Dee Savoy

Other times it just sucks. Like when you are a romance author trying to convince potential readers that your books aren’t just smut. Sure, I write about sex, pretty explicitly, too, no closed bedroom doors for me. I write about people falling in love and sex, hopefully, is a part of that, but it is not the thrust of the story. Yes, Martha, there is a plot in my books, usually pretty complex, particularly when I’m writing suspense. I haven’t done a survey, but I doubt you’d find more than 20 pages in which my characters are actually engaged in sex in either of my last two books. Considering that both of them were over 300 pages long, that’s about 7 percent of the novel spent on describing the deed. I probably spend more time discussing the weather.

You can’t really blame the public for the image of romance, when three quarters of the covers feature some couple in some form of embrace on the cover. It implies that all that is important in the story is the frequency and duration of the hot and heavy. I’ve fought the clinch battle with both my publishers and appear to have won, judging by my last two covers, one of which features a lone woman.

But the fact remains, most romances are marketed on an individual level to appeal to readers on a sexual basis. And it appears on a category-wide approach as well. I’d never been to this site before, but an author friend clued me in to Dear Author where the discussion of Harlequin’s new Romance Report is the topic du a couple of days ago.

Most posters over there seem to be of the agreement that Harlequin’s focus on pornography and the prurient missed the mark with most readers. I haven’t read this report (if anybody’s got a copy please contact me) and didn’t know it existed until now. I’ve only been part of the Harlequin family since they took over BET a little over a year ago. From what I understand, this 21-page brochure is sent to the media and elswhere to stimulate interest in Harlequin–the company, its titles and authors. Yet, from what I understand, only a handful of books are actually featured.

Leaving aside my personal dislike for pushing the prurient aspects in romance, I wonder if what Harlequin is doing is a strategy that works. Considering that romance has been leaching readers to other genres and to the internet for a while now (I could pull out statistics, but I won’t bore you) wouldn’t a shift in focus appear to be in order? Besides, with the rise of erotica, erotic romance and romantica, the average stuff in a lot of romance novels is pretty tame.

So I ask, what matters more to you in a romance–the characters, the plot, the clinch on the cover, the steaminess quotient, some mix of these factors? What, if anything, bothers you about the way romance is promoted? To clinch or not to clinch? You decide.