by Maya Rodale
And yet, at the same time, if subsequent versions were to be produced, authors had a chance to do revisions, especially with the invention of moveable type. One book might be reissued with a new introduction. Even within the same edition, “early editions of Byron and Scott, which were usually produced against the clock, contain many corrections, new errors, and some substantial variations,” St Clair writes.
Thanks to the invention of moveable type, a book could be altered, transformed, revised, or expanded with each new printing, making it a conversation with reviewers and readers and a revelation of the author’s process. It also takes some of the authority away from the author; by making revisions or corrections or responses, it implies they’re not infallible.
This changed, however, with the invention of stereotype plates in 1810. These metal plates were made after the text had been set up in moveable type, and while there was an initial cost to create them, they could be put in storage and brought out to create substantially cheaper editions of popular books. It also meant greater print runs were possible, which meant more money. “By 1839 it was said that 100,000 impressions could be taken from one set of plates,” St Clair writes. It also brought an end to the practice of making revisions to different editions.
Size matters
When it comes to books, size does matter. Smaller is cheaper, of course. The smaller (and cheaper) book size, the duodecimo, greatly increased in popularity from the first days of the printing press to the mid-eighteenth century when most novels were published in this format. One scholar writes, “it is tempting to view the duodecimo as the early modern equivalent of the twentieth-century ‘pulp’ paperback commonly associated with light fiction for women.”[52] We might presume the reference is also comparable to a modern-day, mass-market romance novel.
Not only is smaller cheaper, but it is also more mobile, which is important when it came to the lending libraries or railway station stores—or the pockets of a woman’s dress. Many novels were expensive and many of “the new books of the romantic period were too big and too valuable to be taken outside.”[53] But with small, cheaply produced books, it became possible to start taking them off the shelf and out of the study. This is important to the development of lending libraries, which made books more affordable for many people. When it came to selling these books at retailers other than traditional bookstores, such as at railway stations, what a reader was looking for in a book changed subtly; from a fancy, expensive volume that would be a prize collectible to a volume that was lightweight lasted only for the duration of the journey, and could be left behind. Trashy. Throwaway. Books.
The mass-market paperback
The trend of small, cheap, mass-produced books continued into the 1900s with the invention and popularization of the mass-market paperback. A combination of technological innovations, new sales and marketing strategies, and new methods of distribution influenced the editorial content publishers sought—it moved away from what distinguished literary gentlemen could sell to a small, discerning audience to what publishers could predictably sell to a large, predetermined audience. It was another step in the transition from a patronage-based publishing system, in which a wealthy individual funded the publication of a particular work, to a more commercial system that answered to the book-buying public.
Early in the game were the Beadle Brothers, who specialized in publishing Westerns in America in the mid 1800s. Radway writes that they “reasoned that once they had loosely identified an actual audience by inducing it to buy a specific kind of book, it would not be difficult to keep that audience permanently constituted and available for further sales by supplying it with endless imitations of the first success.”[54] They were right. And to do this successfully, it required a standardization of both the physical product and the content within.
Later, in the early 1900s, Robert de Graff changed the game with the popularization of the paperback. He took advantage of new technologies in printing, binding, and glue to do massive print runs at a low cost. To distribute all these copies, he turned to the American News Company, which distributed newspapers and magazines to a network of thousands of retailers, such as drugstores, candy shops, and food outlets. To convince these retailers to take a chance on his new product, de Graff instituted a returns policy that plagues publishing to this day (any unsold copies could be returned, at a cost, to the publisher).
Books became cheaper and more accessible than ever. As they became more successful and profitable, it cemented the strategy of creating and selling books as commodities. But not without some downsides.
“When paperbacks first came into publishing, they were seen as lesser than,” says Esi Sogah, the romance editor. “All the things that continued to be pubbed in paperback took on that reputation of a pulpy disposable book.”
Formula fiction
Romance novels are formulaic. This is not a new critique of the genre; in an article on “sensation novels” in 1863, the author wrote of women’s fiction: “We watch them advancing through the intricacies of the plot, as we trace the course of an x or y through the combinations of an algebraic equation, and with about as much consciousness of individuality in the ciphers...” Snark!
Other things that are formulaic: physics, algebra, haikus, sonnets, recipes, other genre fiction. Yet none of these are judged poorly for adhering to a repeatable form. Romance, on the other hand, is somehow different. “You don’t hear it leveled against any other genre,” agrees Sogah.
Romance novels are not the only literary genre that adheres to certain plot conventions. “In any genre there are rules. Mysteries are a great example of this,” says Jenn Northington, former event manager at the independent bookstore WORD in Brooklyn. “There are all these different subgenres in mystery as well. Each of them has its own set of conventions.” And she points out, “They’re not necessarily bad.”
