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| Romantica for the brave |
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| Thank you everyone who was kind enough to write to me about the subject of what authors are worth. Some of the emails I received suggested that the fact that authors earn anything at all is amazing as there are just so many of us. Others were surprised that authors didn't get increased amounts of money for each book. (Well, some do, of course).
I did a little research this morning and discovered that the most highly paid authors as a group are those who write romances. By romance, I do not mean only those books published by Harlequin with covers that show a momentarily impassioned half naked man ravishing a woman whose clothes are about one button away from the floor. What I mean is pretty much anything that centers around romance and sex, from women's contemporary novels to historic romances to erotica.
Erotica turns out to generate top dollar. Within the genre are sub-genres, including the sex-as-story novels and the Total Smut. The latter I didn't look into because it was too disgusting to contemplate. The former is known sometimes by the name romantica. Carrie Lewis, writing for Suite101.com, reports that writers of this genre earn ten times what other writers earn, and many of them are regularly topping $100,000 per year. Raeline Gorlinsky, publisher of Ellora's Cave, a leading line of erotic/romantica e-books, appears to regularly invite writers to try their hand at erotic fiction, the guidelines for which are posted on the website. No agents required.
Could I ever write such fiction? Of course not. It isn't that I consider myself too good to write genre fiction (I doubt there's a writer in this world who hasn't secretly wished to write a good detective novel) but that I can't possible write about sex. I can't even talk about except in a doctor's office and then only in the form of answering yes/no questions. Romantica? For the very brave among us.
Here's the website but don't tell them I sent you: www.ellorascave.com/.
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| Wednesday, November 19, 2008 | 12:46:38 |
