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Nattie Golubov
Reading the Romance Writer as an Author-Entrepreneur
Abstract
What does it mean for a romance writer to think of herself as the manager of a career in
writing, conceived as a business venture, a source of pleasure and a life choice? Literally trans-
formed into her own boss, she administers her self in an unequal relation to the multina-
tional, corporate industry of romance publishing that is the power broker with whom her
own «tiny enterprise» must negotiate the «nuts and bolts» that determine the market value
of the product of her labour, on the one hand, while on the other, she must pitch her brand
to an audience, the consumers of her products. We shall see that this entrepreneurial author
figure is urged to assume responsibility for her writing self as a project and as an object,
actively self-reliant and self-determining, engaged in a continuous process of production of
the self required by the dynamic nature of the genre. Given the highly competitive world of
romance publishing, authors are aware that they must create a compelling, up-to-date and
unique «author brand», that unifies and stabilises disparate authorial practices and figurations
that are enacted in different media and in the novels themselves. In this regard, I will argue
that the figure of the romance novelist may be read as an entrepreneurial «belaboured» self
because of her endless efforts to pitch to her audience, with apparent effortlessness, the image
of a happy author-entrepreneur. This article will bring together these ideas by quoting from
writers’ public appearances and self-presentation on webpages, speeches and interviews.
Resumen
¿Qué significa para una escritora de novela rosa pensar en sí misma como la manager
de su carrera literaria, concebida como un proyecto empresarial, una fuente de placer y una
elección vital? Literalmente transformada en su propia jefa, se administra a sí misma, por un
lado, en una relación desigual con la industria corporativa multinacional de la novela rosa, el
agente de poder con el cual su propia «pequeña empresa» debe negociar los «intríngulis» que
determinan el valor mercantil del producto de su trabajo, mientras que, por el otro, debe lan-
zar su marca a una audiencia, los consumidores de sus productos. Veremos que esta figura de
la autora emprendedora es impelida a asumir la responsabilidad por su yo literario como un
proyecto y como un objeto, intensamente autosuficiente y autodeterminado, envuelto en un
contínuo proceso de producción de sí requerido por la naturaleza dinámica del género. Dada
la fuerte competitividad del mundo editorial de la novela rosa, las autoras son conscientes
de que deben crear una «marca autorial» convincente, actualizada y única, que unifica y esta-
biliza prácticas autoriales y figuraciones dispares que son puestas en escena en los medios y
en las mismas novelas. Desde esta perspectiva, argumentaré que la figura de la escritora de
novela rosa puede ser leída como un trabajado yo emprendedor a causa de su incesante esfue-
rzo por presentar a su audiencia, aparentemente sin esfuerzo, la imagen de una feliz autora-
empresaria. Este artículo conjugará estas propuestas con citas procedentes de las apariciones
públicas de las escritoras y de su autopresentación en páginas web, discursos y entrevistas.
To quote this article:

Nattie Golubov, « Reading the Romance Writer as an Author-Entrepreneur », in: Interfé-
rences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 21, « Gendered Authorial Corpographies », ed. by
Aina Pérez Fontdevila & Meri Torras Francès, December 2017, 131-160.
Comité de direction – redactiecomité
Anke Gilleir (KU Leuven) – Rédacteur en chef - Hoofdredacteur
Beatrijs Vanacker (KU Leuven), Sophie Dufays (UCL) – Secrétaires de rédaction - Redactiesecretarissen
Elke D’hoker (KU Leuven)
Lieven D’hulst (KU Leuven – Kortrijk)
David Martens (KU Leuven)
Hubert Roland (FNRS – UCL)
Matthieu Sergier ((UCL & Factultés Universitaires Saint-Louis)
Myriam Watthee-Delmotte (FNRS – UCL)
Conseil de rédaction – Redactieraad

Sascha bru (KU Leuven) Michel Lisse (FNRS – UCL)
Geneviève Fabry (UCL) Anneleen Masschelein (KU Leuven)
Agnès Guiderdoni (FNRS – UCL) Christophe Meurée (FNRS – UCL)
Ortwin de Graef (KU Leuven) Reine Meylaerts (KU Leuven)
Jan Herman (KU Leuven) Stéphanie Vanasten (FNRS – UCL)
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Comité scientifique – Wetenschappelijk comité

Olivier Ammour-Mayeur (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -– Gillis Dorleijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Paris III & Université Toulouse II – Le Mirail) Ute Heidmann (Université de Lausanne)
Ingo Berensmeyer (Universität Giessen) Klaus H. Kiefer (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München)
Lars Bernaerts (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Michael Kolhauer (Université de Savoie)
Faith Binckes (Worcester College – Oxford) Isabelle Krzywkowski (Université Stendhal-Grenoble III)
Philiep Bossier (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Mathilde Labbé (Université Paris Sorbonne)
Franca Bruera (Università di Torino) Sofiane Laghouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont)
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Nicola Creighton (Queen’s University Belfast) Isabelle Meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
William M. Decker (Oklahoma State University) Christina Morin (University of Limerick)
Ben de Bruyn (Maastricht University) Miguel Norbartubarri (Universiteit Antwerpen)
Dirk Delabastita (Université de Namur) Andréa Oberhuber (Université de Montréal)
Michel Delville (Université de Liège) Jan Oosterholt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg)
César Dominguez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella Maïté Snauwaert (University of Alberta – Edmonton)
& King’s College)
Pieter Verstraeten ((Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
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Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 21, December 2017
Reading the Romance Writer

as an Author-Entrepreneur
After all, we are all CEO’s of our own per-
sonal business, each and every one of us,
it doesn’t matter how you publish, you are
your own tiny enterprise. And you need to
know the nuts and bolts of your business.
However, I think we have to be careful that
the nuts and bolts don’t overtake the love
of storytelling that brought most of us to
writing in the first place.
Nalini Singh1
What does it mean for a romance writer to think of herself as the manager
of a career in writing, conceived as a business venture, a source of pleasure and a
life choice? Literally transformed into her own boss, she administers her self in an
unequal relation to the multinational, corporate industry of romance publishing
that is the power broker with whom her own «tiny enterprise» must negotiate the
«nuts and bolts» that determine the market value of the product of her labour, on
the one hand, while on the other, she must pitch her brand to an audience, the
consumers of her products. We shall see that this entrepreneurial author figure is
urged to assume responsibility for her writing self as a project and as an object,
actively self-reliant and self-determining, engaged in a continuous process of pro-
duction of the self required by the dynamic nature of the genre: «Romances are
popular fiction, with the emphasis on popular. That means the entire romance in-
dustry is driven not by capital-L Literary concerns but by a desire to make as many
readers as possible as happy as possible. It’s a market-driven genre»2. Given the
highly competitive world of romance publishing, authors are aware that they must
create a compelling, up-to-date and unique «author brand»3, as they call it, usually a
(pen)name that bestows coherence upon utterances unfolding over time and spread
across diverse media. In other words, the author brand name unifies and stabilises
1. RWA2015 Saturday Featured Speaker Nalini Singh. August 12, 2015. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=7Vm-Y44S5_E.
2. Leslie J. Wainger, Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies, Hoboken, NJ., Wiley Publishing,
2004, p. 70.
3. «Your Author Brand - How to Make the Most of It with Oliver Rhodes».http://roman-
ceuniversity.org/2012/12/05/your-authomartensr-brand-how-to-make-the-most-of-it-with-oliver-
rhodes/.
131
Reading the romance writer
disparate authorial practices and figurations that are enacted in different media and
in the novels themselves4, a process here understood as a form of self-branding.
I will argue that, currently, this specific notion of the romance writer’s career
as an enterprise is best explained within the context of a relatively new type of sub-
jectifying regime, defined by Ulrich Bröckling as forming an «entrepreneurial self».
In turn, this type of selfhood is well adapted as a worker in the creative industries as
they are studied by Angela McRobbie in relation to a «‘soft’ cultural neoliberalism»5
that deploys a «distinctive creativity dispositif – an assortment of instruments, most
of which have an emphasis on training or pedagogy. The aim is to develop a spe-
cific range of positive dispositions towards a new world of work which relies on
self-entrepreneurial skills, offset by the promise of ‘pleasure in work’ in the form of
unleashing personal creative capacities»6. Additionally, the pedagogical technologies
pertaining to this dispositif articulate self-improvement discourses by means of
success guides, journal articles and blogs, online tutorials and columns, workshops
and all sorts of advice books (including handbooks for writing romance) which are
resources used by writers in the conception and public performance of this partic-
ular gendered authorial self. If subjectivity is brought forth at the intersection of
many discursive force fields, the gendered authorial self of the romance novelist is
situated here, the highly competitive market its guiding principle, creative entrepre-
neurial activity extended to all areas of her social relations, including the relation-
ship to the writing self. In this regard, I will argue that the figure of the romance
novelist may be read as an entrepreneurial «belaboured» self because of her endless
efforts to pitch to her audience, with apparent effortlessness, the image of a happy
author-entrepreneur7.
This article will bring together these ideas by quoting from writers’ public
appearances and self-presentation on webpages, speeches and interviews, of which
there are plenty available online. Twitter accounts, Instagram, Goodreads, Pinter-
est, Facebook, Tumblr and other social media have been disregarded because a
thorough analysis of the staggering volume of information available would exceed
the limits of this exploratory article: there is much work to be done in this area.
Although nowadays writers of «genre» and «literary» fiction have an online pres-
ence, unlike these, romance writers address an audience composed mainly of (very
diverse) women, they write about women’s experiences and thus carefully navigate
and reveal aspects of their own lives that gender them as women writers: the dis-
tinction between their private and public selves is itself deliberately blurred since
their private lives (as mothers, daughters, friends, spouses, carers, pet lovers, grand-
mothers, gardeners) are performed in ways that authenticate their knowledge of
the issues they write about because experience translates into authority. Thus, the
4. On average, a published romance writer produces between 1-1/2 manuscripts per year
and often writes shorter pieces, novellas or short stories, published online or in anthologies with
other writers, to keep fresh material in circulation for voracious readers. http://electricka.com/etaf/
muses/literature/prizes_for_literature/rita/rita_popups/RWA_statistics.htm
5. Angela McRobbie, «Re-Thinking Creative Economy as Radical Social Enterprise», Variant,
41, Spring 2011, p. 32.
6. Angela McRobbie, «Is passionate work a neoliberal delusion?», Opendemocracy, 22 April 2015.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/angela-mcrobbie/is-passionate-work-neoliber-
al-delusion
7. Rosalind Gill, «‘Life Is a Pitch’: Managing the Self in New Media Work», pre-print paper
available online at https://www.academia.edu/2333464/_Life_is_a_pitch_Managing_the_self_in_
new_media_work_.
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Nattie Golubov
information found on their webpages becomes an essential factor in the reception

