Viking Unchained - the Time traveling Navy Seal Viking
What are other popular “girl porn” titles?
There is a particular imprint (a sub-brand within a publisher) called Brava Romance, which features exclusively romance novels that are VERY graphic. Lori Foster is one of the top authors in their stable, but you really can’t go wrong.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/catalog.cfm?dest=dir&linkon=section&linkid=88
FYI, “girl porn” AKA, the romance novel industry, accounts for over 50% of all fiction sold, and was a 1.3 BILLION dollar industry in 2007.
OMG, did the author really call one of her novels “The Very Virile Viking”??? :eek:
I don’t read this particular genre, but I’ve read a couple of Diana Gabaldon novels that would probably fit.
Do you have a cite for those numbers? Because this link puts the entire book industry at $25 billion for 2007. I would assume fiction makes up more than $2.6 billion of it.
http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/indStats_02.htm
Lemony Snicket writes smut!
The correct phrasing is that romance is more than 50% of all mass market paperback fiction.
With the boom now in “chick lit” the romance genre is also taking larger bites out of the hardback and trade paperback markets.
The Romance Writers Report, the magazine of the Romance Writers of America, does an annual industry stats article. If I have a chance later I try to dig up the latest one.
Most romance is not girl porn. But romance erotica has become much larger and much more accepted in recent years. Black Lace books, blacklace-books dot co dot uk (must be 18 to enter), is one major publisher. Ellora’s Cave, ellorascave dot com, is another.
One of the erotica lines has a clause in its writers guidelines that most males will find hilarious. Although the protagonist can engage in any kind of behavior in the first half of the book - multiple partners, lesbian, bondage, whatever - once she finds her ultimate partner, she can’t have sex with anyone but that partner for the rest of the book. Not a male fantasy, but definitely a female one. That’s probably why Black Lace, among others, accepts manuscripts solely from females, even though a small but significant amount of romance writing is done by males under female pseudonyms.
I forgot to throw in that most titles are created by editors rather than writers. Editors think they know what will sell. If it sells, they take the credit.
And if it does’t sell, they blame the writers.
Romanceland is a strange, strange place. But Black Lace (I’m assuming you got the clause from Black Lace) isn’t entirely representative of erotic romance publishers as a whole. Neither, for that matter, is Ellora’s Cave (though it was the first e-publisher of “Romantica” and in some regards still the biggest of the specifically erotic romance pubs). Most erotic romance publishers draw the line at things like golden showers/scat, pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality (sorta), and snuff. Everything else, including women with multiple partners throughout the book, is acceptable–as long as its a recognizable romance in the end.
But to me, what they will or will not publish is less interesting than what you mention about only accepting female writers. The gender of the writer is SERIOUS BUSINESS! I’d be shocked if any other genres invested so much thought into the sex organs of the author. At least, in this day and age. For example, there are many female authors who write gay romance. At first, erotic romance pubs wanted nothing to do with this. Even though I (and many others) told them they were wrong for thinking women wouldn’t read m/m books (now it is the fastest growing trend in erotic romance). As a result, women wrote under male names and sold to traditional GLBT publishers. Eventually, those women, still writing with their male names, moved to the more accepting romance publishers. Now, though, there is backlash against women who write with male or gender neutral names because they are “tricking readers.” It’s so bad–and so illustrative of how strange romanceland is–that a gay male openly writing gay romance was recently hounded on a major blog because he wouldn’t “admit” to being a woman.
Wait… those are joke books, right? I’ve tried to google Sandra Hill, but there’s not real information about the intentionallity of the humor.
A time travelling viking-turned-navy seal? One day, I’m gonna figure out a way to MST3K books and make millions.
Right after I find out how to deal with the massive body image issues I got from looking at those covers just now. It’s good to see that men can finally be just as objectified as women, though.
Odd. The RWA cites the same source as saying the book biz is 10 billion in 2007 (“on net revenue, excluding book clubs, mail order, or Harry Potter books”).
http://www.rwanational.org/cs/the_romance_genre/romance_literature_statistics/industry_statistics
Textbooks (k-12 + College-level) could account for $10 billion of the difference.
http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/documents/S12007Final.pdf
I’ve heard of The Very Virile Viking before (a friend of mine picked it up from the thrift store because of the title), and apparently it WAS intentionally humorous. It is a romance novel, but one that’s meant to be funny.
There were apparently (at least) two different covers for VVV, one of which looks like a typical schlocky historic romance and the other which looks like a more lighthearted, humorousbook. The editorial reviews on Amazon indicate that it was intended as a comic novel.
It’s hard to tell the exact differences in publishing history from those links, but US and UK covers are almost always wildly different for any and all books.
Both covers were available in the US, I was just using the first links I found. Here’s the cartoon cover on the American Amazon site.
I haven’t read VVV, but apparently the premise sounds funny because it’s supposed to be funny. Looking at the Amazon info on the sequels, most seem to be intentionally humorous as well, although with a few the description is unclear on this point.
Let it not be said that romance authors lack a sense of irony about their work; In Jennifer Crusie’s novel “Welcome to Temptation” the heroine cribs from her sexploits with the hero and turns them into the storyline of a softcore porn movie. Community outrage, and penis, ensue. LOL!
Interesting. Alternate covers are rare but hardly unheard of. I wonder whether one came first and was in response to reaction to the book or whether they tried a split run with different promotional targets.
Amazon gives the publication date for the cartoon cover as being a month before the shirtless hunk cover, but that’s so close together I don’t know if it means they weren’t happy with the initial sales of the cartoon cover or if both were planned at about the same time.
It looks like all the sequels have only hunk covers, so that must have been the more successful way to market them. I’d guess that “you got humor in my romance!” is an easier sell than “you got romance in my humor!”