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Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community

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Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community by Jessica Anne Taylor A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Anthropology University of Toronto © Copyright by Jessica Taylor 2013 Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community Jessica Taylor Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Anthropology University of Toronto 2013 Abstract This dissertation explores how a solitary writer becomes a social writer, entering into the industrial and community relations of mass publishing. A significant part of this transformation is managed through writing organizations which mediate between the corporate world and individual writers. Despite being one of the most prolific and commercially successful book- markets in a time when both publishing and reading are perceived to be under threat, romance fiction, because of its gendered and classed status, is often neglected by the academy and patronized in the media. Researched through observation of the largest romance writers groups in Canada, which I call City Romance Writers, this dissertation explores how writers’ associations help shape would-be writers into players in the professional market, negotiating the boundaries between professional and amateur, local and global, creative and market-driven. It explores how romance writers organize to manage risk and uncertainty in the publishing industry and how they make claims to legitimacy and authority in the public sphere. Finally, it examines how structures of gender, race and class shape the communities romance writers form and the claims they make. I argue that romance writers’ discourses and practices surrounding writing and publication are a revealing terrain for the exploration of contemporary issues of media production, flexible labour, ii gender and community. In part because of the particular characteristics of romance writing itself, these themes are also underpinned by the constant presence of love, as a discourse, an activity and a story. While revealing the importance of affective discourses of passion and love in mobilizing writers to embrace their own flexibility, this dissertation also argues that writers’ affective relationship with their writing is not fully contained by capitalism. iii Acknowledgments Thank you to everyone involved in making this dissertation possible. As romance writers have shown me, writing is never really a solitary practice. All mistakes, of course, are mine. Thanks to the writers of CRW who let me tag along to their meetings and gave so generously of their time and to all the editors and other publishing professionals who gave me interviews and insight into the publishing world. Thanks to my co-advisors, Sandra Bamford and Joshua Barker, for supporting this project, to committee member Mary Nyquist for her valuable feedback and to external reader Ilana Gershon for her very helpful comments. Thanks also to Girish Daswani, Naisargi Dave, and Holly Wardlow for agreeing to be on various committees along the way and to the Department of Anthropology, the School of Graduate Studies and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for their financial and institutional support. Thanks to all my colleagues and fellow graduate students, especially the members of the Dissertation Writing Group and our informal Accountability Group, especially Kori Allan, Lindsay Bell, Sheri Gibbings, Sharon Kelly, Lauren Classen, Carmen Nave, Anna Polonyi, Laura Sikstrom, Alyson Stone and Zoe Wool, and to Andrew Gilbert and Tania Li for supporting graduate student writing. Thanks to family and friends for putting up with me during the disserting process, especially my girlfriend Anna Wilson for giving me feedback on the entire thing, my dad Christopher Taylor for turning a writer’s eye to the penultimate draft, and my friend Elah Feder for being my working companion and keeping me on track. iv Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Romance Writers and Mass Publishing ...................................................................................... 4 The Romance Publishing Industry .............................................................................................. 7 Flexible Labour: Beyond Factories and into the Middle Class ................................................... 8 Studying Mass-Market Romance: Love and Commerce .......................................................... 15 The Field: Among the Romance Writers .................................................................................. 21 Layout of the Dissertation ......................................................................................................... 24 Chapter One: Becoming a Romance Worker: Professionalism, Labour, and Emotion ................ 28 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 28 Making Pleasure Work ............................................................................................................. 32 Writers and the Romance Publishing Industry ......................................................................... 38 The ‘New Economy’ and Cultural Labour ............................................................................... 42 “Grown Up Business Women”: Professionalism, Self-Management and Legitimacy ............. 50 The Book of Your Heart ........................................................................................................... 54 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 58 Chapter Two: Loving the Novel: Writers, Texts and the Ideology of Fantasy ............................. 60 A ‘Writer Romance’ ................................................................................................................. 63 Ideologies of Writing ................................................................................................................ 66 Feminist Literary Criticism and a Defense of Romance ........................................................... 69 Valuing Affective Writing and Crossing the Boundaries between Fantasy and Reality .......... 74 A Community of Women: Past and Present ............................................................................. 79 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 82 Chapter Three: Making Romance Communities: CRW, Reflexive Practice, and Structuring Genre ............................................................................................................................................. 84 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 84 Creating a Romance Writing Community of Practice .............................................................. 86 Accolades and Raffles: Celebrating the Market ....................................................................... 90 Bring on the Cabana Boys ........................................................................................................ 92 Communities of Practice, Business and Reflexivity ................................................................. 94 Practicing the Romance Genre .................................................................................................. 97 v The Concept of Genre ............................................................................................................... 99 Learning and Teaching the Romance Genre ........................................................................... 103 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 110 Chapter Four: Voice, Pennames and Branding: Creating Romance Authors and Market Individuals ................................................................................................................................... 113 The Individual Voice .............................................................................................................. 115 What is ‘Voice’? ..................................................................................................................... 117 Voice, Individuality and Authenticity ..................................................................................... 120 Categorizing Individual Voices: Subgenre and Genre ............................................................ 122 Voice and Society ................................................................................................................... 124 Sign of the Writer: Pennames and Market Identity ................................................................ 124 Market Identity, as Individual ................................................................................................. 125 Pennames and Authorial Identity ............................................................................................ 129 “Seven letters or less”: Pennames and Control ....................................................................... 133 Market Identity, as Brand ......................................................................................................
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