of their books, functioning much like a paratext, though I prefer to think about
their online presence as part of an authorial « interacting ensemble », to name this
array of disparate mediatic and textual figurations following the suggestion from
Martens and Reverseau that the author is the product of an ensemble of interact-
ing discourse and images8. Incessant work on the public self, this self-promotion
that is also an act of self-surveillance, is an entrepreneurial endeavour that deploys
the neoliberal vocabularies and practices of a makeover culture that incites sub-
jects to (self)manage multiplicity, an endeavour that requires aesthetic, creative, and
relational labour as well as the transformation into capital of their private lives,
including their experience of motherhood and family, marriage, work experience
and body style9.
The relationship between different sorts of texts – literary, visual, verbal –
transform the writer into a « culturally complex object situated at the crossroads
of institutions and modes of representation »10. In this model, the author comes
neither before nor after the fictional text as origin or result of the fictional world
or reading process but is a composite of many texts that circulate widely, imping-
ing upon the image of the implied author that readers may create from the literary
text itself. As a brand, the name of the romance author is a marketing tool, a site
in which a number of discourses and representations converge, but it also brings
together a body of work marked retrospectively by what is called «the voice» in the
industry, a trace of the individuality of the writer, the «(authentic) expression of the
author’s inner self»11. In this ensemble of different types of authorial presences,
the literary text no longer occupies the centre of a complex web of phenomena but
becomes one of the many elements that compose it, including, as one advice man-
ual puts it, «multiple streams of income» such as ebooks, print books, audiobooks,
translations into other languages, and film, media and other formats12.
When deciding which book to buy, romance readers look for writers rather
than specific novels as well as the type of story13, and because successful writers
have to be prolific any single novel is less significant in itself than as part of an
entire corpus. Additionally, the genre changes rapidly so often novelists try their
8. David Martens and Anne Reverseau, « La littérature dévisagée. Figurations icono-
graphiques de l’écrivain au xxe siècle », Image & Narrative, 13, 4, 2012, p. 2. I quote and refer to
romance writers who are 2016 and 2017 RT and/or RWA award winners because they may be con-
sidered representative of an author figure that is currently, collectively and institutionally deemed
successful.
9. The notion of « relational labour » comes from Nancy Baym, who defines it as a form of
unpaid social labour seen as an investiment toward building and maintaining an audience that will
sustain a career. In her own words: «‘Relational’ is meant to emphasize effort that goes beyond
managing other’s feelings in single encounters, as is usually the case in emotional labour, to creating
and maintaining ongoing connections. Relationships built through relational labour can entail all the
complex rewards and costs of personal relationships independent of any money that comes from
them. At the same time, the connections built through relational labour are always tied to earning
money, differentiating if from affective labour». «Connect With Your Audience! The Relational La-
bor of Connection», The Communication Review, 18, 2015, p. 16.
10. Martens and Anne Reverseau, op. cit., p. 2.
11. An Goris, «Loving by the Book: Voice and Romance Authorship», New Approaches to Popu-
lar Romance Fiction. Critical Essays, Sarah S.G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger (eds.), Jefferson, North
Carolina, McFarland, 2012, p. 79.
12. Joanna Penn, Business for Authors. How to be an Author Entrepreneur, The Creative Penn, 2014,
position 273 of 4393.
13. See statistics provided by RWA at https://www.rwa.org/page/romance-reader-statistics.
133
hand at different subgenres, frequently using pseudonyms for different styles. In

an interview Nora Roberts explains why she adopted the J D Robb pseudonym for
her In Death series in 1995, after her agent pointed out that she is too prolific, that
is, overexposed, and «inventory is backing up»: «you know, it’s marketing: there’s
Pepsi, there’s Diet Pepsi and there’s Caffeine Free Pepsi and the light bulb went on
and I said, Oh, oh, marketing and I could be two popular brands».14 Roberts has
written over 50 novels and novellas in the In Death series alongside her other many
books. Yet pseudonyms are not only a form of author branding, as Roberts herself
explains, because they provide an opportunity to adopt another «voice», an extre-
mely liberating and exciting «whole new thing»15. Rather than consolidating one
brand name and associating it with a particular kind of romance, Roberts chose the
gender-neutral J D Robb to sign a hybrid sci fi series featuring a tough female cop.
Eloisa James acknowledges that the main reason why she kept her romance-writing
career separate from her academic career as Mary Bly «in the beginning had to do
with the sense of shame that American culture deals out to romance, to readers of
romance»16. Catherine M. Roach explains that her «alter ago», Catherine LaRoche,
is «more exotic and romantic than Roach»17, but that is also a different identity:
«Catherine LaRoche favors décolletage over tweed and packs long velvet gowns
for conferences instead of standard suits. She allows me to write purple prose
along with solemn academic jargon, steamy sex scenes along with dry analysis»18.
LaRoche/Roach experiences the creation of a pseudonym as a liberating multipli-
cation of the authorial figure, but this dispersal of identities may also be a way of
«reinventing» the authorial self to adjust to trends in the market, a painful process
described by Barbara Freethy, as we shall see.
To better understand the experience described by Roberts above, Ulrich
Bröckling’s suggestion that the entrepreneurial self is not an empirical entity but a
way of addressing individuals as people is useful. This self is a «real fiction», un-
derstood as « a highly effective as if, initiating and sustaining a process of continual
modification and self-modification of subjects by mobilizing their desire to stay in
touch and their fear of falling out of a social order held together by market mecha-
nisms »19. Thus this self is not something that exists but a preferred self that has to
be continually brought into existence. As Bröckling explains, the figure of the en-
trepreneurial self defines the forms of «knowledge in which individuals recognize
the truth about themselves, the control and regulation mechanisms they are subject
to and the practices by which they condition themselves», that is, the technologies,
dispositifs, information and languages with which they come to explain, describe
and govern themselves and develop behavioural dispositions appropriate for a neo-
liberal form of work and life. One essential characteristic of this self is that it must
14. Nora Roberts at The Washington Post, July 14, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=tlO6SdTYqNs.
15. LBTC Bonus Clip, Nora Roberts, https://vimeo.com/173679972.
16. Emma Garman, «Love’s Labors. A Shakespeare professor confesses a terrible secret:
She writes romance fiction, pseudonymously», New York Books, http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/
books/10870/.
17. Catherine Roach, Happily Every After. The Romance Story in Popular Culture, Bloomington
Indiana, Indiana University Press, 2016, p. 38.
18. Ibid., p. 39.
19. Ulrich Bröckling, The Entrepreneurial Self. Fabricating a New Type of Subject, London, Sage,
2016, p. 20.
134
Nattie Golubov
be able and willing to act upon itself continually to change in the direction indicated
by the rationale of the discourse of enterprise of which she is both the product and
agent. Failure is individual, as is success, a lesson learned by Sherrilyn Kenyon: «My
personal motto is: over, under, around or through. There is always a way to get to
what you’re trying to reach… just ask any toddler who wants a cookie from the top
shelf»20. Of course, the danger of taking sole responsibility for their enterprise and
the choices they make in the management of themselves, however, is that a lack of
success is taken to be a private matter, even a sign of a flawed character that is not
resourceful enough, resilient, well-connected, organised, etcetera and considered
a personal crisis: «When it rains, it pours. I’ve noticed that whenever a writer has
trouble in their career, they have it in their personal life, too», states Kenyon.
Some of the demands made upon this self are that it must be self-organised
and self-monitored, resourceful, efficient: everyday life should be conducted on the
model of an enterprise, oriented to success in the market. What is particular about
entrepreneurship is that there is no contradiction between self-realization and eco-
nomic success: on the contrary, the «Me, Inc.» project is based upon the efficient
administration of individual human capital, which includes the ability to work and
gain expertise but also draws heavily from the whole self as a useful resource, as
one advice manual states: «Your career is no longer distinct from the rest of your
life. It includes everything you do to stay in shape – physically, emotionally, spiritu-
ally, socially – in order to do your best work»21. The lines between work life and pri-
vate life, between fun, leisure and labour are blurred because work is fun, leisure is
transformed into a signifier of successful entrepreneurship, discernible in lifestyles,
aspirations and frustrations. As Angela McRobbie has explained, for the risk-tak-
ing entrepreneurial spirit, «passion» is a «normative requirement, indeed a cliché,
in the outlook and presentation of the self [...] The cheerful, upbeat, passionate,
entrepreneurial person [...] must display a persona that mobilizes the need to be at
all times one’s own press and publicity agent. This accounts for a flattening and
homogenization of personhood»22. Adaptability, resilience, skill, open-mindedness,
an ability to «spot trends and turn them into opportunities», the disposition to learn
to «build skill and expertise», to «bounce back» when things go wrong, flexibility,
professionalism, the capacity to plan ahead and strategise are some of the desirable
features expected from an entrepreneur, all oriented to «find[ing] meaning and fun
on the job, and at the same time enjoy a richer, broader life»23. The characteristics of
the entrepreneur are also expected of the «author-entrepreneur», a figure defined
in an advice book as follows: «An author is someone who writes a book, however
that is defined. An author-entrepreneur takes that book much further, exploiting
the multiple opportunities and value in one manuscript and creating a viable busi-
ness from the ideas in their head»24. We can easily discern traces of this regime of
representation in the authors own words.
20. « The Road to Publication », http://www.sherrilynkenyon.com/about/the-road-to-pub-

lication/.
21. Beverly E. Jones, Think Like an Entrepreneur, Act Like a CEO. NJ, Career Press, 2015, p. 14.
22. Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries, London, Polity,
2016, p. 74.
23. Jones, op.cit., p. 14.
24. Penn, op.cit., position 251 of 4393.
135
One of the fundamental imperatives of entrepreneurial discourse is the pressure

