Popular Romance Project

Branding Latina romances

Kensington launched its Encanto line of Latina romances in 1999. Caridad Piñeiro, whose family fled Cuba when she was a young girl, was among the line’s flagship authors with her first novel,

Romance in Turkey

I am a published novelist and storyteller, and for more than two years I have provided editorial support to Harlequin Turkey. During this period, I have had the chance to translate many Harlequin books written in English into my language and to compare their content with popular romance novels written by Turkish writers. I found several interesting cultural differences. In [...]

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 [...]

Kaufman on inspirationals

Debbie Kaufman didn’t set out to write inspirational romance (or even romance at all), starting with suspense. But between joining the Romance Writers of America and her son-in-law lending her a copy of Before We Cook and Eat You, an account of missionary life in Liberia in the 1920s and 1930s, she couldn’t help but think, “I wonder if I [...]

Remaking the virgin hero

Back in 1979, during the first wave of popular romance criticism, Ann Barr Snitow claimed that “virginity is a given” in the mass-market category romance. Things changed for heroines some time ago; in fact, they’d changed in longer historical romance novels well before Snitow published her essay, and in Harlequins shortly thereafter. Is a comparable shift underway for heroes, this [...]

Fifty shades of genre

The market popularity of the Fifty Shades trilogy is undeniable. Starting life as Twilight fan fiction and published as original fiction after some slight alterations, the trilogy has by turns delighted, scandalised, and drawn derision from its readers. What is less clear, though, is what genre the Fifty Shades trilogy occupies. With its emphasis on monogamy, love, and the idea [...]

Around the world

The category romances of Harlequin Mills and Boon are an international phenomenon—sold everywhere from cell phones in Japan to railway stations in Europe and written by authors from around the world. The most popular of these categories is Harlequin Presents, which was originally started with only authors from England, but is now dominated by writers from the United Kingdom, Australia, [...]

A romance novel as art?

Can a romance novel be a work of art? Baldly put, the question seems a little out of date. After all, it’s been almost a hundred years since Marcel Duchamp bought a snow shovel and inscribed it In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), the first of his famous “Readymades.” (His next big number is even more famous: in 1917, [...]

Call me?

Call it the “call me” summer. There are likely few corners of the globe that haven’t spent the past several months humming along—if not more—to Canadian pop star Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.” The fun, flirty invitation to a dreamy crush has been on the USA Top 40 singles chart since March, holding the #1 spot for nine weeks [...]

Boomers need love, too

On June 26th, I (Laurie Kahn) posted some excerpts from our interview with Gwen Osborne, and she wrote to me saying, “I really wanted to underscore the point about the ‘Boomer market.’ Readers are getting older as the heroines are getting younger (or so they seem).” So I invited her to write a guest blog here at PopularRomanceProject.org, and she [...]