>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^E00:00:04 ^B00:00:24 >> Well good morning again and welcome to the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. We're so pleased that we had such a wonderful evening last night, those of you who were there. Those I've not met yet, my name is John Cole. I'm the director for the Center of the Book in the Library of Congress and one of the organizers of this exciting conference. Last night was terrific but you're going to have a chance if you were not with us last night to do a little bit of catch-up, in particular the wonderful film and the discussion which got everyone excited. The discussions will continue and the film will be reshown today, very close to here in the Oval Gallery, which reopened after five years today. Not just because of us but our presence helped it. You know how it works in a bureaucracy. So the film will be showing. But also I wanted to say a couple of things that I mentioned to the larger group yesterday in case you haven't heard, and I'll give you a brief overview of the day. And then we'll plunge right ahead. As we talked last night, romance fiction is one of our culture's most popular and yet least understood and appreciated genres -- genres, I'm sorry. And we have finally, especially last night on the Coolidge Auditorium stage, taken central stage. Why is romance fiction so popular? How and why is romance community different from other fan communities? How is the digital revolution affecting romance authorship and publishing? With help from our distinguished roster of authors, scholars, publishers, and editors, and fans of course, today we will be exchanging ideas about the tremendous appear of romance, its deep roots, and its future in the digital age. Which reminds me, please turn off all of your cellphones. Last night and today's proceedings are all being filmed for the Library of Congress website. And we will be able to use those films and the website presentation as a base for further discussion. We are gathered, as I mentioned, in the library's Madison Building. This building is Washington's only memorial to President James Madison. Like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams for whom the library's other Capital Hill buildings are named, Madison was a book-loving and book-collecting founder of our country who played an important role in the Library of Congress's history, or I really should say its pre-history. In 1783, 17 years before the Library of Congress was created through a bill signed by President John Adams in 1800, and 32 years before Thomas Jefferson donated his comprehensive personal library to reshape this institution through its comprehensive collections. James Madison presented the Continental Congress with a list of books that he felt should be imported from Europe for the uses of Congress. This was in 1783. As he was later to prove in so many other areas, James Madison was well ahead of his time. Today's schedule in the James Madison building is outlined in the program, which we all have. There's some as we came in and there's a new supply right in the back of the room in case you didn't get one. It's important you take a look at it because it has a map of the sixth floor of this Madison Building, and you're going to have many choices after 10:30. After the opening panel and prior to panel four, in other words from 10:30 until 3:30 there will be publisher displays and interactive activities in the Montpelier Room which is also on this floor. And in addition to the interactives there's a lot of swag. There's a lot of giveaways and the Center for the Book itself is participating because I brought many things out of storage, under pressure from our warehouse, and -- no, it was in your honor actually. And so it's important that you help us get rid of things that are that first table as you walk in. It would be greatly appreciated. And, the continuous showings of "Love between the Covers," will be in the nearby Oval Gallery. And so the first one would start shortly then after 10:30, and a number of people asked -- came in late last night or missed part of the film and have asked me this morning about it. So, that will -- we will be scattering those who have the need to scatter, and you'll have the opportunity for much more after 10:30. Now, on the program cover, again, as I mentioned yesterday, I hope you have noticed the allegorical figure of romance painted by George Randolph Barse, Jr., on the ceiling of the East Corridor in the Jefferson Building's glorious great hall. For those of you who have never visited this historic building which opened in 1897 and successfully out-Europed Europe, as I mentioned last night, I will be leading a 40-minute expedition to the great hall during the latter part of our lunch break, which begins at 12:15. There are a number of places up front so please come on up, over in this corner and up here in the front. So again, this will be a beginning -- our lunch will begin at 12:15. Lunch -- the cafeteria's on this level. And if you want to take advantage of the expedition to the great hall we will meet at promptly at 12:50 just outside the Montpelier Room where the displays are, next basically to the cafeteria. And we will arrive back at the Madison