popularity soared as it offered short-term benefits, including a temporary flush to the cheeks due to capillary dilation.

The late 19th-century cosmetic market saw arsenic-brd products like ‘Dr James P Campbell’s Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers’ and arsenic-laced soaps that stayed in demand well into the 1930s.

Radium: The Radiant Element of Beauty

Around 1911, Helen Cavendish in Mayfair, London, introduced a line of beauty products utilizing radium, a radioactive element discovered by the Curies.

This line, known as Caradium, contained products like shampoos and face creams made with radium water and herbs.

The theory of mild radium therapy suggested that exposure to small doses of radium triggered a chain of psychological reactions, improving joint movements and boosting the immune system. 

Despite the known dangers of radium, these products reportedly caused minimal harm due to the minuscule amounts used.

Mercury: The Quicksilver Cure

Dating back to the 1300s, mercury or ‘quicksilver’ was used to treat skin issues like psoriasis and leprosy. In the 17th century, mercury was part of the recipe “to procure Beauty” published in Hannah Woolley’s book.

The effects of mercury, however, were detrimental. Its accumulation in the body resulted in tissue damage, stomach ulcers, loosening of teeth, and damage to the nervous system. 

Mercury was finally struck off the British Pharmacopoeia, a register of approved remedies, in the 1950s.

Link to the rest at Culture.org

Not exactly about books and writing, but potentially of interest to those who write historical fiction.

7 Novels About Falling In (And Out Of) Love in London

From Electric Lit:

London has served as the setting for many a novel—the backdrop to tales of scrappy orphans and drunk, dancing thirty-somethings, of marmalade-adoring bears and magical nannies. It’s also, of course, the setting for so many love stories.

Not quite as romantic as Paris, nor as hustle-and-bustle-y as New York, London sits somewhere in the middle, a charming city with grit, a gritty city with charm. And its greatest love stories often walk a similar tightrope. Sure, some feature the type of happily-ever-after in which the music swells and crescendos at the end; but, like its own identity and character, the majority of London’s love stories are constructed from a combination of toughness and tenderness, of joy and complications. They capture the beauty of falling in love, of course, but they also capture the reclaimed power that comes—sometimes—with falling out of it. 

It’s a balance I’d like to think my own novel, Adelaide, has struck. Set in London, it details the rise and fall of a torrid and toxic relationship between the titular Adelaide Williams and a foppish-haired, emotionally unavailable Englishman named Rory Hughes—a relationship Adelaide eventually (and somewhat disastrously) exits, choosing instead to put herself first. Toeing the line between commercial and literary fiction, Adelaide, like London, hopefully balances light with dark—something so many brilliant writers, and their London-based novels, have done before. 

This reading list features seven books that strike a similar balance—each telling its own version of what it means to fall in and out of love in the British capital.

. . . .

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

I’ve heard other writers describe Dolly Alderton as a millennial Nora Ephron—big shoes to fill, surely, but if anyone can wear them with confidence, it’s Dolly. And Ghosts, her debut novel, is a shining illustration of why. 

It follows Nina Dean, a food writer in her early thirties living in north London, as she navigates the shifting nature of a number of relationships: with friends, with parents, with ex-boyfriends, and one, notably, with a beguiling man named Max. Alderton brilliantly captures the twists and turns of modern dating—the joy of late-night dancing, the distress of being ghosted—with sharp humor as well as big-hearted tenderness. An Ephron-esque talent, no doubt. 

Maame by Jessica George

Maame by Jessica George is predominantly a coming-of-age story about 26-year-old Maddie Wright, but it’s speckled with romantic adventures (and entanglements) throughout. George tackles everything from the magic of first kisses to the hellish nature of apps (including the fetishization and microaggressions to which Black women are far too often subjected) to the challenges of dating while grieving with unparalleled grace and wit, painting a painfully accurate portrait of one young woman’s love life in London.

Link to the rest at Electric Lit