As with other aspects of the romance genre, what contributes to its success is part of what damns it. In romance, first we have the meet cute, then the obstacles, then the black moment when all seems lost, and finally the happy ending. The formula provides an advantage when it comes to perpetuating the genre. For one thing, it makes it easier to teach the genre to a new generation of writers by giving them a solid framework in which to demonstrate their creativity.
But while it helps authors get started, it doesn’t necessarily stifle their creativity. Many authors would probably agree with Esi Sogah when she says, “It’s harder to write within constraints and to be interesting and creative and to hold attention than it is to just do whatever. And I think sometimes people don’t see that.”
So what is the formula? Is there a rule that the couple must meet by chapter three, have their first kiss on page 69, and confront a nasty villain exactly three-quarters into the story? It’s much more vague. Pamela Regis outlines eight elements of the romance novel that are identifiable in most—from the attraction of the two main characters to the “black moment” and the betrothal. But it’s even more basic than that: “A romance should have a romance,” says Sogah. It should also have a happy ending. Most would argue that it’s not a romance without these two elements. And most romance readers would be supremely pissed if their expectations were not met.
The true power in the formula is not just how it standardizes the genre conventions and makes it more easily replicable. The formula is powerful because of how it affects the reading experience, how it makes the reader feel, and how that in turn affects sales.
Romance readers know that their romance absolutely will end happily, with the obstacles overcome, the couple in love, a bright future ahead of them, and all subplots and mysteries resolved. Because of this, the element of surprise is “ruined,” the stories are labeled “predictable,” and it is a horrible, horrible thing everyone should be ashamed of.
Unless, of course, Shakespeare does it. In fact, in some performances of his plays, someone comes out and announces what is about to happen in the next act. This is not to ruin the s
urprise but to change the reader’s focus.
When you know what is going to happen, you relax into the story and pay more attention to how it happens. When you know that it’s “safe” to care for the characters and identify with their feelings because no tragedy will befall them, the reading experience becomes more intense, more personal, more real. Recent neurological studies on the effects of reading in the brain show that we experience fiction more deeply than previously thought; it’s not just the “language” areas of the brain that light up, but sensory areas as well. When you read the word “cinnamon,” your brain is processing it not just as a word but also as a scent.
The formula and certainty of the happy ending allows the reader to focus more intensely on the journey the characters undertake and the transformation they undergo. They can feel it along with the characters. My hunch is that this enhances how our brains already process fiction. The overall effect is one that is more personal and profound that just reading through a collection of scenes that conclude with a moral judgment on how the characters behaved.
Because the reader has been feeling deeply as she reads, the emotional payoff with the happy ending is a tremendous experience. Romance readers know that warm fuzzy feeling, the sigh of delight, and the happily-ever-after glow that comes when finishing a romance. It’s not unlike the high of a drug. And it’s a high that readers crave again and again.
Readers also bought
For many people, Harlequin is synonymous with romance novel. The Canadian publisher got its start by reprinting English Mills & Boon novels for the North American market. But it was how they marketed those books that led to their tremendous success. Harlequin was “the first in the world to treat books like brand name commodities. Aggressive American-trained, marketing-driven male executives further refined these revolutionary ideas and virtually reinvented book publishing domestically and throughout the world by peddling romance novels like boxes of soap flakes in the very places where women shop,”[55] Paul Grescoe writes in his book Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance. Indeed, these executives came from companies that did in fact sell boxes of soap.
While Harlequin may have perfected this practice, they did not invent it. The commoditization of literature had been evolving for quite some time. Eighteenth and nineteenth century publishers understood that their success depended on answering the market’s demands. And if you were going to give readers the books they wanted, you had to provide them where the readers were looking for books.
Circulating libraries, such as Mudie’s, began to spring up in the eighteenth century and became tremendously popular, powerful, and influential by the 1840s. The cost of membership and book borrowing, while pricey, made book reading an option for more people. Being a business, Mudie’s sought out ways to increase their profits. One key strategy was the three-volume novel, which enabled one novel to be checked out by multiple readers at the same time, though in different stages of the book. Mudie’s also routinely purchased large quantities of novels—if not entire print runs—thus ensuring that a publisher could recoup expenses and make a profit. Naturally, publishers promptly published more novels to Mudie’s specifications.
St Clair writes that “the effect of Mudie’s declaring, in practice if not explicitly, that a ‘good’ book was published in three volumes and composed with women and young girls in mind”[56] was that publishers and authors would predominantly create exactly that. The fact that many novels didn’t even have an author’s name—as many as a third of all novels were just credited to “a lady”—was partially due to concerns for a woman’s reputation, especially if she was a woman of quality who ought to be ashamed of writing for money, but it also further reinforced the notion that all the books were interchangeable. They looked the same, the stories were similar, and they were written by the same anonymous author.
