New from the publishing industry: Crimson Romance, Simon & Schuster’s “diverse romance” imprint, recently announced on Twitter that it will close. The Book Riot blog reports: “The Ripped Bodice, a Los Angeles romance bookstore whose owners recently published a report on the state of diversity in the genre, retweeted the announcement, noting that Crimson Romance is the only romance publisher that published at least 25% books by authors of color last year (the next highest was 12.6%). Members of the romance community expressed their disappointment in the decision.”
We’re awfully glad to know that the “romance community,” like other communities, is equipped with its own diversity watchdogs, ready and able to publish reports on the number of minority or otherwise marginalized practitioners it generates.
The same day we read the sad news about Crimson Romance, the Guardian reported that romance authors—the vast majority of whom, we gather, are female and politically liberal—are having trouble figuring out how to write alpha-male-dominated stories in the era of Donald Trump. “I woke up on 9 November [2016] and I was like, ‘I can’t write another one of these rich entitled impenetrable alphas. I just can’t,’ ” says famed romance author Sarah MacLean, who at the time was writing a bodice-ripper that included an aggressive male as one of its two main protagonists.
The Scrapbook is not a fan of romance fiction, but it would seem pretty difficult to imagine a romance novel without a fairly aggressive manly-man. Hence MacLean’s problem. Her manuscript, she realized in the shock of Trump’s victory, “was the story of that horrible impenetrable alpha evolving through love to be a fully formed human, which is a thing we do a lot in romance. And I just couldn’t see a way in my head that he would ultimately not be a Trump voter.”
Romance is a billion-dollar industry, explains the Guardian’s reporter. “Yet, to some,” she writes, having apparently adopted the famously bad writing of the romance genre, “it might seem a jarring relic among the current, wider conversations about sexual politics and gender equality.”
So what did MacLean do? How did she respond to this existential predicament? She called her editor. “I said, ‘I can’t do it.’ It was a bad day. But my editor was also a wreck about the election and understood.” MacLean wrote the entire book, this time with a more nuanced and sensitive male protagonist. But the author wasn’t satisfied with the result: “I was like, ‘I can’t even stomach this guy, he’s not sexy.’ ”
We shudder to think of the literary masterpieces that will never be written. We’re like, “Oh great, now Trump’s ruining our bodice-rippers, too!”