Building at 1:30, 15 minutes before the start of Panel Three. And if you are joining us, bring your cameras. The Center for the Book and the Popular Romance Project are especially grateful to Harlequin, our lead sponsor. Representing Harlequin I have the pleasure of introducing Margaret Marbury, the vice president of Women's Fiction Editorial, which includes MIRA and Harlequin Team. Margaret, are you here? Margaret is not here. We will hear from her later today. But remind her I thanked them at the beginning of the morning as well. Okay? Finally, on behalf of the Center for the Book, I again thank our co-organizer, the Popular Romance Project, personified by two people you will meet and are about to get us started. I will begin by presenting our filmmaker Laurie Kahn, and I would like to let Laurie say whatever she likes, but as she comes up let's give her another round of applause for last night. ^M00:07:58 [ Applause ] ^M00:08:01 Come on up, Laurie. ^M00:08:02 [ Applause ] ^M00:08:04 Secondly, and this is one of the things Laurie is going to do, is to present Pam. And I want to point out that Pam Regis is really at the heart of the relatively recent development of romance and especially romance fiction as an exciting field of scholarship. Her leadership in putting this program together is very much appreciated. Let's get rolling with another well-deserved round of applause for both Laurie and Pam. Laurie. ^M00:08:30 [ Applause ] ^M00:08:35 Laurie, you're on. You want to say whatever you would like to say. >> They're [inaudible] the wrong name on the podium. >> Oh, it's okay. >> You want to be me? >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> I'm Pam for the moment. I think people will get who I am. So, welcome to everybody. It's really incredible to me that this day is really here. Five years ago it was just an idea and when I called -- or did I email you or call you John? I can't even remember. >> I don't either. >> I called him out of the blue to find out if he wanted to host a popular romance project conference and he enthusiastically agreed. He's been a fabulous partner and Pam Regis, President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance and a professor at McDaniel College, has been a total delight to work with. Everybody has been. It's been a dream team. And also the -- Kelly Schrum at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for the History of New Media did an amazing job creating the project's extensive website, which you can look at in the Interactive Room, in the middle of the day. And it was a remarkable collaboration and great group of people to work with. This is going to be a very interactive and inclusive day. The aim here is to start a discussion between authors, industry insiders, readers, and scholars, exploring the deep roots of romance and its future in the digital age. ^M00:10:07 We've made videos to start off each panel. If you wish you can stay in this room all day taking part in a wide range of conversations with an amazing roster of writers, industry insiders, and scholars. In the middle hours of the day you'll also be able to see the film if you missed it last night, which as John mentioned, is going to be in this Oval Room which I'm delighted is functional again. You can try your hand at writing a first paragraph of a romance novel, or a first kiss, or a first meeting, under the guidance of members of the Washington Romance Writers. And we invite you to suggest ideas for the nationwide series of Popular Romance Project Library programs that are going to roll out when the film is broadcast under the wonderful tutelage and guidance of John Cole. So, anyway, have fun and thanks for being here. And don't miss the tour with John in the middle of the day. It's an amazing building and he has written several books about this building that are well worth looking at. So finally, without more ado, I will introduce Pam Regis who not only is the president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, and a professor of English at McDaniel College nearby, but she is also the co-organizer of this conference and runs a program with Jenny Crusie on how to write romance fiction at McDaniel. And they've done some incredible work. And Nicole and Pam both have programs, who you're going to meet. So, it'll be an interesting conversation among everybody today. Thank you for coming and it's great to see such a big crowd. ^M00:11:48 [ Applause ] ^M00:11:54 >> If I don't say this I'll probably be fired. Our program at McDaniel is online and asynchronous. ^M00:12:05 [ Laughter ] ^M00:12:07 It's not a residential program. Really. And now I won't be fired. So I add my welcome, my warm welcome to everyone and I thank everyone for coming. Now, as your program indicates, if you'll open it up, the day is divided into four panels, during each of which we will invite your questions and comments on an aspect of romance fiction, or on an aspect of love, in fact. I'm the moderator of panel one, which is what belongs in the romance canon. So, without making anymore welcome, I hope you all feel warmly welcome. We're going to get right to it. So I should explain then what is a canon. A canon of literature is a set of agreed upon, important texts. So part of our discussion