Samhain Publishing Ltd. Weblog

Would You Like My Book? Are You Sure?

Before a recent family get-together, I got a brief e-mail from my brother-in-law asking me to bring along a copy of one of my books so that he could take it to my husband’s aunt. Now leaving aside the sort of obvious response to that—“Gee, Bob, can’t you afford to buy my book?”—I could see other, more long-range problems. My husband’s aunt is an 87-year-old unmarried lady; once upon a time, you might have called her a spinster. While I may not be too sure of Aunt Beth’s tastes in literature, I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t like my stuff.
This is a sensitive question for a lot of us. We write romance because we like it. We read it. We support it. Catherine Wade had an interesting post on her blog about this a couple of months ago, pledging that she would no longer apologize for writing romances and asking the rest of us to do the same. I’m with her all the way. But at the same time, I know some of my friends and relations won’t like what I do because they’re not fans of the genre. I’ve already had a friend tell me she liked my first book “except for all the sex.” If you read romances, the fact that my books have a lot of sex scenes shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. If you don’t, it may be a bit of a shock, to say the least.
So what do you do when your grandmother wants a copy of your book? Or your grade-school teacher? Or the pastor’s wife? Or your colleague at work who reads mostly literary fiction? Samhain requires its authors to write warnings that are posted with the book description at the Samhain Web site. These are mostly good-humored (hey, we try to be witty about it), but they also serve a serious purpose. Samhain doesn’t want readers buying books with content they’ll find offensive. So how do you head off a friend or relation who might be similarly upset by what you’ve written?
So far I’ve tried the straight-forward approach, telling anybody who asks that, yes, my books do include fairly explicit sex scenes, but no, I’m not writing porn. I have no idea how erotica writers handle this, but I’ll bet they’ve had to come up with ways to alert their maiden aunts before they buy their latest books.
The problem for all of us may be that reading and liking romance is still regarded as a guilty secret by a lot of people, even though it’s one of the best-selling genres in publishing. It’s always possible that my husband’s aunt has been reading romances for years and would look at mine as just another on her TBR stack. But she’s never mentioned it, and I’m not sure how to ask her. So for now, I’ll just tell my brother-in-law that I don’t think my book would be right for Aunt Beth. And then the next time I visit her, I’ll check her bookshelves for copies of Nora Roberts or Danielle Steel or even Barbara Cartland.
And if I find them, I’ll be sending her autographed copies of my books—ASAP.