to be creative, creativity often described as an innate human potentiality which
needs to be nourished and cultivated as it is the energy behind innovation and
reinvention which require «ceaseless creative exertion»25. According to Bröckling,
the State is often cited as one of the main impediments to creativity; in romance
novelists’ discourse, the large publishers are regularly regarded as the obstacles to
creativity, which has become one of the reasons given for the decision to self-pub-
lish. However, the self has also become an obstacle that must be overcome: «The
only person who can stop me is me and I don’t think enough of myself most days
to let me be much of an obstacle», says award winning Sherrylin Kenyon26. At the
present moment, writes Bröckling, creativity, very easily identified as an ideological
imperative, is conceived as an unquestionably desirable resource and a response to
economic necessity. That is, not only is it needed to solve problems and overcome
obstacles, but comes in handy as a «form of production»27. Both these meanings
of creativity are deployed by romance writers, who are under constant pressure to
publish frequently and promote their products. Workshops listed on RWA chap-
ter webpages offer many types of motivational activities aimed at honing creative
competencies, improving productivity and self-actualizing for marketing purposes:
«Fights in Fiction», «How to Write When Everything Goes Wrong», «Principles
of Good Web Design», «What is a Tweet and Why Should I care? Diving Deep
into Social Marketing», «Crafting Likable Characters», «Getting Results from your
Author Newsletter», «Writing the Romance Novella», «How to Write Fast» are
the workshops listed by the Northeast Chapter of Romance Writers of America
for 201728. Writers both take and offer these workshops, Susannah Erwin offers a
«Quick Guide to Facebook Pages» on her webpage, drawing on her experience: «In
my other life, I’m a general business strategy consultant, with an emphasis on mar-
keting and social media»29. The titles of these worshops suggest that two of their
main concerns, uncannily appropriate for the figure of the author-entrepreneur, are
marketing and the stimulation of creativity, which are disciplinary pratices.
Judging from the vast quantity of workshops available throughout the year,
the creativity dispositif may be read as a biopolitical tool because it seeks to pro-
duce «happily creative subjects»30 whose life as self-interested, multi-tasking entre-
preneurs is upheld as a model of freedom and independence from traditional forms
of employment. The imperative to actualise the self echoes the dictates found in
self-improvement books that tout the fantasy of individual success and self-in-
vention, which are the stuff of makeover culture in the US, as Micki McGee has
shown in her study of the contemporary self-help genre. Her research includes an
analysis of the «self-help market in the ‘creativity’ subgenre of the literature» which
25. Following Foucault, Angela McRobbie defines «dispositif» as a self-monitoring, self-reg-
ulating mechanism consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, laws, administrative
measures and the relation between these elements. The creativity dispositif comprises various in-
struments, guides, manuals, devices, toolkits, mentoring schemes, reports, TV programmes and oth-
er forms of entertainment that together form a type of governmentality that, in the case of romance
writing, interpellates women.
26. « The Road to Publication », http://www.sherrilynkenyon.com/about/the-road-to-
publication/.
27. Bröckling, op. cit., p. 105.
28. http://www.neorwa.com/online-workshops/upcoming-meetings/.
29. April 23, 2017, http://www.susannaherwin.com/blog/.
30. McRobbie, Be Creative, p. 162.
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Nattie Golubov
sells the idea of «a fulfilling career as the right – and responsibility – of each and
every individual, irrespective of gender, race, or ethnicity»31. The quest for creative
self-fulfillment through work is an ideology that she links with the stereotype of the
«artists», who will work for little or nothing because the work itself is the reward.
The notion of a «career change», very often an item in romance writers’ online
biographies, is essential to this cultural trend which began in the mid-1990s due to
the recession and brings together the «metaphor of ‘a path in life’ [...] with the idea
of ‘life is a game’»32.
There is a combination of connected cultural trends in the US that are rele-
vant to the social and cultural positioning of romance writers in that country: the
large scale processes associated with neoliberalism, specifially the deployment of
the creativity dispositif, the imperative to mould the writing self into an aspiration-
al author-entrepreneur and the exhortation to enjoy the craft of writing because
working for fun is the path to self-fulfilment, all of which crystallize «into ways of
speaking, aways of engaging, ways of comporting the self, expressing enthusiasm,
withholding a critical disposition, etc.»33. It is because the market moves quickly
and there is fierce competition between writers, that success is never guaranteed,
as Barbara Freethy stated in her keynote speech at the RWA meeting in 2015: «just
because things start going up doesn’t means that they don’t come down, occasional-
ly»34. Given this uncertainty, reinvention becomes a survival strategy that Freethy re-
sorts to when publishing trends shift and her editor suggests a change of direction:
«Do you jump on the trend, do you stay with what you’re doing? [...] and how long
will the trend last», she asks her audience. Freethy explains that whenever she is up
against an obstacle, she «reinvents» herself as a writer, having moved over the years
from contemporary category romance to longer more emotional novels to roman-
tic suspense, which then looses its popularity so she goes on to write «small town»
novels with angels (a fourth reinvention of her authorial life), and then moves on
to self-publishing: she explains how she «learns» to self-publish, her success de-
pendent on the development of a «brand» for herself35 because the fan base has
to be built and nourished, since the responsibility for effective self-branding falls
squarely on herself. Other writers echo Freethy’s awareness of the pedagogy of the
self. Dana Marton confirms this imperative to be ahead of the game: «Dana has a
Master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction, and is continuously studying the art and
craft of writing, attending several workshops, seminars and conferences each year.
Her number one goal is to bring the best books she possibly can to her readers»36.
This public performance of the self differs substantially from the experi-
ence of the «subject positions» with which romance writers struggle. Jessica Tay-
lor’s ethnographic research analyses the ways in which the writers locate themselves
and negotiate two discourses: one concerning professionalism, the other «artistic
31. Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc. Makeover Culture in American Life. Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2005, p. 111.
32. Ibid., p. 116.
34. RWA2015 Keynote with Barbara Freethy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
jeT8R3HB_zI.
35. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeT8R3HB_zI.
36. https://www.danamarton.com/about-author.
137
passion»37. According to Jessica Taylor, tension is experienced by romance writers

between their aspiration to middle-class professionalism, understood as a strategy
to counteract a disparaging media representation of the romance writer in order to
create a «legitimated subject position» and dignify their work, and the emotional act
of creation, which is complicated because they not only write about emotions but
are also expected to produce emotional responses in readers and write with pas-
sion. Their desired professionalism is a way to make sense of their place within an
industry over which they have little control because, as «contractors», not employ-
ees of the publisher but «flexible workers» adapted to the new types of capitalism
characterised by precarity, they are expected to transition from being «a person who
might enjoy writing romance stories to a romance writer and romance worker»38.
However, we have little information about her interviewees (is she describing the
situation of unpublished and aspiring romance writers only?), and this omission is
problematic because currently, as we shall see, many romance writers actually have
professions which they proudly mention in their online profiles: Julie James prac-
ticed law, Radclyffe is a retired surgeon, Pintip Dunn received her J. D. from Yale
Law School, Rebecca Zanetti received her J. D. from the University of Idaho after
working as a Senate aide, C S Harris is a former academic with a PhD in European
History, and so on. Indeed, many writers leave their professions to embark upon a
writing life, not aspiring to be professional but, on the contrary, to decelerate and
redirect their livelihoods: «I didn’t consciously leave academics» says C S Harris,
«I simply got married»39. Having worked as a lawyer in contested custody cases,
HelenKay Dimon decides to bring people together through romance novels rath-
er than helping them terminate their relationships, in addition to the fact that she
«got tired of wearing pantyhose»40. How does the professionalism of a romance
author differ from that of a lawyer or academic?
Unlike Taylor, whose research is based upon the lived experience of the
women she interviews, I believe that as a theoretical tool it is useful to conceive of
this entrepreneurial authorial figure as not «something that exists but something
that ought to be brought into existence»41. This bringing into existence is an ongoing
process, not only because like all other identities the author-entrepreneur is perfor-
mative, but also because authorial identity has to be seen to adapt to rapidly shifting
exigencies of both the marketplace, the industry, the launch of new products and
reader preferences and this dynamism and up-to-dateness should be visible on social
media, because the more visible they are the more notoriety they will accrue. Taylor
does not examine the effort required by romance writers in the production of a
public self, an author brand, which they themselves consider an essential part of
their labour: that is, it is not only the writing process itself but the constant self-pro-
motion and self-actualization that have become an important factor in the business
of authorial self-branding. It would seem that, as Taylor concludes, romance writ-
37. Jessica Taylor, «Love the Market: Discourses of Passion and Professionalism in Romance
Writing Communities», William A. Gleason and Eric Murphy Selinger (eds.), Romance Fiction and
American Culture. Love as the Practice of Freedom?, Farnham, Ashgate, 2016, p. 292. Taylor refers to
«North America» as the context of her research but no mention is made of romance in Mexico.
38. Ibid., p. 281.
39. http://csharris.net/author_looking.php.
40. http://helenkaydimon.com/meet/.
41. Bröckling, op. cit., p. 20.
138
Nattie Golubov
ers draw upon what she calls «discourses of professionalism» to understand and
manage their roles in the industry as respectable writers although, according to
Taylor, their efforts to self-manage are oriented to accommodating and separating
«emotion and business »42. Yet there is an important difference between thinking
of oneself as a professional worker, as a writer whose behaviour is similar to that
expected from someone within a profession, and being an author-entrepreneur, the
owner and employee of one’s own business venture. One significant divergence is
that neoliberal entrepreneurship incorporates enjoyment as an essential element of
labour, so although Taylor posits professionalism and passion as inimical because
of how they are experienced, in terms of the discourse and performance of neolib-
eral authorship this injunction to be a visibly happy, self-employed entrepreneur is
encouraged and indeed read as the mark of an independent spirit. Precisely because
creative work is posited as a choice it should be enjoyable. As McRobbie points
out, there is an expectation of finding pleasure in the work itself and a passionate
attachment to it43. Like many of the novels themselves, which feature heroines who
are passionate about their jobs, romance writers celebrate the idea of an exciting job
and demand their right to be paid fairly for it. One example of this is what writers
refer to as « research » for their books, usually described not as taxing toil but as
a source of pleasure: « Be warned, ye who enter here. The historical novel can be
dangerous territory. If you love history, it’s easy to get happily lost in research – and
never be heard from again », says Shelly Thacker, author of historical romance44.
In public appearances they constantly tout the pleasure that they find in their
craft, a reward which is magnified by the idea that they are giving pleasure to their
readers and improving women’s lives. This aspect of their work ties in to the idea
that the «management of female affect [is] requirement for ‘pleasure in work’ such
that not to find and express such enjoyment becomes a mark of personal failure»45,
although in the context of the unpredictability of the romance market, no one can
plan on accommodating oneself to market demand succesfully, so the emphasis
on individual pleasure may mitigate uncertainty since the satisfaction of one’s own
pleasure is the guarantee to happiness46. The publicly expressed expectation of ex-
periencing pleasure in work is not a masquerade or insincere. Rather, as a form of
subjectification, the passion of the author-entrepreneur is palpable in interviews,
writer’s enjoyment of the creative process a constant theme. Nora Roberts explains
that she really loves her job, «and I think if you love your job you work only more
happily but more often»47. Nalini Singh, at the RWA 2015 conference, states that
I believe that when we write to our passion it shows on the page, some of us
bleed onto the page, others laugh onto it, others seduce, but through it all is a
passion and a love for story. That passion speaks to readers in a way nuts and
bolts never will. Other may denigrate our genre, but what matters to me are
42. Taylor, op. cit., p. 287.