will focus upon the romance texts that we feel are iconic, that are keepers, that are important. Our questions to consider, and again, if you consult your program you'll read a few of them in the panel one description. Our questions -- in addition to what iconic romance novels might be, what are the titles and why? Address the global reach of romance, the nature of the archetypal love story, the nature of the romance audience, and the boundaries of the genre. We have deliberately cast our net wide. If there's a topic about the books that you don't hear included raise your hand and interject it into the conversation. It's not intended to be focused and tight. It's intended to be wide-ranging and we hope therefore interesting. So with these issues in mind then let's watch a film clip then I'll invite our -- >> Yes, we will. >> Okay. No, no, you're good. You're good. You're good. I have a little more before I'm going to point to you. Then I'll invite our panelists join me. Each of our panelists will offer then a brief reaction either to the clip or to questions or to anything really that they wish to say about this large issue. And then we'll open it up to Q and A to you. >> Pam? Sorry. Could we just do a hashtag? >> Yeah, oh yeah we should. >> Yeah, because it is -- >> It's POPROM, so P-O-P-R-O-M. >> P-O-P-R-O-M. >> Popular Romance as a hashtag, just so we're all on the same page and anybody who's out there who wants to call [inaudible] that hashtag. >> And you have service here? >> Yeah. >> Okay, all right. Okay. >> Not very good [inaudible] Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook. >> All right. >> That will be our hashtag. >> It should get out. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Yes, sir? Are we ready? >> Here we go. >> Roll clip. Can't lean against that. >> Well, I think romances always suffer from the fact that it's basically usually written by women for women. A few exceptions, but mostly it's been known as a women's genre. And like anything that's devoted to women it tends to get kind of short shrift. But, having said that, I will tell you that all of my friends who write in the other genres of popular fiction do just as much whining as not getting any respect. My science fiction friends whine about it, my mystery writer friends whine about it. So I really learn not to take it too seriously. Because I think in general our society doesn't treat popular fiction with much respect and I think it's because it hasn't -- there's been no need to acknowledge it. It's just always been there, it was always going to be there. We live with it. So we take it for granted. I think the biggest problem in the study of popular fiction is that nobody asks the core question of why does it continue to exist? Why do we still write it? And why are we still dealing with archetypes that go back 1000years? And I think those are the questions that don't get asked in Lit. classes and things like that. But those are the fascinating questions. And I've over the years sort of evolved a Jane's theory of popular fiction evolution, which is that it wouldn't survive unless it served a real purpose for the survivability of our culture. And I believe that it's in popular fiction that we preserve our societies, our cultures core values. You know, people complain they're not taught in school. People complain, nobody goes to church anymore. People complain that nobody understands what core values are anymore. But that's baloney. We read them. We know exactly what a hero is supposed to do. We may not do it ourselves but we sure know what the truth is. And we learn that not so much from the institutions but from our popular fiction. And that's why it survives, we need it. ^M00:17:12 [ Music ] ^M00:17:13 [ Inaudible Conversations ] ^M00:17:15 >> The others [inaudible]. >> Was there a title card? That was Jane Ann Krantz. Yes, okay. Lots of people recognize her. I would then like to invite my panelists to come up here and join me. First is Len Barot who writes as Radclyffe, founder, CEO Bold Strokes Books, and herself a romance author. Beverly Jenkins, romance author. Nicole Peeler, who's associate professor of English at Seton Hill and, double threat, a romance author. Eric Murphy Selinger, Professor of English at DePaul, and executive director of the ^IT Journal of Popular Romance Studies ^NO. And Susan Ostrov Weisser, Professor of English and Adelphi. So this is our panel, and when they have sort of settled in here in a minute I'm going to ask them for their brief reactions. And this is basically just a few -- this is basically a sound bite to kind of get the conversation rolling in addition to the clip. Len are you ready? >> I am. I thought I was going to go last but I'm happy to go first. >> The last shall be first. ^M00:18:29 [ Laughter ] ^M00:18:31 I thought I was going to go last so I was going to speak like after everybody said everything that had already been covered, but I'll go first instead. And I think for me it's a little bit easier because I'm going to talk a little bit about the canon as it relates to gay and lesbian fiction, which is a little bit different than the large body of popular romance because it's only 50 years old. So I think that when we talk about canon and gay and lesbian romance