We were in the supermarket last weekend, and as we’re going through the book aisle, this catches my eye:
Harlequin Romances with the NASCAR logo on them.
I stop. Can this be for real? There’s a bunch of them, with roguishly good-looking guys looking manly and promising… I don’t know – carbon monoxide fumes and blown-back grit. Loud engine revving and seem,ingly endless circuits around the track. Am I missing something?
You see Western Romances, but you never see, say, football romances, or Hunting romances. Howcum NASCAR is expexcted to rope in a female readership? Are there a lot of women heavily into NASCAR? Or are there a lot of guys who are closet Harlequin readers?
This is not particularily new–I think I heard it on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me a couple of years ago, and that wasn’t the first place I’d heard of it. (Although, in fairness, I don’t think they’d released any NASCAR romances at that time, just announced the partnership). (Poking around a bit, 2005 as the date for forming the partnership and 2006 as the date for the first published books seems reasonable).
I’ve read a couple–when an author I’d already determined I liked wrote them and I could pick them up at the library. They weren’t horrible, just prone to the usual quirks and predictable pitfalls common to series romance. They also weren’t strikingly better or more interesting than the usual run of such things, so I’ve not sought out more.
I’m not a NASCAR fan, so if any of the names dropped in the books are real NASCAR people, I didn’t notice. I did get the impression that the author I read (Pamela Britton) had spent enough time behind the scenes to know a fair bit about what goes on behind the scenes and portrayed it as accurately as one could expect. Only in a romance novel does the single father who teaches school and races go-carts on weekends go out for some kind of competition intended to glean the best amateur drivers and actually win, then go on to hook up with the widowed owner of the race car he’s driving and end with a proposal–and a promise to drive race cars for her and love her. (Any deviations from the actual plot of the book I’m semi-summarizing my fault alone).
Incidentally, while they haven’t been marketed as Football romances, neccessarily, especially since they are single-title as opposed to series romance, several of Susan Elizabeth Phillips novels feature pro-football players, owners, managers, etc. I can’t think of any romances that I’ve read that featured hunting as a theme/setting, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Signed,
A woman who reads too many romances, who sees the NASCAR romances as more of a brand which makes people shift money they’d already be spending on romance novels towards a particular subset of the genre rather than as a brand which makes people buy romances who would otherwise buy other stuff with their entertainment dollars. Harlequin and NASCAR may think otherwise.
Perhaps Harlequin Romances did a survey and discovered that the women who read their books are (more often than one might expect on average) married to or dating men who watch NASCAR races. For that matter, perhaps the men or women who read Harlequin Romances tend to watch NASCAR races. They wouldn’t be publishing the novels if they didn’t think that there was a market.