44. http://www.shellythacker.com/for-writers/researching-the-historical-novel/.
45. Ibid., p. 103.
46. McGee, op. cit., p. 125.
47. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlO6SdTYqNs.
139
the opinions of my readers and those readers love romance in a way that those
who look down on our genre will never understand.48
Writers repeatedly feel that they have to defend the genre from the negative
criticism of reviewers, fellow male writers and publishers. In Writing the Romance
for Dummies, Wainger argues that «outsiders have a very clear – and clearly wrong!
– image of the typical romance writer. They picture her as someone dressed all in
pink (boa included) who taps computers with the long red nails of one hand while
picking up bon-bons with the other, unless she’s writing in the tub, artfully camou-
flaged by bubbles »49. Although this is clearly a caricature, what is evident is that the
romance writer is stereotyped as frivolous, superficial, self-indulgent, unashamedly
displaying – indulging in – a type of femininity which the writers resist by perform-
ing the model of the author-entrepreneur.
To posit the writing of romance as « work », writers differentiate it from an
art and a hobby. This differentiation is accomplished by conceiving the writing of
romance as a «craft» rather than an art, a formulation common to those handbooks
analysed by De Geest and Goris50. In a handbook designed to coach aspiring writ-
ers into publication, Valerie Parv compares the creative process to baking a cake51,
while several other guides insist that «romance writing is hard work»52 because of
the challenges presented by the constraints of language, content and form inher-
ent to the genre of the popular romance novel. The concept of «craft» brings
together ideas of skill gained through practice with an occupation that is neither
a professionalised job nor an alienated form of standarised paid work although it
is a worthy source of income, and more modest than an art. «Craft» also eschews
meanings often associated with writing as artistic, a natural gift which is therefore
impossible to learn, the quality of a select few rather than an activity available to any
avid romance reader who puts her mind to it:
Many people believe that the best writing is done in a fit of inspiration, in the
middle of the night and on a completely unpredictable schedule. In fact, wri-
ting is a craft, and inspiration comes most often to those sitting in an appro-
priate place, waiting for it [...] If you write regularly, even for just a few minutes
at a time, you’ll be in practice, your story will stay fresh in your mind, and you’ll
be in shape to take advantage of bigger blocks of time when you find them.53
Taylor argues that for romance writers «passion and love, rather than inspi-
ration, are the terms used to describe this element outside of business that is nec-
essary to writing as a creative and artistic endeavour»54. Yet according to Goris and
De Geest, in handbooks romance writing is described not as an art but as a craft, so
48. RWA2015 Saturday Featured Speaker Nalini Singh. August 12, 2015. https://www.you-
tube.com/watch?v=7Vm-Y44S5_E.
49. Wainger, op. cit., p. 32.
50. Dirk De Geest and An Goris, «Constrained Writing, Creative Writing: The Case of
Handbooks for Writing Romances», Poetics Today, 31, 1, Spring 2010.
51. Valerie Parv, The Art of Romance Writing. Practical Advice from an International Bestselling Ro-
mance Writer, Allen & Unwin, 2004, p. 1.
53. Leigh Michaels, On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells, Ohio, Writer’s Digest
Books, 2007, p. 54.
54. Taylor, op. cit., p. 291.
140
Nattie Golubov
a disciplined work schedule and controlled environment are propitious for «inspi-
ration», not the other way around. After a period of not «knowing what to write»,
for example, Barbara Freethy describes how she was «baffled what to do next» in
her career, so explains that when «the business starts to suck, you gotta go back to
the craft, right? [...] I went to some craft workshops and it has really rejuvenated my
thinking. I started thinking I really gotta do a great book and I’ve got to reinvent
myself. So, the first of many reinventions. So I went back after that conference on
craft and wrote the book of the heart»55. She encourages her fellow writers to en-
able their creativity by reawakening their potential, harnessing what is already there
as a potentiality in everyone by means of training programmes, advice books, work-
shops, tutorials. Her advice resonates with the recommendation in an advice book:
I’m not saying that creativity and talent aren’t important, because they defini-
tely are – very important. With literally thousands of romance novels being
published every year, it’s incredibly difficult to stand out – to give the readers
what they want while still maintaining a unique voice and approach.
Your creativity and talent come from within. Your’e born with the talent and
desire to tell stories. But you can acquire craft and the ability to write what rea-
ders want to read. That part of the equation starts with knowing your market,
which boils down to knowing the reader and what she wants.56
Angela McRobbie has discussed the recent dignification of the idea of « craft »
as a reaction to the «prevailing ethos of creative work and the wider environment of
speeded-up flexible labour»57. Although she discusses crafts such as knitting, quilting,
and other activities which use traditionally feminine and domestic skills, the activity
of writing romance takes on the meanings associated with this type of work that is
home-based and viable because of new digital technologies and social media. One
interesting fact in this regard is that Kit Rocha, the pseudonym for a «co-writing
team» that has won the RT award for erotic romance on several occasions, make
jewelry in their «free time» and sell it on Etsy.com; Lois Winston has edited a collec-
tion of recipes from 105 authors, available for purchase from her webpage, while
Nora Roberts has a shop offering tote bags, sweatshirts, coffee cups and other
merchandise related to her In Death series and a link to the bookshop owned by her
husband.
One practice that contributes to the policing of the craft are the popular hand-
books for writing romance, admirably analysed by the critic An Goris. Designed to
guide aspiring writers through the writing and publishing processes, these usually
incorporate three suggestions: 1) a continuous appeal to the aspiring author’s own
experience of romance reading which «presents creative writing as an easy, natural,
and even self-evident act»58. The handbooks clearly articulate the essential elements
of the romance genre with which the authors are familiar because, as readers, they
expect to encounter a familiar narrative framework and this tacit knowledge, gained
from the reading experience, enables them to better elaborate their ideas to fit a
55. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeT8R3HB_zI.
58. Goris, op. cit., p. 74.
141
sub-genre59; 2) the conception of writing as a craft and a profession which can be

learned. The pleasure of reading the romance derives from the balance between
repetition and innovation, a requirement that handbooks emphasise since «Notwit-
hstanding the importance of the generic narrative framework, the romance reader
expects and demands a new, exciting, and surprising reading experience every time
she picks up a romance novel»60; 3) the prescription of norms that concern generic
features (often concerning content, such as the appropriateness of sexual violence
or the character of the heroine, who should reflect the concerns of contempo-
rary women) derived from the fact that the guides are process- and commercially
oriented. Goris argues that guides adopt some of the «high-brow values such as
creativity, authorship, originality and authenticity»61 in an effort to legitimate writers’
work, and the experience of dedicated readers seems to indicate that they recognise
this as important to their reading experience. In another article Goris and De Geest
take up the use of the notion of craft to point to issues in the handbooks they
analyse: the first is the demystification of the conception of writing as an «infini-
tely creative and unbound activity»62, because the handbooks are intended to make
writing seem accessible and secondly, the process is described as «the practice of
putting together a set of tools, making optimal use of all ingredients indispensable
to a good romance novel»63. This second recommendation in discussed at length
because of their interest in the issue of constrained writing and norms.
The author figure that emerges from the self-presentation of romance writ-
ers brings together many of the experiences, expectations and rhetoric associated
with the discourses described so far. In an interview Kristan Higgins describes the
situation of many romance writers who pursue the goal of self-realization and
achieve a sense of agency through writing. When asked about her decision to put
pen to paper, she explains that she began to write because, as a mother of young
children, she felt « lonely for grownups »: « I’d really like to stay home but I also
want to do something, something to contribute to the finances of our household,
and something to keep my mind occupied on more than just the kids ». Higgins ex-
plains that she has been a reader of romance from the age of 13, and thus felt that
she had the tools necessary to write a romantic comedy while her children napped.
At the time there were a lot of books out there about very remarkable people
like billionaires, and vampires were just coming into popularity, and there were
a lot of Navy SEAL heroes and military heroines and I thought, you know, I
am none of those things, I am not a billionaire, I’m not a vampire, but I wanted
to write a story that was a little more down to earth, that was about people like
me and my husband and working class people, people like my sister, I didn’t
live in Manhattan... what about us? The rest of us? Don’t we get a story too?
Writing was about having time to herself, a «joy», time out from the «whole
mommy experience». In the interview she goes on to state that, knowing nothing
about the industry, she decided to contact an agent, receiving in response eighteen
59. Ibid., p. 77.