for many of us we're talking about books that we read as they were published. I think that for those of us who are over 35 years of age we could probably name every single title, and we probably own every single title. There's probably two generations of romance readers who have watched the evolution of lesbian/gay romances from the mid 1960's until today. And for the first 20 years of those 50 years there were probably less than 200 titles. And everybody knows how quickly romance readers read. So we were out-reading the publication of that genre and waiting, and waiting, and waiting in line for the next book to come along. And that's why when you talk about canon there's an interesting confluence between the historical canon and I think there's probably -- if you're thinking about canon you almost have to think about three canons. The historical canon, what came first, what were the groundbreaking books. The literary canon, because I think the scholarly works aren't always the ones that were first, every though the first are important. ^M00:20:02 And I think the one that gets forgotten is the reader's canon. What are the books that the reader's love? And for us in gay and lesbian romance the firsts are the ones that we love because we mark the steps in the evolution of our community by those works. So I would name ^IT The Latecomer ^NO. And I think that every gay and lesbian romance lover is going to name these books. And I was talking to Pam the other day that I asked 200 of our authors and associates who write and publish romance what are the books that form the canon, and everybody said basically five that were the same. ^IT The Latecomer ^NO by Sarah Aldridge. ^IT Desert of the Heart ^NO by Jane Rule. ^IT The Lord Won't Mind ^NO by Gordon Merrick. Excuse me, I had to write them down so I don't forget them. ^IT Amateur City ^NO by Katherine Forrest. And ^IT Curious Wine ^NO by Katherine Forrest. And those were all '60s into the early '80s. And then there was an explosion within gay and lesbian romance into the '90s and into the 2000's and we start to see diversity coming into the canon in terms of romantic intrigue, erotic romance. And in the last minute I just want to share an interesting poll that I did with readers on Facebook. We asked them looking at the types of books that they wanted to read, which I think speaks to the reader's canon and the issue of archetypes. Because in same sex romances you have a hero and heroine but they both happen to be of the same sex, which means we need to revision the archetypes which leads to the concepts of the lesbian hero or the female hero. And what are the books that our readers love to read? And they love to read hero books, warrior archetypes. They like to see the people that sacrifice themselves for others. And I think that speaks to the hero in all of romance fiction and it embodies the core values that Jane Ann Krantz was talking about, courage, loyalty, integrity, and the ability to love selflessly. So, those were my thoughts. >> Thank you. Thank you. We're just going to go down the row and then open it up generally after that happens. So, Beverly? >> God, how do I follow that? ^M00:22:15 [ Laughter ] ^M00:22:17 First of all, somebody's phone is here. Is she looking for her phone? ^M00:22:25 [ Laughter ] ^M00:22:31 Canon as it relates to women and men who write of color is not usually in the conversation either. Usually you'll have African American books defined as, you know, literary fiction and you've got Tony, and you've got Alice and people like me and Brenda and Piper Hughley and all of us down a hill are sort of relegated to something else. I don't even know what they would call it. But I think we're a very, very integral part of the canon these days. There was no African American Romance branch of the romance tree until 1994. So, we are still growing our canon. It would be nice if I had somebody on the historical branch with me. I'm out here sort of swinging by myself. I mean, which is good sales wise. ^M00:23:40 [ Laughter ] ^M00:23:44 I mean every time you buy a book you help a sister pay a light bill. ^M00:23:47 [ Laughter ] ^M00:23:49 But it would be great to be able to expand that canon to include more stories, more bibliographies so that the readers can not only enjoy the love stories but also enjoy the history that goes with it, which is why I put the [inaudible] in the backs of my books. That, and also to answer the question did black people really do that? Yes. So, that's my three minutes. Okay. >> Nicole, you're on. >> Thank you. Hi everybody. I also teach at an MFA, its low residency. There's my plug. And it only does popular fiction. So, but my background is in English Literature. I actually did Modernism [inaudible] and then I ended up doing this stuff. But as soon as I saw the clip and I was asked to take part in a conversation about the canon I immediately sort of started mentally preparing my syllabus for this imaginary class. I'd probably start with Warner's ^IT A Wide, Wide World ^NO as an absolute proto sort of romance book. But I wanted to talk about this book by E. D. E. N. Southworth called ^IT The Hidden Hand ^NO. And I have it from a reliable source, so it's actually [inaudible] are both free digital platforms. But