An Award for Romance

I came from the film industry, so I was raised on a steady diet of the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the SAG Awards. Those awards are supposed to represent the best of the best – the top performances, the best writing and directing, and all the other wonderful moving parts that go into making an excellent movie. Those awards come with seals of approval, marks of prestige, a title that says you did a thing that people found to be great, perhaps even the greatest of that year. All of these awards are subjective, of course, and all of them have had problems, have been called out for inequity, a lack of diversity or inclusion, even inaccessibility. The good ones, the relevant ones with reputations for excellence keep moving forward, making strides to be different, to grow and change as people’s minds open to all the myriad ways hurt, harm, and exclusion have been perpetuated by the systems in place, and as such, they remain a hallmark of something special.

The book world has its own set of prestige awards. The National Book Award, the Pulitzer, the Booker, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner – each with its own focus, its own rules, gatekeepers, judging criteria – and each producing a badge with a name that confers a sense of quality or excellence.

Interesting side note: the Women’s Prize for Fiction was developed from a private grant after the 1991 Booker prize. More than 60% of novels published that year were written by women, but none of the six shortlisted finalists was written by someone identifying as female. https://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/events.

Genre fiction tends to get shut out of the big literary awards, so they have developed their own prestigious awards – the Hugo and Nebula Awards for sci-fi and fantasy, the Edgars for mystery, the CWA Daggers for crime fiction, and, until a few years ago, the RITA and Golden Heart awards for romance.

The romance book industry accounts for approximately one-third of all book sales and is a billion dollar industry, which grew 17% during the pandemic. It is also the genre which has seen the most independently-published success - over 50% of romance titles are self-published - with female-identifying authors dominating the playing field.

Consider that – independent authors, mostly female.

Independently published books account for 30-34% of all ebook sales across every genre. It means that independent and hybrid authors have a significant voice in the book world, and yet almost none of the major literary awards will accept a self-published title or an author submission for consideration. Those are a lot of unheard voices in the consideration of “the best” books of that year. Not so interesting side note: the Women’s Prize for Fiction doesn’t embrace the inclusion of female independent authors. All submissions for awards must be made by publishers.

In romance, independent authors are one of the primary reasons the genre has seen the growth of diversity in its characters. The publishing gatekeepers and whatever quotas they may have just don’t apply to the independent community, which means my disabled characters, or your Black characters, or her Southeast Asian characters don’t remove opportunity for Black, disabled, or Southeast Asian authors, because I am my own publisher, and a traditional publisher isn’t even going to see me or my book when they’re looking at quotas.

All of that is to say that one of the primary ways to access a truly diverse spectrum of literature is to embrace the independent community, so that it isn't traditional publishing vs. independent, but independent and traditional together, hand-in-hand, equal opportunity for all.

Obviously, this presents a possible quality problem, which traditional awards have tried to mitigate by only allowing traditional publishers to submit their authors’ books. The VIVIAN award, newly revamped by the Romance Writers of America to take the place of the RITA, did away with those barriers to consideration, as anyone – member, non-member, trad pub or indie – could submit their book, and the task force in charge of the VIVIAN Award came up with some of the most equitable and inclusive judging criteria of any award I’ve seen in the industry. Tragically – and yes, I do feel like it’s tragic because so much work went into creating something different – it seems that the problems were so deeply entrenched in the organization that even the most equitable framework couldn’t counter ignorance and baked-in bigotry.

I don’t feel qualified to judge whether the RWA retains its relevance and usefulness to the romance author community in the wake of the last few years of controversy surrounding it. I do fear that its primary book award – the premiere literary award for romance – has lost its prestige, and with it, its usefulness to authors seeking to set their books apart from the crowd, to get noticed by the people who notice awards, to validate and substantiate novels in a genre that still suffers from a credibility problem because it’s written primarily for and by women.

