Memories and old wounds
Kristan Higgins told Laurie Kahn, executive producer of the Popular Romance Project, about her first attempt at writing romance: “[It] was a very hilariously bad outline of an Irish romance. A handsome, wealthy Protestant duke falling for a peasant Catholic girl, and it was set during the Potato Famine. So I didn’t know what I was thinking.” Realizing she needed [...]
Inspirational qualities
Readers of inspirational romance want both a compelling, wholesome love story and an uplifting Christian faith element. A good inspirational romance supplies both of these, and more. Many contemporary readers find it challenging to live an authentic Christian life in today’s world, to act with integrity in an impure culture and to keep their faith, hope, and love alive in [...]
USA Today’s HEA
My days begin and end with a happy ever after. That’s because I’m the curator of USA Today’s Happy Ever After blog devoted to romance novels. You might think I’m quite the lucky dog for getting to do a romance-novel blog for
Digital self-publishing
Fact 1: BookStats, the annual survey of book publishing by the Book Industry Study Group and the Association of American Publishers, reports that in 2011 revenue from e-books surpassed that of physical books in the category of adult fiction. Fact 2: In the Amazon Kindle Store, romances are the largest category of genre fiction listed, outranking mysteries and thrillers by [...]
Writing on a dare
A university librarian by day and a romance author by night, Crystal Jordan never planned to be a writer. Working in academia, she’s open about her interest in romance, but she told me she doesn’t like thinking that her colleagues are reading her novels. “So I just pretend that they haven’t read my work.” Crystal began writing romance novels on [...]
Lady Jane’s Salon
Romance authors read aloud from their work on the first Monday of every month in the Soho district of New York City. The cover charge for Lady Jane’s Salon is $5 or “one gently used romance novel.” Net proceeds from the events support an end-of-year donation to a NYC women’s charity. Lady Jane’s Salon was launched in 2009 by three [...]
Consuming passions
As of today, the Popular Romance Project has attracted visitors from at least 66 different countries and territories, suggesting that romantic novels are of near global interest. Our stats raise countless questions. For example, given that the HEA (or HFN) is crucial to the definition of romance genre fiction, have our top countries (the U.S.A., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and [...]
Nora, most popular of all
In the romance community everybody knows—and, if we are to believe the tagline, everybody reads Nora. Nora is of course Nora Roberts, the most popular romance author of our time. The tale of Roberts’ fabulous rise to fame is one of the romance genre’s most beloved success stories. In 1981 she started out as an unremarkable category romance writer—one of [...]
Jenkins on history
Beverly Jenkins has written 30 novels and she is much beloved by her readers. Most of her romantic fiction is set in the 19th century, and some of her contemporary romances (she writes romantic suspense and faith-based romances) are about characters who are the descendants of her 19th-century characters. Her historical books all have bibliographies in the back—and it’s clear [...]