this book and why I want to talk about it is, I was really interested in what Jane Ann Krantz was saying about popular fiction, especially genres like romance, as representative of culture. And I would just like to extend her definition to say that it actually transforms reality too, and I think this is what my fellow panelists have said already. Capitola Black is the heroine of this book and we meet her in New York. She's dressed as a boy and working as a bootblack. And she's rescued by a plantation owner and taken down south. And E. D. E. N. Southworth herself was an ardent abolitionist and a feminist and so she's always confronting sort of these values that Capitola does not agree with. And throughout the book, the serialization was started in 1859, so throughout the book Southworth sort of plays with the sensors by saying things like, "Reader, what is about to happen is terrible. You do not want to do this as a lady." But, the hero's knocked out. The heroine, the sort of blond fainting heroine, has been captured. So Capitola puts on her trousers and takes a sword off the wall and rescues her from the pirate, right? But it's always done with this kind of warning. "Ladies, don't do this at home." But obviously as the reader you don't won't -- you don't care at all about the fainting, sentimental heroine who you're supposed to according to Southworth [inaudible]. You know, she's supposed to be a role model. But you want to be Capitola and you want adventure, and you want this amazing, you know, woman with all these traits you're not supposed to have as a lady. You want her to take center stage and you want to follow her through anything. We know she's the real hero of the book despite there being actual heroes. So it challenged the censors. They had to let slide. But obviously she was doing things that were distinctly unladylike. And so it created an expectation in readers that female characters do more. They don't just faint, they don't just get carried off and swung over horses. And it does create an expectation that women's lives can contain more. Right? If we see women doing these things in books we can then do these things ourselves. And Southworth herself was absolutely a heroine. As I said, she was a feminist, an abolitionist. She supported herself on her writing. She was one of the most prolific and famous writers of her time. There were actually lines of merchandise, Capitola merchandise, and that's probably where the name came from. And she's been forgotten so that again speaks to what Jane Ann Krantz was saying about sort of things that are important to women. The whole point of this documentary -- things that are important to women are often forgotten, they're treated as disposable commodities when actually they're fabulous. And this book is so much fun to read, so I really recommend you go and get it and read it, it's so over the top and wonderful, and you'll love it. So, thank you. >> What's the name again? >> The ^IT Hidden Hand ^NO. And E. D. E. N. Southworth. And it's actually, if you're a ^IT Little Women ^NO nerd, it's made fun of by Joe. She tries to be something Northworth but -- Slogan Northworth or something terrible, and then she realizes that she doesn't have to be that. >> What was the [inaudible] again? >> It started to be serialized in 1859. And so -- and it ran over months. Yes. >> Cool. >> Yeah, it's such a fun book. >> And was endlessly reprinted. >> Yeah. >> I mean just a really popular book. And so she had four names, so its abbreviation, E. D. E. N. and then Southworth. Yes, yes, I'm writing about her too. Eric you're on babe. >> The last thing that popular romance needs is a man in a suit explaining -- mansplaining. ^M00:29:31 [ Laughter ] ^M00:29:33 What belongs in the popular romance canons. >> Take off your tie. ^M00:29:38 [ Music ] ^M00:29:47 >> I can tell you what's been on my syllabi. As your program notes I've taught upwards of 30 courses exclusively devoted to popular romance fiction at DePaul University. Everything from historical surveys to thematic courses, to 10-week courses devoted -- 10-week seminars devoted to an individual romance novel. ^M00:30:07 But every book and author that I have taught is there because of the expertise and enthusiasm of some blogger, reviewer, scholar, reader, librarian, or author who loved that book, put that book on a list, or put that book in my hands. Saying this is awesome. this was influential, this would teach really well and I don't get to teach that class, you do, so put it in. It's worth noting, I think, that so far every one of those bloggers, scholars, readers, authors, and librarians has been a woman. Now, I don't always end up teaching the particular novel they suggest. Sarah Frantz Lyons has been after me for years to teach ^IT It had to be You ^NO by Susan Elizabeth Philips. My wife loves ^IT Match Me If You Can ^NO. But when it comes to Philips ^IT Natural-Born Charmer ^NO is my jam. ^M00:31:09 [ Laughter ] ^M00:31:12 It teaches perfectly for me. And this leads me to the second point I want to make about the romance canon, one made last spring by a young Australian scholar named Jody McAllister. In the romance world, Jody wrote in a blog post called "Boom Goes the Canon," there are certainly iconic