60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 82.
62. De Geest and Goris, op. cit., p. 93.
63. Ibid.
142
Nattie Golubov
rejection letters although eventually one gets back to her, states that she has a «won-
derful writing voice», offers an initial two book deal and subsequently Harlequin
agrees to publish Fools Rush In in 2007: « What stared out as something to do so that
I didn’t have to go back to work and then it became more and more of a career »64.
Higgins is the bestselling author of sixteen novels which have been translated into
twenty languages and reviewed extensively. The biographical note on her website
states that « Kristan lives in Connecticut with her heroic firefighter husband, their
freakishly beautiful, entertaining and sarcastic children, two overly frisky rescue
dogs and an occasionally friendly cat »65. The tone used is also popular: light-heart-
ed, self-deprecating, playful, witty, chatty, a rhetorical strategy intended to bring
writers closer to their readers and inscribe that mark of individuality associated in
Romancelandia with the concept of « voice »66.
Angela McRobbie has argued convincingly that the pedagogies associated
with creativity are intensely subjectivizing by urging individuals to express their
uniqueness and distinctiveness while simultaneously deploying a «toolkit» approach
to the processes involved in creative practices, which consequently become highly
normative of behaviour, affect and embodiment. Writers’ webpage biographies are
highly codified and gendered in specific ways while they simultaneously use visual
content and information to individualise the author brand without confronting the
expectations of readers or undermining the features associated with the particular
subgenres in which they specialise. In this respect, romance writers use a limited
repertoire of trajectories which are individualised by the surrounding elements in-
cluded on their webpages such as photographs and quirky details about their lives67.
One such trajectory is the reader-to-stay-at-home-mother-to-romance-writer nar-
rative used by Higgins, whose codification of life events contributes to the belief
that dedicated readers of romance « will be eager (and will eventually be able to)
write successful romances of their own »68, but also dignifies authors’ experience of
domesticity and motherhood by incorporating it into their trajectory, just as other
writers mention their professional experience in the labour market to give authority
to their writerly selves. Family life and motherhood are transformed into a market-
able asset. Sarah Morgan states that she completed her first full manuscript while at
home with a baby, briefly mentions that she was a nurse, yet most of the informa-
tion concerns her lifestyle and writing: «when she isn’t reading or writing she loves
being outdoors, preferably on vacation so she can forget the house needs tidying».
Virginia Kantra includes her trajectory as an award-winner, the quantity and type
of books published with a note that she is « Married to her college sweetheart and
the mother of three (mostly adult) children, Virginia lives in North Carolina. She
is a firm believer in the strength of family, the importance of storytelling, and the
power of love »69. Significantly, for many, the writing life is inextricably bound up
64. Interview with Ann Nyberg, WTNH News8, March 5, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=IWeUv6r47Rs.
65. .http://www.kristanhiggins.com/.
66. Goris, op. cit., p. 79.
67. Pierre Bourdieu would describe a trajectory as a chronological progression with an inter-
nal logic which could be told in many other ways, yet has become a shared —and predictable— life
story in its established normality. «La ilusión biográfica», Acta sociológica, 56, September-December,
2011, pp. 121-128.
68. De Geest and Goris, op. cit., p. 89.
69. http://virginiakantra.com/KantraBio.html
143
with the management of family and domestic life. Unsurprisingly, family seems to
be a recurring fact in bios because the genre reflects upon family (traditional and
nonconventional), caring for a family is a «moral force for good»70 in the genre gen-
erally, nuclear familialism a cornerstone of an acceptable white middle class lifestyle
as well as an expression of a type of successful femininity, and is also, undeniably,
an important dimension of the lives of many writers who have to juggle career
and motherhood. Not only do they write in a domestic space but are advised to
incorporate the family into the enterprise: «Set up a workspace for yourself, even if
it’s a corner of your bedroom or family room [...] Get your family invested in your
writing so that they’re happy to pitch in so you can succeed»71. Although family is
acknowledged as work too, authors validate child care, motherhood and domestic-
ity, the emotional labour involved in this notion of the family as an enterprise. On
her blog, Jill Shalvis entertainingly describes how she juggles family and work, hus-
band, children, agent and editor, household chores and writing. Her experience is
not unique. Lynda Aicher confirms the need to skillfully manage the household and
multi-task: «I have the luxury of being a full-time writer. That is, a full-time writer
around my duties as a mom, wife, cleaner, cook, chauffeur, master scheduler, bank-
er, cheerleader, volunteer, and tutor. Writing has to be a priority, or it would never
happen»72. In consonance with McRobbie’s suggestion that maternalism is a source
of human capital, these writers give a new, more professional status to domesticity,
motherhood and family because they enjoy them in the company of spouses who
are often described as equal partners at the head of a unit or team, much like the
heroes of many novels, especially those with «kick ass» heroines. In this context,
roles which from one perspective may be described as unrewarding acquire positive
meanings, so even childrearing and homemaking become sources of expert knowl-
edge for their writing and capital for their profiles. During an interview, Christina
Dodd, Connie Brockway, Julia Quinn and Eloisa James all speak of their spouses
as supportive73.
Out of 39 RT award winners of 2016, more than 24 mention families, spous-
es and/or pets on their webpages; those who do not, significantly, enjoy celebrity
status (Sylvia Day, Beverly Jenkins) or write a cross-genre that appeals to audiences
other than romance fans, such as V. E. Schwab, N. K. Jemisin and Becky Chambers,
winners in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy category. Chambers mentions her nomination for
the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards, Jesimin is the «first black person to win the
Best Novel Hugo» and positions herself as a «political-feminist/anti-rascist blog-
ger», making her the only 2016 RT winner who mentions politics in her bio. Other
writers highlight their professional and work experience before turning to romance
writing, thus on occasion converting the competencies acquired in one job into
capital useful for another while simultaneously acquiring credibility as connoisseurs
of the milieu in which their novels are set: Joyce Tremel, winner of the 2016 Re-
viewers’ Choice Award for Best Amateur Sleuth, mentions the fact that she was a
70. McRobbie, «Feminism and the New ‘Mediated’ Maternalism: Human Capital at Home»,
Feministische Studien, 31, 1, p. 141. In this article McRobbie argues that the effort to deproletarianise
society is achieved by casting the ideal family as a kind of small business unit, which in turn means
that a business ethos at home is promoted to women as a morally superior way to live. The profes-
sionaization of motherhood is part of this dispositif of new maternal-familialism.
71. Wainger, op. cit., 56.
72. https://www.lyndaaicher.com/about
73. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov7O5DMFNb0
144
Nattie Golubov
police secretary for ten years and «more than once envisioned the demise of certain
co-workers, but settled on writing as a way to keep herself out of jail»74. After grad-
uating from UT, Terry Shames – who writes mysteries – joins the CIA, is trained
at Langley as a computer programmer/analyst: «She worked in that field for the
next several years [...]. Burned out in the stress of the computer world, and wanting
to concentrate on writing, she attained her real estate license and worked in that
field while she got her MA in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State
University»75. HelenKay Dimon comments that as a lawyer working in Washington,
she got to represent clients belonging to the CIA, FBI and Secret Service so «It’s
no surprise that when I write romantic suspense ot tends to be undercover types».
Cheryl Etchison lists her degree in journalism, followed by a «career as an oil and
gas reporter» that leads to boredom and the decision to «trade in reporting the facts
for making it all up». She has a husband and three daughters. The career change is
a frequent narrative strategy that evidences their ability to make over their lives and
to capitalise their experience. The inclusion of pre-romance-writing careers in the
bios is important because it dignifies their choice of career in romance writing: they
were successful at their previous employment but chose to dedicate themselves to
romance, giving them the power to steer their lives.
The formal homogeneity of the bio notes on author webpages is striking be-
cause it seems to respond to one of the injunctions of neoliberal subjecthood to be
homogeneously different: «serial singularity, ready-made difference», in Bröckling’s
words when he describes creativity. What we infer from this uniformity is that «the
paths to the particular should be the same paths for all»76, so although the trajecto-
ries are remarkably similar some deliberatly chosen particularities are introduced to
create individuality; thus writers may live in different areas of the US, hold different
degress, write different subgenres, may have different cultural backgrounds and
explicitly identify with a particular race or ethnicity, yet the highlights of their lives
are identical: education, awards, marriage, children, career change, pets, plus a few
quirky details because active differentiation is expected by the logic of this regime77:
Laura Lee Guhrke lives in the Northwest with her husband (or, as she calls him, her
very own romance hero), «along with two diva cats and a Golden Retriever happy
to be their slave»; Jeffe Kennedy «lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two Maine
coon cats, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of Oriental
Medicine».
With the exception of Weina Dai Randel and Beverly Jenkins (who received
the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award), all the 2016 and 2017 RWA award
winners are white. Jenkins’ biographical note is very brief, mentioning her acco-
lades alongside her pivotal role in «leading the charge for multicultural romance»;
Randel too lists her awards and nominations, her Chinese origins and adaptation
to the US «when she began to speak, write and dream in English». Randel has an
M. A. in English, a job and lives with her «loving husband and two children». In a
2015 interview, Sonali Dev noted that the «genre is so overwhelmingly, overwhelm-
74. http://www.joycetremel.com/about.html
75. http://terryshames.com/terry.php
76. Bröckling, «On Creativity: A Brainstorming Session», Educationl Philosophy and Theory, 38,
4, 2006, p. 518.
77. Lois McNay, «Self as Enterprise: Dilemmas of Control and Resistance in Foucault’s The
Birth of Biopolitics», Theory, Culture and Society, 26, 6, 2009, p. 63.
145
ingly neutral and white neutral»78, neutral understood as «relatable», presumably