Hugh Howey, author and blogger about the state of the publishing industry said, “The new power authors are predominately female, and to cope with the reality of this transition, the media and legacy authors have had to resort to lumping them into a single genre (erotica) in order to stigmatize them. Despite the fact that these authors write romance, thrillers, science fiction, literary fiction, non-fiction and other genres. Those who write in one of the hundreds of varieties of romance are today castigated as “smut” writers when this has never been true.” https://hughhowey.com/the-state-of-the-industry/

I did an informal poll among my readers about the role awards may or may not play in their decision-making about buying or reading books. The majority said that they notice the award badges on book covers, but it doesn’t affect their decisions. However, several mentioned that if they were looking at a fantasy or sci fi novel, seeing the badge for a Hugo or Nebula award would absolutely influence them to look at the back cover copy. That's because the Nebulas have name recognition attached to them. Readers understand that this is the award in that genre, and you'll be guaranteed a level of quality. The film industry has their Oscars, their Palme d’Or, and their Golden Globes, and as such, film and TV producers looking for new material are primed to notice prestige awards as well as sales figures. And when an awards event is promoted, touted, and anticipated with excitement, as the Nebulas are for science fiction and fantasy authors, it creates a buzz not just among authors, but readers and industry professionals too. And that is good for the entire business.

That being said, the nomination process for the Nebulas does not take full advantage of the independent book community, and I believe they are therefore missing tremendous opportunities for diversity and inclusion. The Data Guy who worked with Hugh Howey for several years on his Independent Book Industry Report, was a featured guest at the RWA conference in 2016, and author Jami Gold posted about his presentation. “Unlike the earnings gap between traditionally published white authors and authors of color, among self-published authors, the racial earnings gap does not exist. (Emphasis and boldface type are from Jami Gold's article). Gatekeepers are causing the racial earnings gap, not the market. Traditional publishers who claim the target market for diverse stories doesn’t exist are holding authors of color back.” – Jami Gold, RWA16 Industry Insights from Data Guy https://jamigold.com/2016/07/rwa16-industry-insights-from-data-guy-and-more/

***Edited to add: I can find no more comprehensive data from the Data Guy, Paul Abbassi, regarding the existence or lack of a racial earnings gap in independent publishing, however anecdotal evidence of friends of mine who are independent authors and women of color suggest that there are many other factors that go into an earnings gap than pure royalties. Things like discriminatory advertising and categorization practices on Amazon, as well as the systemic issues that plague WOC with traditional publishers continue to affect the income of indie WOC authors. Statements like those in Jami Gold's article, when not qualified (like I did, for which I heartily apologize) are disheartening and make it hard to press for changes that lead to earnings equity. End edit***

"Indie romances often provide me with representation that is often slow to show up on the traditionally published market," book vlogger Mina Thomas of Minareads said in a 2019 article in Shondaland. https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/books/a34047527/indie-romance-is-big-business-why-arent-we-hearing-about-it/  Shondaland – the company owned by Shonda Rhimes, producer of Bridgerton based on the Regency romance series of the same name by Julia Quinn – published an article about the diversity and inclusion in indie books, which means Hollywood isn’t blind to indies, and they recognize the value to the whole ecosystem when diversity and representation are embraced.

I only know about the VIVIAN Award task force from things I’ve read, but I’ve read the judging rubric they crafted, and it’s good. It’s clear that in creating those rules, the task force was committed to embracing the diversity that is one of the hallmarks of the romance genre. But there are so many more steps to be taken than just writing the rules, as evidenced by this year’s award for a Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements. The category rules state that the books must be "Works in which spiritual beliefs are an inherent part of the love story, character growth or relationship development, and could not be removed without damaging the storyline. These novels may be set in the context of any religious or spiritual belief system of any culture." https://www.rwa.org/Online/Awards/The_Vivian/Vivian_Contest_Rules.aspx#Descriptions And yet the day after the VIVIAN Awards, when Twitter was buzzing angrily about the winning novel’s depiction of the Massacre at Wounded Knee with its good people on both sides take, RWA sent out a definition of the category as one in which characters can seek redemption from ‘crimes against humanity,’ saying that the book had been read by 13 judges who hadn’t flagged the content as problematic. As Sarah, from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books wrote, “No matter how much work and how many thousands of words go into an award rubric, if the judging is done by people determined to hold onto a racist narrative, racism will be the result.” https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2021/08/worse-than-a-dumpster-fire/?fbclid=IwAR0vlQfaG7wSaOZbAb3-9MwGZ1Ewk3OIJpNqkgD_jvVrXXRF12ueACR-kUY

There are other romance book awards out there, and some indie book awards that feature a romance category, but we need our own prestige award - one that is built from the ground up on the premise of diversity, inclusion, and excellence - with judges pulled from across the spectrum of readers, bloggers, critics, authors, publishers, editors, and even the odd producer or two. And we need a gala event that is all about the red carpet, the award itself, recognizing the finalists and the romance world at large for producing a year full of great books, and to celebrate this women-empowered, women-led business in which diversity and inclusion are actively embraced, and where love is love is love.