books, authors, publishing lines. But these don't function the way that a traditional literary canon does, to establish authority, to separate the wheat from the chafe, the sheep from the goats, the gospel of the Lord from the Bible fanfic. Romance readers, she writes, are quite comfortable with the ideas of subjective pleasure and contingent value. What works for me won't necessarily work for you. And what works for me might work for me for some reason other than objective artistic merit. Subtlety, artistry, depthness, and all these other supposedly demonstrable qualities of canonicity. There are, we might say, many fish in the sea, a lid for every pot. That's a lesson from within the novels. Right? The same hero doesn't work for every heroine and vise versa, or heroine for hero, or hero for hero for that matter. That's a lesson from within the novels that readers seem able to map onto the literary field itself. The romance community, that is to say, is quite comfortable with what Barbara Herrnstein Smith years ago called contingencies of value. And as a scholar my inclination is less to weigh in on questions of what belongs in the romance canon or how wide the boundaries of that canon should be. Than to try to learn from the romance world what it can teach me about why we are asking these questions and what is at stake in how we answer them. Thank you. >> Susan. >> Okay, well I'm going to do something a little bit different which is that I wanted to answer my own question. Go a somewhat different way, because this is something I've been thinking about. The question is are love and romance synonymous? Are they the same thing? What do we mean by these terms? So I'm going to give you my own thoughts on this and we'll see if you agree or disagree if you'd like to. I avoided making a precise distinction between love and romance in my book ^IT the Glass Slipper ^NO because the terms are used somewhat interchangeably, though not always consistently, including by me. But let me try it now. Love is a feeling, with romantic love a variation with special goals that for example always include sexual fulfillment. I said almost always. I will venture that romance on the other hand is a kind of story that we tell ourselves about these romantic feelings based on a scripted drama provided by society and whatever media there are at various historical periods, from fairytales to cable TV, and everything in between. Love feels preeminently individual to us because it's poignantly directed to a specific person, unless like Edward Albee's hero, you're in love with a goat. Does anybody know that play, that wonderful play? Romance, fictional or acted out, is a narrative that always beckons to a larger social frame while aligning, one hopes smoothly with what you, a specific lover, are feeling. But of course it's not as simple as this, it never is. In my observation, nearly every young person I've taught over the last decades has believed that romantic love is equivalent to romance. That's to say that for them love is a type of relationship in which each is the "One," capital O, to the other, always based on feeling that's perfectly mutual, equal in both quality and quantity, and ending in a permanent public relationship that's happy. In the face of high rates of serial relationships, infidelity, and divorce, this idea still has enormous power, thus the still high rate of marriage even among much-divorced movie stars. There's an algorithm to the scheme. Love begins in passion, that strong feeling of desire and longing. It becomes a romance. That's a narrative with certain types of characters and a coherent sequence of events, with iconic steps from meek, cute, to -- oh all the way up to adorable old couples celebrating Golden Anniversaries. And it ends in a lifelong relationship, one that defines the word real in real love. Mutual caring, kindness, understanding, empathy, trust, companionship, and service also much more, also gets stirred into the mix once the relationship takes over. It's exhausting just to think about never mind to practice successfully. This idea is our culture's romance with romantic love itself, which has a tremendous capacity for generating meaning in individual lives. It prompts us to stage our experiences comedy or tragedy. Our insignificant selves as part of story that carries us either into a deep and dark place, or else into the light. It assigns a role for the other as the lover and points to a glorious and exciting but at the same time reliable and comforting future, both the pant of passion and sigh of relief. The romantic frame transforms so much, the meaning of sexual desire, the meaning of all our actions toward the beloved, and most of all our sense of who we are. Our very lives appear to enlarge and grow in worth as the drama the engulfs us comes to seem meant to be, as many say. That is, at least as long as the trajectory is going in the direction it's supposed to. I now want to turn to a film which I'm hoping at least some of you have seen, Spike Jones's "Her." In the provocative film by spike Jones called "Her," a non-descript and depressed man's life is renewed by his love for his female, I have to put that in scare quotes, operating system, since it's a machine. But it's a female machine. A love