Romance Writers of America

Her shelf is packed with honors.

She won four RITA Awards for Best Novel, is the only five-time winner of Romance Writers of America's Favorite Book of the Year, and was introduced into the RWA Hall of Fame in 2001.

She is a New York Times bestseller, and fans know her as the queen of romantic comedy.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips, I am so excited to have you on the podcast.

And I feel like- They were very

similar to the Romance Writers of America in that they just imploded one day.

Now branded as Novel November, at least one of the writing organizations that I engage with.

It's just interesting.

Mm-hmm.

No, that, those are exactly the, the two requirements that have been listed, presented by the Romance Writers of America.

Even if we don't trust them as an organization anymore-

Sure

And so I really had no idea that, you know, there was somebody behind [laughs] those words.

And, um, to get into the, well, getting to the writing romance, um, there was a group of, of women from southern Wisconsin who were part of the Wisconsin Romance Writers of America, and they came up to Chippewa Falls.

And a bunch of my friends, we went and listened to them talk about writing and stuff, and I'm like, "Well, that sounds really kind of interesting." So I mean, I had no idea what I was doing, no clue.

[laughs] So, but I just, you know, plugged away.

How do you actually define romance as a genre?

I think the most encompassing definition is the one that was adopted by the Romance Writers of America, which says that a romance has to have a primary focus on a relationship, and of course, that really important happy ever after ending, that emotionally uplifting ending.

So is there data around different genres that tells us what the gender split is? Because, I mean, a book could be marketed as romance, but that's a pretty broad, uh, definition that you've given.

It is.

It's really hard to pin down exactly what romance is, not least of which because romance can be almost anything.

If you think of any genre or subgenre that you might like to read, there's often a romantic counterpoint, romantic science fiction, romantic fantasy.

Um, there's not a great deal of data, but in 2021, the Romance Writers of America, the organization that I referenced just earlier, found that 18% of romance readers identified as men.

Again, it's a little bit tricky because there may be a number of men out there who are reading romance novels without knowing it because they've stumbled into it sideways via one of their preferred subgenres, whether that's, you know, reading a science fiction that has a really strong romance subplot, whether it's romantic suspense or crime romance.