The Library of Congress and The Center for the Book did a great job at hosting this conference. The sneak preview of the Love Between the Covers documentary was informative and entertaining and ably captured the joy and enjoyment to be found by authors and readers in the romance genre.
All of the panels were interesting, some much more than I anticipated. The panel members provided some great discussion, and the attendees some equally great and very intelligent/probing questions. The final panel was on where romance fiction is heading in the digital age. Cathy, I took notes on this one for you, and Sarah Wendell (@SmartBitches) caught all the highlights in her live tweeting (#poprom). I'm not enough of a multitasker to manage live tweeting. From my notes:
Digital has allowed the reader to assume a position of power. - Angela James
The shift to digital has forced publishers to show how they can add value to the relationship between the author and reader. (Forget who said this.)
Three elements of digital media: 1) an explosion in DIY media; 2) social media is a very nice space today and we don't know where it's going, but we can learn a lot about readers and engage with them and build communities; 3) multimedia - we can now tell stories across media platforms. - Tara McPherson, associate professor of gender studies and critical studies, University of Southern California
Women genres really shape more of modern culture than any other.
On discoverability: Liliana Hart says, "Write more books. Write more books that people want to read." She went on to say that she launched her self-pub career like a traditional publisher would have. It's a business; have a strategy. She launched five books at one time in order to have an immediate backlist, but notes that this requires a lot of patience on the part of the author to wait until those books are written and ready before putting them out into the market.
More from Liliana Hart: Find out who your readers are. Self-publishing can really help fill the gap. She was told that romantic suspense was dead, but she's doing very well with it. Same for chick lit - allegedly dead but there are people finding success writing it. Write what you want to write, and have an overall business plan.
Still on discoverability: Librarians are sometimes the ones who find the niche because readers are asking for it. - Sarah Frantz Lyons, editorial director of Riptide Publishing and founder of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.
Question from the audience: Can digital have an impact narratively - changing the way stories are told? For instance, Henry James' later style was influenced by his use of a dictophone and speaking his stories instead of writing them. Jon Fine, former director of author and publisher relations at Amazon, replied: Publishers are now thinking of creating books in every possible media. Angela James noted that while romance readers helped drive digital publishing's success, they have not embraced multimedia because they want to remain immersed in the story - no interruptions. This, however, is also very societal and romance in Japan is very different. Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah says data shows that romance readers don't want (multimedia) enhancements in their books.
Re: subscriptions. There are models where you can make money and models where you can't. You'd better know which is which before entering into a subscription model. - Dominique Raccah.
Author Elizabeth Essex said, "I don't think we need to separate out that there's only one job for authors and one job for publishers." It doesn't matter how you do this as long as you respect the people you write the books for.
Genre fiction is really limited in its scope because it's found only in certain parts of the bookstore (e.g. romance section or sci fi section) and not in others. - Dominique Raccah. We create a set of outcomes with those genres that we need to think about. She also said, "We're living in the Renaissance of the book." People are reading and talking about books more now than ever.
Jon Fine noted that how we inculcate a culture of reading in our youth when they may not have ever frequented a bookstore is something that is constantly being discussed.
