Dreams of Dunes and Hefty Sales
(03/11/2010) If the digital revolution has knocked publishing on its heels, no facet of the business is worse off than fiction. A worried novelist who lives around here said recently it was going the way of poetry — to the fringes. But one genre has successfully slipped the punishment.
“Romance hasn’t been in trouble, it’s doing very well for everybody,” Bertrice Small, who has been called the doyenne of romance writers, said Sunday from her home in Southold. “If it weren’t for romance, writers of literary fiction wouldn’t get published. . . . It’s a billion-dollar-a-year industry. It sells more fiction than every other genre put together.”
“The romance genre has voracious readers. I’ve got lawyers, doctors, Ph.D.s, as well as readers who can barely spell their name.”
She’ll be facing some of them on Sunday at the Amagansett Library, when at 1:30 p.m. she’ll join a few colleagues in discussing the field, or, as the program’s title has it, “The Love of Romance Novels: Why People Read Them, What Makes Them Special, Why and How We Write Them.” With her will be others from Dunes and Dreams, the East End chapter of Romance Writers of America, among them Barbara Metzger of Montauk. Both women go heavy on the history. “She writes lovely Regency stuff,” Ms. Small said, speaking of a subgenre that emphasizes a particular style as much as an early-19th-century English setting.
“When I started, my histories were considered outrageously sexy,” Ms. Small said. She has become known, however, for her historical accuracy. “I’ve written about Tudor England a lot. The Elizabethan era. Scotland, everybody loves Scotland. I like the reign of Charles II. It was a very colorful time, very bawdy.”
And then there’s her own history. She has been in the business for 32 years. “I started as one of the original ‘Avon ladies,’ ” she said of a group of eight women who, in the wake of “The Flame and the Flower,” a trailblazing hit by Kathleen Woodiwiss, helped shape the resurgent field in the 1970s under the direction of an Avon editor named Nancy Coffey. “I’m one of three left standing.”
She has been on the best-seller lists of The New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and The Los Angeles Times. Romance Times magazine gave her a lifetime achievement award.
She is nothing if not prolific, having written three books a year for the past 10. “I’ll have 51 books in print as of the summer,” she said. “The romance genre is a hydra,” she said, checking off various subgenres: “historical, Regency, paranormal, western, mystery-suspense, contemporary erotica. . . .”
Fantasy, too, which seems an appropriate amalgam — other worlds, out-of-this-world sex. Her latest book, due out in May from Harlequin, is “Crown of Destiny.” It concludes her World of Hetar series, in which fairies and shadow princes cavort and carry on.
The other Dunes and Dreamers on Sunday will be PattiAnn Bergen, Candace Gold, and Gina Ardito. The group will next meet, by the by, on March 20 at the Patchogue-Medford Library. The theme? “Too Fast? Too Slow? Get the Pace Right!” Guests will be welcomed.