because whiteness goes unmarked, it is a default setting, unremarkable, while race
and difference are either made explicit for marketing purposes, in deference to
reader preferences, and as dimensions of the author’s public identity which may be
an indication of the characters and issues that she writes about. Race comes into
play in several ways in Romanceland, many of which have already been addressed
by critics. Winners of awards tend to be predominantly white if the 2016 RWA and
RT lists of winners are an indication of structural, institutional racism, and so are
the values, norms and the cultural capital displayed on webpages, as they dominate
in the fiction. Sarah from the Smart Bitches Trashy Books page agrees: «I think one
of the problems is often that the default, the path of least resistance, in marketing,
in selling, in pitching, in all of the sort of well-worn paths through which a book is
published, the default is white, heterosexual, Christian, American, with a very set of
prescribed characteristics»79. If by cultural capital we mean «an acquired set of val-
ues, beliefs, norms, attitudes, experiences, and so forth that equip people differently
for the life in society»80, the standardisation of the information available on web-
pages is clearly white and middle class to boot. Given that the industry is dominated
by women and that the audience is predominantly female, the writers perform fem-
ininities deemed appropriate for contemporary career women who have achieved
some authority in the field and, in some cases, considerable celebrity, without either
sexualizing or masculinizing themselves, in tension with the marked gendering of
the genre as feminine and female despite the diversity of the genre itself, which is
becoming more queer, racially and sexually diverse and formally hybrid. However,
a recent report states that out of every 100 books published by romance publishers
in 2016, only 7.8 were written by people of colour. That is, the authorship does not
reflect either the diversity of the content or of the readership, which may be an
indication of institutional racism in the major mainstream publising houses from
which these statistics have been gauged as well as the difficulties that women of
colour face when orchestrating a career change or acquiring the necessary human
and cultural capital81.
A 2017 Gallup poll shows that, in terms of the subjective perception of
social class, Americans place themselves as middle class based upon identifiers such
as education, family heritage and background, prestige of residential area, beha-
viour relating to cars, houses, manners, spouses, occupation and family context82.
Education is considered the biggest factor in this self-perception, a fact that the
writer biographies corroborate, together with the idea that hard work is a value in
itself and will deliver just rewards, a notion which is also the key to vertical mobility
and the centrality of a lifestyle that pivots around family life and includes indicators
78. « Bollywood and Romance: An Interview with Sonali Dev », August 28, 2015. http://
smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast/156-bollywood-and-romance-an-interview-with-sonali-
dev/.
79. http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast/156-bollywood-and-romance-an-inter-
view-with-sonali-dev/#transcript.
80. Steve Graner, Whiteness. An Introduction, London and New York, Routledge, 2007, p. 49.
81. October 5, 2017. http://ew.com/books/2017/10/05/romance-publishing-diversity-re-
port/.
82. « What Determines How Americans Perceive Their Social Class? », February 27, 2017.
http://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/204497/determines-americans-perceive-social-
class.aspx.
146
Nattie Golubov
such as leisure activities and travel. In addition to the normalised trajectories from
college to paid employment to fulltime romance writing, the writing process itself
is described as hard work and resilience a necessary character trait:
I know that a lot of writers, aspiring, published, new experienced, there are
some who will disagree with me... inspiration’s crap. The muse, forget about
the muse, Sister Mary’s responsibility kick’s the muse’s ass every single day,
you can sit around waiting for the muse to sit in your shoulder, wait to be
inspired, wait until you feel like it? You’re going to be unemployed a real long
time. Writing is a job, it’s a fabulous job, it’s a wonderful job, and it’s a job you
can do in your pajamas in your own house, you don’t have to wear makeup or
pantyhose again and, really, the benefits are legion but it’s hard, sweaty work
and you do it. If you’re not disciplined and then you don’t push through, you
got an idea you... sometimes it will be like that runaway train, and those are
great days. Some days it’s like carving in granite with a toothpick, and you gotta
sit there those days too, keep your ass in the chair, keep working, because some
day you’re not writing well, but you’re keeping up the habit of writing, you’re
not breaking the habit, because the next day if you’ve broken that habit – you
know you exercise and then you slack off – it hurts. You can fix a bad page,
but you can’t fix a blank one... but if you walk away and wait for muse, she’s a
fickle bitch.83
Romance writers often work at home -those interviewed in Love Between the
Covers are filmed typing away in bedrooms, studies, kitchens, porches-, a workplace
within the domestic sphere which, as they often claim, calls for strict self-discipline.
But on their webpages they are not in their pajamas and slippers, their images are
carefully crafted, an indication of the aesthetic labour involved in self-represen-
tation that reflects the capital that they have or aspire to have. The photographic
portraits of romance writers hover between the spontaneous and the posed, re-
enforcing the idea that, like the characters they create, they are «everywoman». In
her handbook Lanigan states that «The heroine should be ‘everywoman’», the «kind
of woman with whom women from all over the world can identify», her defining
characteristics intelligence, intuition, compassion, courage, beauty84. Yet the value
of the heroine is in her perceived uniqueness, so she, like the author herself, treads
a fine line between the familiar and the unusual, the normal and the extraordinary:
Give your heroine character traits that feel real. She often has a job or lifestyle
that your reader will never have. Maybe your heroine is a spy, a federal judge,
a minister, or the daughter of a millionaire and her first car is a Mercedes. On
the surface, she may seem too far outside the reader’s realm of experiencie for
that crucial sense of identification to occur, but a few well-chosen character
traits can change that. Maybe she likes to drive too fast or is always playing
with ther hair. Maybe she has a soft spot for stray dogs or coos at babies in the
supermarket... Something small and human that you briefly mention just once
or twice can resonate with the reader and make her realize that, for all their
diferences, she and the heroine aren’t so dissimilar after all.85
83. Nora Roberts at The Washington Post, July 14, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=tlO6SdTYqNs.
84. Lanigan, op. cit.
85. Wainger, op. cit., p. 192
147
There is a collective inclination to sustain a particular image of the gendered

author- entrepreneur that is as non-threatening to the audience as the heroine, an
image created performatively through gestures, clothing, conversational styles –
chattiness, humour, self-deprecation –, the signifiers that point to the writer as the
locatable origin of a body of work, a confirmation of the image of the romance
author that emerges from the interaction with the text, as well as the material incar-
nation of a possibility – a career – since, despite the appearance of spontaneity and
friendliness, public appearances are marketing strategies.
Beverly Jenkins, during the keynote speech at the 2016 RWA convention,
suggests that writers should «treat their readers like the precious jewels that they are.
When the ducats begin rolling in your readers are the ones who will help pay your
mortgage, they will help put your kids through college, and help pay for the repairs
to the Honda Accord 6 that you tore up while you were on the road»86. Readers are
cultivated as consumers, but the novels themselves construct their readership and
encourage reader identification. The various meanings suggested by the remark-
ably similar portraits below are not read in isolation but within the domain of the
romance semiosphere, which is distinct from Romanceland or Romancelandia, a
term used to refer to «the territory of the romance genre»87, which may include the
specific norms of the genre itself, the fictional world-building specific to it, as well
as the «land where romance writers and readers live and play»88. It is a metaphor that
may be extended to include a type of sociality based upon a shared language and
the circulation and discussion of books, an interpretative community with a com-
mon code to read romance novels, and a presumed commonality of world-view
in which women are viewed as strong and independent, their problems important,
families and communities valued and relationships fulfilling and supportive. This
community includes fans of the genre, romance writers, industry professionals and
academics, the identities of all these merging together in interesting ways. In her
keynote speech, Jenkins refers to Romanceland as a «tribe»89 and collaborative work
is its foundation: time and again, in the acknowledgements of books, in interviews
and speeches, romance writers acknowledge that their books are not the product
of an isolated mind but the result of a support network. Not only do they have
«writing partners» who read and critique their work in progress, but they may write
together, and Amazon Kindle Direct publishing and other forums allow writers to
place their work in the public domain and receive immediate feedback from readers;
Harlequin has an online support community for writers; and Nalini Singh describes
the «community» as «welcoming, nurturing and generous»90, writers as professional
and warm.
Undoubtedly Romanceland exists because of a communal effort to sustain
and perpetuate it, and it is perceived as a positive female space: a recent video post-
ed by the RWA on friendship and support, together with academic interest in the
86. RWA2016 Keynote speech by Beverly Jenkins on Thursday, July 14 2016. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=fb5IFwPbJKA
87. Roach, op. cit., p. 17.
88. Ibid., p. 41.
89. RWA2016 Keynote with Beverly Jenkins. August 16, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=fb5IFwPbJKA.
90. https://www.facebook.com/LoveBTCFilm/?fref=ts.
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Nattie Golubov
subject of solidarity, highlights this conviviality91. The porous boundary between

reading and writing is substantiated by the writers who present themselves as hav-
ing been avid readers before becoming writers; they also become each others’ read-
ers and promote each other’s books: Sonali Dev, for example, discovers romance
when she is acccidentally given a Catherine Coulter novel, HelenKay Dimon claims
that The Bride by Julie Garwood, Perfect Partners by Jayne Ann Krentz and Daniel’s
Bride by Linda Lael Miller «literally changed my life» and prompt her career change.
Being an avid reader is not only necessary to become a writer, as Goris has point-
ed out, but becomes an integral part of the romance writer’s identity as a writer.
Indeed, their personal stories about their first encounter with the genre are often
interpreted as a form of female bonding, between mother and daughter, sisters
or schoolmates, as if sharing books were a coded language and an initiation into
a secret feminine «underground» world, as Maya Rodale explains in an interview:
misconceptions about the genre arise because people do not find out about them
through a female grapevine but media coverage, «we don’t read about it in The New
York Times»92. Lasting friendship is undoubtedly a cornerstone of Romanceland,
yet it coexists with an obligation to network and collaborations are useful means
to publish novellas between the appearance of single novels or as critique partner-
ships, but they require emotional and relational labour.
We should not idealise the sort of sociality expected in Romanceland because
good working relations with peers are crucial to burgeoning careers, and they also
require the «careful management of emotions»93. However pleasurable they may be,
working relations require relational labour, the immaterial skill to not only listen and
respond to others in face-to-face encounters (chapter meetings, award ceremonies,
interviews, book signings), to adequately manage emotion and the body in these
situations, but also to build and maintain relationships with audiences and people in
the industry with which they may in the future have a relationship. So although one
dimension of the creative worker is a capacity to work with others, it may also bring
with it a dynamic of surveillance of that other in the context of writing workshops,
critique groups and other collaborations, much like the manuals studied by Goris,
disciplinary practices that simultaneously encourage a fellow writer’s career and
guide her towards whatever is deemed appropriate behaviour in the industry and
from a writer. Indeed, the paradox of this common practice is that «creativity-trai-
ning» standardizes and disciplines certain writing practices and rules of romance
writing as it «liberates» creativity. Anger, unhappiness, discontent, anxiety, illness,
frustration, poverty, despair, divorce, hatred, depression are never a part of autho-
rial self-description, as proscribed on webpages as political opinions are in Roman-
celand94. It is not that emotion itself is frowned upon; rather, certain emotions are
explicitly manifested and others deemed unacceptable in public. Given the unifor-
mity of the portraits shown below, there seems to be a collective intent to manage
emotion in consonance not only with the image of the entrepreneur but also in
91. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9BpJ7SD1QE&feature=youtu.be.
92. « Everything You Wanted to Know About Romance Novels », December 10, 2012.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwNTVj2KIVY
93. David Hesmonhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Indus-
tries, New York, Routledge, 2011, p. 179.
94. These issues are more often mentioned on Blogs, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and other
social media which are more appropiate formats for the description of everyday life.
149
relation to the romance genre itself, defined as it is by the HEA. There may be an
organizational pressure to display emotions that are valued positively and desirable
in writers whose plots guarantee a happy ending, irrespective of the emotional and
psychological complexities described in the novels themselves. In a recent interview
with Sonali Dev, Beverly Jenkins talks about the history tours she embarks upon
with fans who have become «sisters of my heart» because «I can travel with them
and I don’t have to be ON, I can just be me, so it’s not open to everybody»95. Being
«on», presumably, is online or switched on as a public figure. There is an effort in-
volved in displaying happiness, but there is also a deployment of «aesthetic labour»
in the production of their appearance, including their demeanour, posture, gaze,
neither too sexualised nor too masculine, hitting the mark of a normative feminine
aesthetic that does not undermine their casual professionalism96. What interests me
is the careful production of an authorial identity that understates the production of
a commodity by cultivating a sense of intimacy with the reader, mingling two acti-
vities that the novels themselves ostensibly oppose although in the end overcome:
money degrades intimate relationships97.
Freethy dispels some of the romance associated with the relationships in
Romanceland by transforming them into business arrangements:
When you’re planning a long career you have to think about the relationships
that you have, and you have to start checking out, like, the professional rela-
tionships I’m talking about, you know, have any of them flat towed, you know,
is the relationship you had with somebody – an agent, an editor, a retailer,
whoever, has it changed, a distributor – you know, are you both still getting
what you want out of that relationship, and don’t be afraid to make a change,
change is good. I believe everyone should be professional, and it’s kind of
funny because sometimes I think when a publisher dumps a writer it’s called a
business decision, and when a writer leaves a publisher it’s a personal decision,
and I think they’re both professional decisions, and I’ve never believed that we
have a «marriage» relationship with any of these relationships. I think you’re in
business and you are a business [...] you’re your best advocate.
« Advocacy » is conducted through newsletters and Facebook, she goes on to

say, echoing Eloisa James’ description of hersef as an « author platform » because
of her presence on social media, which she experiences as «exhausting»98. Indeed,
as Micki McGee has pointed out, media presence is a form of «working countless
hours of overtime in order to “brand” and “market” one’s self»99. In this context,
the central message of Julia Quinn’s speech during the 2015 RWA conference, «you
95. Lit With Love, S.1 ep. 1 Beverly Jenkins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5_jr-ARl-

