Romancing the Atlantic

If Black Lace was a slice of cake, some of the lovely ladies here would be dark chocolate curls, the luscious cherries soaked in brandy and the tart coffee center. My place would be the fluffy pink frosting on the top. I’m basically a boring person with a wild imagination, so I apologize if this blog isn’t as scintillating and edgy as usual!

I write erotic romance even if my idea of what constitutes a happy ending isn’t the conventional one woman one man anymore. Growing up in England, my romance reading was confined to Mills & Boon and the gritty northern sagas by such writers as Catherine Cookson. I sensed even then that something was missing. I tried to write my own sagas but I kept morphing into a bad imitation of Jane Austen with sex and somehow I couldn’t quite get it right.

Then my big sisters discovered Kathleen Woodiwiss. I’d hide in the bottom bunk bed and listen to them read the books aloud to each other while giggling uncontrollably. After mulling over what I’d heard, I’d invariably have to ask my mum a few questions: such as what does phallic mean and what exactly is a burning tinderbox of love? She did her best to answer me and I knew I was getting somewhere.

I kept writing through university and the early years of marriage, still not getting it right. Feedback was at least consistent. Too much sex and not enough gritty angst. I stopped writing.

Fast forward to the late 1990’s and I get to move to California with my lovely family. Of course the first thing I do is head for a bookstore and I find a huge section labeled ROMANCE. I pick up the first book I see, which happens to be a Catherine Coulter, and I start reading. This book has SEX in it and a happy ending. A light exploded in my skull and I realized I’d found my audience.

I wrote a note to Catherine Coulter and she kindly replied and pointed me in the direction of Romance Writers of America. I was on my way to finding my peeps. Just in case you don’t know, RWA has over 9000 members both published and unpublished, including Nora Roberts. Romance in the U.S. accounts for over 51% of paperback sales and generates approximately 1.2 billion dollars in sales a year. That is a big number and makes the romance industry a force to be reckoned with. Every time someone sneers at what I do, and it’s not just men, I drop those numbers into the conversation and it usually makes them pause.

A romance section in an American bookstore is vast. It contains every sub-genre possible from inspirational, contemporary, paranormal, science fiction, historical, futuristic and of course, erotic. It’s a constantly mutating and developing market place.

When I first moved here, Black Lace books were shelved in some very strange places that included not only the erotica section but sexual therapy and ethics. Now they have proudly taken their place in the romance section as the American market has become hotter and hotter.

Some of that change has come from the internet publishers such as Ellora’s Cave, New Concepts Publishing and Amber Quill. They gave American women the opportunity to buy very hot romance novels as downloads which avoided a trip to the local bookstore and the potential snottiness of a sales assistant who considered all romance trashy porn. (and what’s wrong with that anyway?) Now most of the New York publishers have their own erotic romance lines. Kensington Aphrodisia (I’m also contracted to write for them) makes no apologies for publishing erotica. They chose to call it erotic romance in order to get it shelved in romance.

These publishers pushed the envelope and took their readers along with them. Of course, Black Lace had been merrily doing that for years. For me, my journey as a writer took me to Ellora’s Cave and then back in a nice cosmically pleasing circle to Black Lace and Cheek. As BL seek a bigger market share in the U.S. will the erotica publishers here reciprocate and send their books over the pond and how will they be received?

I’ve never quite understood why the huge Romance section available in an American bookstore hasn’t worked its way across the Atlantic yet. I know that it’s beginning to. My five sisters have converted a lot of people since I ‘showed them the way’.

When I lived in Britain, the word ‘romance’ conjured up Mills & Boon and that was it. Now it makes me think of a multitude of different sub-genres and a market that keeps on growing alongside an increasingly sophisticated audience. Will romance ever explode in Britain or is the word too clichéd to reflect the variety now available? It will be interesting to see.

Oh, and wish me a happy birthday-I’m… another year older. As my friend said on my card: “We’ll still be friends when we’re old and mysteriously not at all gray.”

Kate Pearce