Achieving the happily ever after

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None of this should come as a surprise. According to RWA's website, in 2012, romance fiction held the largest share - 16.7 percent - of any genre in the United States consumer book market. That amounted to almost $1.438 billion in US sales.

This year the genre even infatuated business magnate Rupert Murdoch: In May, News Corporation announced it would buy Harlequin Enterprises, one of the world's biggest romance publishers, for $417 million.

But for all its commercial and cultural importance, the romance genre often feels as though it does not get its due from mainstream cultural media. Last year, when the New York Times Book Review asked 15 writers to answer questions regarding sex and writing for its Sex Issue, not one romance writer was in the mix. New York Times best-selling romance writer Sarah MacLean expressed her dismay in a letter to the editor.

Neither elite opinion nor sales numbers seemed to be an outward concern of those at the conference. Everyone seemed to be having too much fun talking about how to write and sell romance novels. The end goal is to achieve the Happily Ever After. The hard work of getting there - taking two people and figuring out how to resolve their conflicts in a way that leaves the reader satisfied - is the business of modern romance writers.

It is, in fact, a more interesting and better written business than tired stereotypes and Fifty Shades Of Grey might suggest. Linda Francis Lee and Eloisa James led my Alpha Hero workshop; the real Eloisa James (a pen name) is a tenured Shakespeare scholar at Fordham University. The next day, in an adjoining room, the standing room-only How To Write Hot Sex panel was immediately followed by the more literary and historically based, Angst And Affability: Using Jane Eyre And Pride And Prejudice To Craft New Adult And Contemporary Romance.

At the conference, there seemed no hint of doubt that the future of the industry looks just as bright as the past. Romance publishers are at the cutting edge of e-books. At least according to one study, digital is the most popular format in which romances are now purchased. The RWA just launched an app for iOS and Android that connects readers and writers to a database of romance.

Romance queen Nora Roberts, 210 novels and millions of dollars to her name, summarized her decades of work during a "chat" for star-struck attendees: In the end it all comes down to "happily ever after, good overcomes evil". It is a simple message but, in a world that seems increasingly bereft of happy endings, it is one whose appeal seems only to be growing.

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