Part #3 of our chat with @Dabney Grinnan LUV: Do you see any book trends? Absolutely. I am thrilled by and blown away by the huge rise in sexually diverse romance. If you had told me five years ago the big five (publishing houses) would be publishing queer covers, lesbian covers, menage covers… I also see this in readers. Readers are now reading so much more that HET (heteronormative) romance. I credit this tremendously to great writing by authors like KJ Charles who trailblazed the way in historical romance. There is such a glut of World War II women’s fiction that I am noticing World War I fiction. Literally there is too much WWII. I see a trend I am not crazy about – there is a historical romance author whose books I love. She incorporates modern values into her stories, but in every book the heroine hits or slugs the hero. What we see is women behaving badly. The justification is that men have always behaved badly. We should not excuse this behavior. AAR has always rated books on a sensuality scale. What we used to consider hot was anything outside male/female fairly traditional sex. It’s interesting to see the huge rise of books that are not marketed as erotica that 5 years ago would have been. Instead these stories are marketed as mainstream. Everyone is getting over the cartoon covers. I’ve seen some cool new covers that are a blend of photography and cartoon. A big trend that is worrying to me is that is AAR and romance writers have relied on some kind of gatekeeping for quality. Amazon has completely upended that. It is harder and harder on Amazon to find well written romance. Authors who are writing a book a month and selling it for 99 cents win the Amazon algorithm. Sites like AAR and Smart Bitches have never been more important because it’s hard to find quality romance because of the quantity of books and the Amazon rubric.

Posted by LUV Team at 2022-03-31 19:00:59 UTC