With the sniggering title “Textually Promiscuous”, Publishers Weekly takes an inside look at romances and the romance community. While the title is rude, the contents are mostly positive with a focus on the diversity (not ethnic but theme) of the genre. While paranormal or otherworldly romances are popular, it appears that the historical is not down and out but never even suffered a lapse.
I was surprised to see that PW made a couple of big errors. First, it referred to JR Ward’s Lover Enshrined as being released in January 2008 when the publication date has actually been moved back to June of 2008. (As an aside, this is my least favorite Ward cover). Second, in referring to online communities, it points to Romancing the Blog, but gets the web address wrong identifying it as romancingthe-blog.com instead of romancingtheblog.com. That sucks for RTB.
In any event, it is definitely worth a read.
I don’t find the title “sniggering” or “rude”. It’s an eye-catching headline, and it suits the point made in the article: that romance readers have varied interests.
I think it’s a positive article that captures some of the current genre trends and tensions. The editors gave thoughtful responses (no “It’s just silly novels” overtones as in the recent BBC radio piece on M&B), and historical romance came off looking pretty great–Dutton describes a combination of good writing, good history, and solid sales.
The Teach Me Tonight group deserve kudos for creating a critical mass of scholarship so that the article didn’t rely on dated, hostile academic perspectives on romance. I think it’s striking that none of that’s in the article, except as a frame for Pamela Regis’ perspective. And the rest of the online romance community gets high praise too. From the article, it’s obvious a lot is going right in this corner of fiction.
RfP, we’re very happy to be in the shadow of Pam at the moment! A great deal of what the academic romance *is* right now is because of Pam. She’s a fabulous resource and a very generous scholar and friend. But thank you for your kind words.
I saw Pamela Regis listed in TMT’s “About Us” section, so I was trying to congratulate her and the rest of you all together!