WM&feature=player_embedded March 17, 2017.
96. A more detailed analysis of the relationship between women and «aesthetic labour»,
understood as those practices that constitute work involving self-presentation, is available in Aesthet-
ic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics on Neoliberalism, Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill, Christina Scharff
(eds.), London, Palgrave, 2017.
97. Viviana A. Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005,
p. 1.
98. « An Afternoon with Eloisa: Why Romance Novels Are Worthy of Respect », March 20,
2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qw3UJByzhk.
99. McGee, op. cit., p. 136.
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Nattie Golubov
can’t please everybody all the time. You can’t»100 acquires a particular significance
because of the intense and constant relational, emotional and aesthetic work re-
quired to occupy the « happy professional place »101, as Jesimin describes her public
author self.
Identification with the author-entrepreneur is fostered by the photograph-
ic portraits on author webpages. Portraits should single out and individualise by
emphasizing the uniqueness of the sitter, yet the images on websites are similar to
those on book covers because they «mettent en scène un sujet comme impersonnel,
ou plutot comme dépersonallisé»102, not a singular personality in search of the self,
inward-looking, contemplative but a type of woman, direct, casual, smiling, friendly.
A portrait photograph, says Graham Clarke, is a trace of the person: although it
may validate identity, have «the status of a signature and declares itself an authentic
presence of the individual», it is in fact a representation of this individual, a codifi-
cation of the person in relation to other frames of reference and other hierarchies
of significance103. The portrait photographs we find on author webpages are the
type of representation that would be found in a domestic setting or a book cover,
functioning less as an aesthetic object than as a likeness and necessarily read in the
context of the romance semiosphere104.
Source: http://www.kristiannhunter.com/about
http://www.pintipdunn.com/about/
http://www.beverlyjenkins.net/web/about/
http://sarahmanderson.com/press-kit/
http://carrienichols.com/?page_id=20
These portrait photographs, taken from 2016 RWA award-winning author

webpages, are embedded in a welter of information about the writers including
biographical sketches, dates for book launches and public appearances, book
signings, book cover illustrations, newsletters.105 Although the portraits have
minimal backgrounds, they must be interpreted – in the first instance – within
100. RWA2015 Friday Featured Speaker Julia Quinn, August 12, 2015. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=bdXIybulGoA.
101. http://nkjemisin.com/2010/05/dont-put-my-book-in-the-african-american-section/.
102. Maria Giulia Dondero, «Les approches sémiotiques du portrait photographique. De
l’identité à l’”aire”», COnTEXTES, 14, 2014.
103. Graham Clarke, «Introduction», The Portrait in Photograhy, Graham Clarke (ed.), Washing-
ton, Reaktion Books, 1992, p. 1.
104. I have adapted the term from Juri Lotman, «On the Semiosphere», Sign Systems Studies,
33, 1, 2005, pp. 205-229.
105. The RWA online awards listings feature photographs of finalists and winners that are
either the same photographs used on author webpages or in a similar style.
151
the context of the webpage and later, perhaps, in relation to the literary text or the
subgenre associated with the author brand, as in the case of Sarah M. Anderson,
who writes «Contemporary Westerns with a Kick» so the hat and outdoors are
directly relevent to the tenor of her product. The evidently posed quality of the
photographs need not imply that the sitters are inauthentic or insincere because the
depictions are highly conventional, familiar, posed yet also suggesting something
about the personality and character of the women: they are happy, their direct gaze
unthreatening, unchallenging because their bodies are turned away or, in the case
of Beverly Jenkins, separated by her folded arms; their clothing is sober, comfort-
able and casual yet not too business-like or formal, their make-up suggests a pref-
erence for a natural look, simplicity rather than enhancement, but not dowdiness,
frumpiness or carelessness. Interestingly, none incorporate symbols or references
to their identity as writers, devoid as they are of the stereotypical paraphernalia that
often accompany writer portraits and identify the sitter as a writer: desks, pens,
computers, typewriters, books, studies, eyeglasses (unless the authors seek to signal
her seniority, like Beverly Jenkins or Carrie Nichols). The intensely conventional
individualised image of the writer has been analysed by Durand106, for example, as
a figure absorbed in thought and singular, portraits that register not an occupation
but a person caught unawares in the act of reflection, writing, thought, so involved
in creative process that the outside world leaves no impression upon them. Ro-
mance writers, on the contrary, here show a willingness to adopt a contrived pose
thus, paradoxically, emphasising the naturalness of their demeanour. To use an idea
suggested by Arlie Russell Hochschild, they are displaying affect: sincerity, casual-
ness, happiness, friendliness, all are achieved through «emotion management»107. So
these portraits are less about an inferred inner domain and psychological profile
than about an affective inclination and disposition towards happiness, sincerity and
irrespective of how contrived the portrait evidently is, their conventionality testifies
to their values, class, lifestyle.
Although the photographs are taken by a third person, it is clear that the
writers are directly involved in the production of their public images, a form of
aesthetic labour. The portraits are marked by a tension between individualising fea-
tures and expressions and the generalising visual devices such as the profile view or
the naturalistic style. Woodall has argued that naturalistic portraiture seeks to make
present the person that is depicted so as to «unite the identities to which [the por-
trait] refers [...] Our pleasure in seeing a portrait consists primarily in recognition,
which is the process of identifying a likeness with what it is perceived to be like, of
substituting something present for something absent»108. This holds true of unique
portraits, but romance writers are present on many platforms, so this concentration
of dispersed authorial presences, a tendency to accumulation, works alongside a
proliferation of surfaces.
106. Pascal Durand, « De Nadar à Dornac. Hexis corporelle et figuration photographique de

l’écrivain », COnTEXTES. Revue de sociologie de la littérature, 14, 2014.
107. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1983, p. 24.
108. Joanna Woodall, « Introduction: facing the subject », Portraiture. Facing the Subject, Joanna
Woodall (ed.), Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 8.
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Nattie Golubov
http://www.iwantherbook.com/39822/
http://www.julieannelong.com/index.shtml
http://www.maiseyyates.com/about/
http://www.karen-white.com/media.cfm
Surprisingly, the half- and full-length portraits in themselves may simply sig-
nal a type of contemporary femininity and its lifestyles: the writers’ identities are
tied to their domestic roles so we meet them at home, casually facing the viewer
with a welcoming smile, as if we were with them in their tastefully decorated liv-
ing room about to share a cup of coffee, dressed in jeans that are not fashionably
ripped – an egalitarian item of casual clothing – paired with plain tops and unob-
trusive jewellery. It is the older writers who have more contrived portraits, and Dee-
anne Gist, who writes historical romance, is more traditionally feminine (dress, lace,
soft colours, heels, styled hair), whereas Long and Yates, who write contemporary
romance, are less gender differentiated (jeans, no frills, casual hair) and more casu-
al. Unlike other portraits of writers, these generic photographs are not necessarily
intended to be a comment on the writer’s inner life, but are, rather, photographs
of an affective disposition that is associated with the romance novel: the novelist
is communicating directly – personally – with her audience, sincerely and honestly,
relaxed. Just as they have to pitch their romance novels to editors, peers, agents and
publishers, novelists have to pitch themselves as women to their readers. They ad-
just their images to the subgenre they specialise in, so the picture of the paranormal
romance 2016 winner Angela Quarles is significant because her clothing and pose
signal the subgenre to which her work belongs. Her portrait is considerably less
conventional than those above, she is less contained (not reclining away from the
camera but moving towards it), her clothing a trendy combination of a long lacy
black skirt with a more masculine, olive green-coloured jacket and combat boots, an
understated steampunk look, sitting boldly not on a chair or lounging on a sofa but
on an antique with a license plate that locates her precisely on a porch in Alabama.
Her glasses express the «geekiness» that she ascribes to herself in her longer bio:
153
http://angelaquarles.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/angelaquarles_hires2.jpg
The photograph substantiates her self-description:
Angela loves history, folklore, and family history, and has been a hobby histo-
rian for twenty+ years. She decided to take her love of history and her active
imagination and write stories of love and adventure for others to enjoy. When
writing, she’s either at her desk in the finished attic of an historic home in
beautiful and quirky Mobile, Alabama, or at her fave spot at the local Star-
bucks. When she isn’t writing, she’s either working at the local indie bookstore
or enjoying the usual stuff like gardening, reading, hanging out, eating, drin-
king, chasing squirrels out of the walls, and creating the occasional knitted
scarf. She has a B. A. in Anthropology and International Studies with a minor
in German from Emory University, and a Masters in Heritage Preservation
from Georgia State University. She was an exchange student to Finland in high
school and studied abroad in Vienna one summer in college.109
Her bio seamlessly incorporates many of the themes discussed previously:

lifestyle, education, leisure activities, her «hobbies» derived directly from her de-
grees, her willingness to share of herself with her readers, a combination of the
«normal» such as coffee at Starbuck’s and gardening, with the unusual (historic
home and travel) and a meaningful relationship between her style and the subgenre
that she writes.
As mentioned, authors include a brief biographical note under the thumb-
nail «Meet so and so», «About» or «Bio» that take on additional meanings in the
context of the other information on the webpage: recently published books and
launch dates for new publications with a link to online booksellers, a bookshelf
that lists past publications by date or series, contact information, a frequently asked
109. . http://angelaquarles.com/about/.
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Nattie Golubov
questions section, a form to join a newsletter, links to blogs and other social media,
interviews, book reviews or official publisher webpages, writing resources, contests
for readers, free stories or novellas, photographs. In contrast to Quarles, veteran
Brenda Jackson’s webpage unequivocally says «romance» with very conventional
signs such as hearts, champagne flutes, chocolates, flowers, type of font, and use
of colour:
https://www.brendajackson.net/
In contrast, webpages showcasing writers that specialise in hybrid genres such

