View of Reading the Romance Writer as an Author-Entrepreneur

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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 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 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 esfuerzo 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.

Nattie G

^olubov

Reading the Romance Writer as an Author-Entrepreneur

To quote this article:

Nattie G^olubov, « Reading the Romance Writer as an Author-Entrepreneur », in: Interfé-

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Sascha bru (Ku leuven) Geneviève Fabry (UCL)

Agnès Guiderdoni (FNRS – UCL) Ortwin de GraeF (Ku leuven) Jan Herman (KU Leuven) Guido latré (UCL) Nadia lie (KU Leuven)

Michel lisse (FNRS – UCL) Anneleen masscHelein (KU Leuven) Christophe meurée (FNRS – UCL) Reine meylaerts (KU Leuven) Stéphanie vanasten (FNRS – UCL) Bart vanden boscHe (KU Leuven) Marc van vaecK (KU Leuven)

Olivier ammour-mayeur (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -–

Paris III & Université Toulouse II – Le Mirail) Ingo berensmeyer (Universität Giessen)

Lars bernaerts (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Faith bincKes (Worcester College – Oxford)

Philiep bossier (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Franca bruera (Università di Torino)

Àlvaro ceballos viro (Université de Liège) Christian cHelebourG (Université de Lorraine) Edoardo costadura (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena) Nicola creiGHton (Queen’s University Belfast) William M. decKer (Oklahoma State University) Ben de bruyn (Maastricht University) Dirk delabastita (Université de Namur) Michel delville (Université de Liège)

César dominGuez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella

& King’s College)

Gillis dorleijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Ute Heidmann (Université de Lausanne)

Klaus H. KieFer (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München) Michael KolHauer (Université de Savoie)

Isabelle KrzywKowsKi (Université Stendhal-Grenoble III) Mathilde labbé (Université Paris Sorbonne)

Sofiane laGHouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont) François lecercle (Université Paris Sorbonne) Ilse loGie (Universiteit Gent)

Marc mauFort (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Isabelle meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Christina morin (University of Limerick) Miguel norbartubarri (Universiteit Antwerpen) Andréa oberHuber (Université de Montréal)

Jan oosterHolt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) Maïté snauwaert (University of Alberta – Edmonton) Pieter Verstraeten ((Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

C^onseil^de^rédaCtion – redaCtieraad

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)

Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties KU Leuven – Faculteit Letteren Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – Bus 3331

B 3000 Leuven (Belgium)

C^omitésCientifique – WetensChappelijkComité

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Reading the Romance Writer as an Author-Entrepreneur

After all, we are all CEO’s of our own personal 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 production 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 industry 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/.

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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 specific 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 particular 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 entrepreneurial activity extended to all areas of her social relations, including the relationship 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 presence, 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-neoliberal-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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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 interacting 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 subjects 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 manual 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 xx^e 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 considered 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 it 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.

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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», understood 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 mechanisms »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 entrepreneurial 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 neoliberal 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 Ever 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.

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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 economic 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 private 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-taking 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 business 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-publication/.

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.

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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-publish. 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 chapter 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 marketing 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 practices.

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 produce «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 instruments, guides, manuals, devices, toolkits, mentoring schemes, reports, TV programmes and other 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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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, specifically 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-fulfillment, 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 mean that they don’t come down, occasionally»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 romantic 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 experience 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.

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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 passion. 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 rather 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-promotion 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.

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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 neoliberal 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. Others 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.

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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 writers 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, writing is a craft, and inspiration comes most often to those sitting in an appropriate 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 inspiration, are the terms used to describe this element outside of business that is necessary 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.youtube.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.

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a disciplined work schedule and controlled environment are propitious for «inspiration», 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, workshops, 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 readers 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 handbooks 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.

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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 contemporary 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 writers 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 explains 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.

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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 included 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 narrative 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 information 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

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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 domesticity, 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, husband, 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 knowledge 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, spouses 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

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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 it 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 because 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 trajectories 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.