Romance writer Dee Tenorio has posted to the Romancing the Blog group blog about some of the problems facing writers of some of the more traditional, less explicit books in her genre.
It’s not an area to which i’ve paid a lot of attention, except when shelving them or looking up books for customers. But it’s clear that, as Tenorio writes, much of it has gotten a lot more explicit.:
The current marketing trend is hotter, fleshier, flashier and lets be honest here, there’s often a lot more people in the bedroom these days than there used to be. Books that aren’t hot at all can often have suggestive covers and blurbs in the hopes of grabbing that titillation-hungry buyer. And it’s working. Which can leave a “vanilla” / “B-cup” writer scratching her head wondering how to effectively promote a book without misleading readers who might not appreciate the bait-and-switch.
What’s even more surprising is the way that genres are crossing over — it’s getting so I can’t tell what genre a mass-market paperback goes in without a look at the shelving sticker. Maybe it’s Buffy’s fault (and I’ll happily admit to being a big fan of the TV show, comics, etc), but it seems like every other book today is about the loves of a young crime-fighter dealing with vampires. Romance? SciFi/Fantasy? Mystery/Thriller? Young Adult? Literature/Fiction? Erotica? There’s simply no telling.
(And can someone point me to an explanation of what’s happening in the African-American Fiction genre? I’ve had customers–mostly African-Americans themselves–confront me repeatedly about why so many of the books on those shelves look from the cover pictures and blurbs to be, as they put it, porn.)
It might be a goofy game to pull a random set of bookstore categories and create blurbs for books that cross all of them. I see a big future in something that can be cross-filed in Atheism, Management, Drawing Instruction, Weight Loss Diets, and Hockey…
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