CBS Sunday Morning
By Jerry D. Simmons | February 21st, 2006 | No Comments » (Click to add yours!)
For those of you who missed it, Sunday Morning the CBS news magazine show ran a segment a week ago entitled “Between The Covers.” The focus was romance writing and readers of romance novels and the reporter centered the piece on the annual meeting of the Romance Writers of America. There were some interesting statistics and an interview with the current President, Tara Taylor Quinn.
The reporter indicated that total sales in 2004 of all romance titles (including all formats: hardcover, trade paper, and mass-market) totaled a whopping $1.2 billion dollars. That number represented 54% of all mass-market sales and 39% of all fiction sales. A representative from Harlequin, the quintessential romance publisher, indicated that the category is growing at enormous proportions and that readers were both men and women.
Tara Taylor Quinn said in her interview that between 3 and 10% of all romance writers are men. It seems plausible that the percent would be much closer to 3% rather than 10%. It should be noted that romance as a category is most dominant in the mass market format and not hardcover or trade paper. The only relevance to this point is that Harlequin is a mass-market publisher of romance titles.
The program made note of all the various workshops offered by RWA at their convention and of course the issue for me, as a former publisher, is that the one workshop that is probably not offered is one preparing writers for a future as an author. My message and the focus of all that I do is that writers must have an understanding of what goes on behind the scenes in the offices of publishing companies.
It cannot be stressed enough why this is so very important. If anyone is listening, PLEASE forward this message to the national offices of ALL writers organizations and encourage them to start preparing their members for life as authors. Thank you.
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