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« on: January 25, 2005, 05:05:55 PM »
Labels, labels, all is labels.
I had no idea that "Wake me. . ." was being sold as a romance. None of the stores I've been in have labeled that or HoM's other book that way. Instead, they've labeled them as Mormon Fiction, a label that has all sorts of connotations that I'm not going to touch at the moment.
I want to talk about romance novels. I know that bodice-rippers make up a large portion of the genre, but there is also the section of regency romances, which tend to be cleaner than the average romance. However, they still count as romance because the main object of the book is to tell a love story. That doesn't mean these books don't tell other stories as well. I'll cite Georgette Heyer who wrote romance and mysteries. Her regency romances tend to be light in the way they deal with characters, but she often brings in bits of mystery and comedy as well. My sister mostly reads Mormon romance fiction, and she tried Heyer and couldn't read it because it was too outside of her experience. She didn't understand the regency world and its conventions so the book wasn't enjoyable to her even though it was still technically part of her favorite genre. She loved "You Got Mail" but it didn't prepare her for an author who is one of the "queens" of romance.
What I'm trying to say is (and you know I'm not doing it very well if I have to sum up at the end) romance is not a genre of "read one, you've read them all" just as sf&f isn't like that. Both groups have large portions of pulp that is very similar, but it isn't all that way.
Also, as for sales of Sf&f dropping, I would guess that that statistic is for adult sf&f. Children's sf&f, while a hugely growing market, tends to be lumped together with children's sales.