as paranormal, sci fi, fantasy or suspense tend to be visually less «feminine», using
darker colours, urban environments, cityscapes and other visual cues (typography,
colours other than pink, pastels or purple). Julie Anne Walker, who writes romantic
suspense, not only features a gun and bullet holes, but also announces trouble and
suspense with the menacing, stormy, electrifying sky:
http://julieannwalker.com/
«Indianness» is inscribed in Sonali Dev›s webpage aesthetic as well as on

the covers of her novels, a cultural resource that distinguishes her writing just
like race or any other self-fashioning based upon difference. As Lisa Duggan and
others have argued, multicultural, sexual and racial diversity are compatible with
the neoliberal mainstream and indeed are integrated into the marketplace by means
155
of the commodification of identity110. The use of difference in the making of the

author brand is as deliberate as the exclusion of difference: the choices made are
about marketing as well as political111. Young Adult, Sci fi and fantasy writers tend
not to signal the romantic elements of their work on their webpages: 2016 RT
award winners and nominess in the Sci Fi/Fantasy category are a case in point (Nisi
Shawl, Beecky Chambers, Ada Palmer, Rachel Neumeier).
https://sonalidev.com/books/
110. See Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy, Boston, Beacon Press, 2003; and John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc., Chi-
cago, Chicago University Press, 2009.
111. The explicit discussion of politics in romance novels is frowned upon as we can gather
from the reader comments in a discussion about politics in romance on the AAR webpage (https://
allaboutromance.com/politics-in-romance-an-uneasy-blend/). Of course, this does not mean that
romance novels are not ideological: individualism, familialism, the romantization of small town life
and community without conflict, patriotism, a very local understanding of diversity, the normalised
possession of firearms, the idealisation of security forces, the features and world views of the main
characters, desirable lifestyles, are all markedly from the US, though they are often presumed to be
culturally neutral or unproblematic by authors who aspire to have a global reach. On her webpage
Julia Quinn declares that she is an «ardent supporter of military families» but this does not seem to
be read as political statement in the romance semiosphere judging too from the amount of heroes
and heroines who have military training.
156
There is a certain essentialism at work in the crafting of the figure of the au-
thor-entrepreneur. As we have seen, the fact that most romance novels are written
by women, focalise on female characters and that important elements of women’s
lives are mentioned on webpages, support the claim that experience guarantees
authenticity. Paradoxically, however, the frequent use of pen names proves that a
writer of romance may also pen other genres. Precisely because of this paradox,
many suspense novelists, like T. Greenwood, sign with initials and surname only
or with a male pseudonym, thus appealing to a wider audience and, if they write
other types of romance, to differentiate their varied personae by gender, not only
by name. The writer of gay romance «Josh Lanyon» does not have a photograph
on her webpage or Facebook feed, and she explains that she adopted a male pen
name because «GLBT publishers believed that gay men preferred to read fiction
written by gay men»112. L. A. Witt is also Lori A. Witt, Diana Fyre, Lauren and Ann
Gallagher to distinguish between different subgenres: L. A. Witt writes gay male ro-
mance, Lauren Gallagher writes hetersexual, lesbian and bisexual romance, Lori A.
Witt specialises in sci fi/fantasy, Ann Gallagher writes «sweet romanes and young
adult» and Diana Fyre writes horror113. The postructuralist notion that the author
is dead is irrelevant in the romance semiosphere: when the author chooses to dis-
play her difference there is an assumption that race or gender do indeed legitimise
and guarantee the authenticity of the fictional worlds, although this is not always
the case. Eileen Wilks is white yet the heroine of her series is a Chinese-American
police detective who inherits magical power from her Chinese ancestors. In con-
trast to Dev, Pintip Dunn’s biography emphasizes her Ivy League education, awards
and family: ethnicity or cultural difference are completely absent and therefore not
considered an asset or resource for the marketing of her YA novels: we discover
that she is Thai in an inteview in which she mentions that only one of her books
explicitly addresses the issue114.
Subjectification is a formation process in which «societal organization and
self-constitution bleed into one another»115 in such a way that the notion of creative
(self)entrepreneurship, linked to processes of aspirational middle-classification116,
brings together a self-employment ethos that cultivates an enterprising self with
the neoliberal type of governmentality which «interpellates the individual as the
actively choosing and self-responsible consumer/entrepreneur who is motivated by
economic self-interest and risk-calculation, and who freely and willingly engages in
a ceaseless project of self-making and self-governance»117. The creativity dispositif is
not coercive, McRobbie explains, because it encourages «the unleashing of an inner
creativity, which brings the tantalizing promise of self-reward, thereby almost ne-
gating the threat of insecurity. Or at least, the risk is written into the excitement of
the undertaking [...] the imperative to ‘be creative’ is an invitation to discover one’s
112. http://www.joshlanyon.com/about.html.
113. http://www.gallagherwitt.com/.
114. Pintip Dunn on Lit With Love. S.1 ep. 7, October 21, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=7fZ_Yytb2Kc.
115. Bröckling, «Gendering the Enterprising Self: Subjectification Programs and Gender
Differences», Distinktion, 11, 2005, pp. 7-23.
117. Eva Yin-i Chen, «Neoliberal Self-Governance and Popular Postfeminism in Contempo-
rary Anglo-American Chick Lit», Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 36, 1, March 2010, p. 243.
Reading the Romance Writer
own capabilities, to embark on a voyage of self-discovery, for example, by joining

a creative-writing class»118. McRobbie could be analysing the self-description of en-
trepreneurial romance writers, who choose a craft as an alternative to an unrewarding
job or an escape from motherhood despite the fact that it blurs the line between
paid and unpaid work, particularly in relation to the practice of self-publishing or
what one could call DIY authorship: «Gone are the days where a writer had to send
their manuscript by courier and hold their breath while waiting for a response. Now,
thanks to e-book publishing, armed with just a laptop and an internet connection,
anyone can be their own editor, agent and publisher»119. Does DIY publishing imply
longer self-imposed working hours or a liberation from the demands and impera-
tives of large publishing companies?
Angela McRobbie has identified an egalitarian spirit in the creativity dispositif
because everybody can have a creative career so long as she taps into the «self, and
somehow uncover[s] a unique talent, a set of capacities which can be nurtured and
then exploited»120. There is a belief that anyone can write a good romance so long
as she learns the craft, perseveres and is discplined about her writing. Eloisa James,
in Love Between the Covers, declares that «Romance is one of the few meritocracies
left. You can be a chef. Cooking is a meritocracy, and romance is a meritocracy. Any
woman sitting at her table can look at this book and say “I can do it”, and what’s
more, “I can do it really well, I can be Nora Roberts”, right? Nora Roberts just had
her two kids, there is a snowstorm, she sits down, she starts writing, now she owns
two mountains. Right. I can own a real mountain»121. However, the emphasis placed
on education, the pressure to constantly workshop one’s own work or try out a
different subgenre, the complaints about rejections from publishers and deadlines,
the often strained relationships with editors and agents belie the ease of the path
described by James.
More work is needed to investigate how many authors fail to publish more
than one book, how many from the more than 10,000 members of the Romance
Writers Association make a living writing romance, how much time they spend on
relational labour, what are their backgrounds in terms of class, religion and politics
and how are these factors absorbed into the seemingly «neutral» representation of
love, family and sexuality found in the novels, an ideological depoliticising opera-
tion which Roland Barthes conveniently called and «ex-nominating phenomenon»
characteristic of capitalism122 which is even less visible at the moment since the
process of subjectification – including the formation of the romance author-entre-
preneur –, is both a disciplinary practice of subjugation and a form of self-consti-
tution. Further work on the complex interactive ensemble of this authorial figure
is required to fully comprehend the contextual nuances of the performance of au-
thorship across media and over time in relation to the publishing industry, romance
institutions such as the RWA, reader preferences and broader social, cultural and

119. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3370330/Buying-house-funding-wedding-
Vegas-giving-work-Meet-women-fortune-self-publishing-best-selling-books-wrote-home.html.
120. McRobbie, «Re-Thinking Creative Economy», p. 32.
121. Love Between the Covers, Laurie Kahn (dir.), 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-
CqCOKznOhc.
122. . Roland Barthes, Mythologies, New York, The Noonday Press, 1991, p. 138.
© Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties 2017

economic shifts in the US. Focus on one author’s trajectory or a group of authors
gathered according to subgenre, region or generation may also be of interest, to-
gether with a better understanding of their habitus, the production of middle class
femininity and the fictional representation of class, lifestyle and status. How does
their place of residence and background map onto the electoral map? Currently,
as we have seen, the creativity dispositif has had a discernible impact on the ways
in which romance authors pitch themselves to their readers on webpages and talk
about their own work, but this self-representation varies contextually so a compar-
ative study between author figures from different countries and periods may throw
light upon the cultural forces at work in the process of authorial self-presentation.

Nattie Golubov
Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Romance Author Entrepreneur Illi - 21golubov

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Reading the Romance Writer

information found on their webpages becomes an essential factor in the reception

hand at different subgenres, frequently using pseudonyms for different styles. In

20. « The Road to Publication », http://www.sherrilynkenyon.com/about/the-road-to-pub-

One of the fundamental imperatives of entrepreneurial discourse is the pressure

passion»37. According to Jessica Taylor, tension is experienced by romance writers

42. Taylor, op. cit., p. 287.

sub-genre59; 2) the conception of writing as a craft and a profession which can be

59. Ibid., p. 77.

ingly neutral and white neutral»78, neutral understood as «relatable», presumably

There is a collective inclination to sustain a particular image of the gendered

subject of solidarity, highlights this conviviality91. The porous boundary between

« Advocacy » is conducted through newsletters and Facebook, she goes on to

95. Lit With Love, S.1 ep. 1 Beverly Jenkins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5_jr-ARl-

These portrait photographs, taken from 2016 RWA award-winning author

106. Pascal Durand, « De Nadar à Dornac. Hexis corporelle et figuration photographique de

The photograph substantiates her self-description:

Her bio seamlessly incorporates many of the themes discussed previously:

In contrast, webpages showcasing writers that specialise in hybrid genres such

«Indianness» is inscribed in Sonali Dev›s webpage aesthetic as well as on

of the commodification of identity110. The use of difference in the making of the

own capabilities, to embark on a voyage of self-discovery, for example, by joining

118. McRobbie, Be Creative, p. 15.

© Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties 2017

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