This system of course depended on supply and demand: As a certain type of book became more profitable to produce, publishers needed to find manuscripts to print. Implicit in this was the idea that because their motivation was profit and not, say, publishing the finest example of literature ever produced, publishers might select any manuscript that fit their need, regardless of how well written or plotted.
With standardized story elements, a standardized physical product, and a mass audience, selling one book on the reputation of another or on the expectations of the reader became a viable marketing strategy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, advertising was one of the major costs of producing a book,[57] and this like = like marketing method (especially once Mudie’s came along) meant fewer dollars needed to be spent on puffing reviews or newspaper adverts. Instead of guessing what a reader or customer wanted each time, authors and publishers could mitigate their risk and protect their time by generating more of the same.
St Clair explains, “We see the producers trying to commodify the text textually as materially by implying that they were broadly similar, within quite narrow limits, both in subject matter and the ideologies they advocated.”[58] Janice Radway notes that this continued in the American publishing industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where it was more cost effective to design an advertising campaign around a type of book rather than an individual title. A television ad from 1980 focuses on Harlequins, generally, instead of a specific title. The camera quickly pans over a big batch of new releases.
Once authors and publishers had become financially dependent on an audience of buyers, they had to satisfy those readers by giving them more of the same. Radway writes, “This new idea of the book as a salable commodity gradually began to alter the organization of the editorial process and eventually the conception of publishing itself.”[59] Instead of looking for a unique book that might serve a small, select, and disparate audience, they were keen to satisfy the hunger of a large audience that wanted more books like the ones they’d already read.
To help readers find more of the same, the books were made to look the same. Romances tend to have similar-looking covers (the classic clinch! The dreamy real estate drawings! The cuff links in dark shadows!), similar sounding titles, and, let’s face it, similar plots. This was true for early Harlequins, too: “So similar were the fat volumes in appearance (not to mention subject matter) that the more resolute readers would even put their own mark on the backs of the books to indicate whether they had already read them.”[60] In the effort to snare readers on a massive scale, the books end up looking and seeming really damn familiar—because they are.
Nowhere is this strategy of like = like more apparent than Amazon’s readers also-bought algorithm, which significantly simplifies the decision of what to read next by suggesting titles that similar readers bought, that are similar to the books you’ve previously purchased, or that are by the same author.
It is an extension of the system that has been developing for centuries. It is a system that is based on marketing books based on their similarities rather than on how they are unique. This helps to make a commodity out of literature by emphasizing what is easily replicable more than what is special.
However, each romance novel is special in some way. Agents and publishers are always on the lookout for “fresh” new stories and voices and authors strive to deliver this. As readers, we want a book to surprise and delight us—while still delivering the love story and happy ending we expect. And we know to find those stories by looking out for certain visual clues, whether the book is “By a Lady” or has Fabio on the cover.
In this volume-based business, everything is geared toward making the product easily replicable, whether it’s through the “formulaic” plot; the standard length, size, and format; the technological innovations in printing that allow for massive quantities to be cheaply produced; or marketing based on how one book is similar to a hundred others. These strategies have made romance a huge success, but they have also contributed to its bad reputation.
One commenter to a USA Today article about romance novels writes, �
�I can tell you exactly why it doesn’t garner respect: Because it is a book factory and they can churn them out like the cheap dime novels of old.”[61] From the beginning, what made the popular romance novel a commercial success prohibited it from being a critical success. It never had a chance of becoming respectable fiction.
A tale of two readerships
And then there’s William Wordsworth. He’s the quintessential nineteenth century romantic poet and author of such classics as I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and The Leech-Gatherer. Though he is required reading in many high school and college courses, he was not widely read in his time. His story highlights some of the tensions surrounding who and what literature is for.
In a time when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, with its crowded cities and stinking factories, the Romantic Movement glorified nature and the simple agrarian life. But for all that Wordsworth lauded the rural poor, his books weren’t exactly accessible to them. “Wordsworth may have believed that the rural poor were more sensitive to literature than gentlemen, but he did not number many leech gatherers among his readers,”[62] St Clair writes. His collection, The Excursion, was produced in quarto size, and for the price of one copy, a reader in Salisbury could have purchased 100 pigs.[63] However, his books weren’t the only pricey ones.
His print runs were small—around 500 copies compared to Jane Austen’s books (2,000) or Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels (tens of thousands). He barely sold any copies in his lifetime, yet today, he’s part of the canon.
If certain books were expensive to produce and had little hope of selling, generating a profit, or being widely read, why create them at all?
Mary Poovey, a professor at New York University, gets to the heart of the matter: “The Romantic definition of literary value made it difficult for authors of genres that were popular—whose value as commodities was unmistakable—to claim that their works were also valuable in aesthetic terms.”[64] Likewise, if Wordsworth and others like him couldn’t justify the production of his work in commercial terms, he had to find another way. The answer was to elevate one form of literature as intellectually superior and denigrate the other type as trash.