which is returned, that is it was meant to be not because of fate but due to software wiring. The hero's beloved Samantha is the ultimate, although she's not even human, who is brought into the fold of normality, which is to say she's brought into the story of love. But the science fiction genre allows for new possibilities in the romantic script. Without giving anything away, in case you haven't seen it, the ending is neither categorized as either happy or unhappy. It's not easy to sort of put it into one box or the other. I won't say more than that because I don't want to be a spoiler. I don't believe it's particularly useful to make a clear distinction between love and romance because there really isn't anything clear about these terms. We want all of it together, the feeling and the story. And why not? What is more interesting and alluring than that vision of a bright heaven we have dreamed up and dreamed about? More accessible in the media than the religious vision of salvation because it's here and now? And at least in theory, meant for one and all on earth. At the end of the movie "Her" I was on Samantha's side of the struggle for control, but also sympathetic to the hero who really just wants to love and be loved, computationally or not, for as much and as long as he can be. Though the real Saint Valentine apparently came to a gruesome end, we have made of him an emblem of this very human impulse and called it Saint Valentine's Day. But if we could separate love, the feeling, and romance the story we might be ore tolerant of love that breaks free of the rigid confines by which we often judge romantic scripts, of the conventions of sex and gender, of unyielding expectations of what "real love" should be and what it supposedly is not. Maybe romantic love could be appreciated more simply as one of the most intense, and rich, and complex experiences we can have, lifting us even if only temporarily from the many shallow and shabby habituations of modern life. For that we don't need a card, or a gift, or even a saint for that matter. Just a capacity to feel as the operating system Samantha knew. Thank you. >> All right. ^M00:39:34 [ Applause ] ^M00:39:36 So, I thank the panelists. You will be hearing from them again but at this point what we do is open it up to Q and A from you. So raise your hand, wait for somebody with a mic to find you so that everybody can hear your question. >> Good morning, everyone. I've had coffee, so that's good. For me one of the most interesting questions about canon, and I saw it touched on a little bit in here, is that I think there's a challenge in that there is an academic canon or a teachable canon, one could argue. ^M00:40:10 A historical record canon -- I think you were going after that, Len, in your observations. And then a reader canon. And I think that that differentiation is a value to this community because we want this genre to be taught, we want that examination. But we were talking about this at dinner last night. I was eating with the marvelous Catherine Ash, Myra Odell, and Catherine is teaching a romance course at Duke this semester. She mentioned she's teaching Heyer. And of course the instantaneous thought for anyone who's read Heyer, of course, historical record is something, oh, ^IT Venetia ^NO, ^IT Arabella ^NO, ^IT The Grand Sophy ^NO. Those are the titles you think of quickly, but she chose ^IT Masqueraders ^NO. Now when you ponder it, gender roles, of course, examination, what's male, what's female, the boy's the girl, the girl is the boy, they're [inaudible]. What's going on? But then is that one you'd recommend as the first one to read of Heyer when you go out to a reader? And they say, "EW, Georgette Heyer, what should I read?" Is that -- ^IT Venetia ^NO, thank you. So I think that there is this question of do we just need one canon? Or should we start examining that canon in that way? Readers, what's the first thing? Because I'm a schmuck reader, okay? I'm not an academic. And you may remember this from Princeton, Eric, I was the one always standing up going, "I'm the only non-academic in the room, but." But I think that the thing that I raise as a question for all of us to look at as reader, the first thing we often ask is tell me what you've already read, so that I'm not just shoving you what I like, I want to know what you like and then I can come back to you. So, how is that aspect of the question addressed when we look at canon? So, those are the two questions I really have, the differentiation and then the repost, the parlet that one has. >> I think, I mean it's a great, great, great, great thing to talk about. But my thing is who's going to decide? Who's going to decide what goes in the academic canon? The readers don't care because they've already got their canon. And it's pretty well cement. But who's going to speak for Len? Who's going to speak for you? Who's going to speak for the people who are writing urban fantasy? Who's going to decide? And it's going to be argued just like anything that's supposed to be, you know, cemented. So, I'm jut waiting to see the fight. ^M00:42:49 [ Laughter ] ^M00:42:52 >> Go. >> I mean, I agree completely. I think that there are different canons based upon the purpose of the canon. What is the end purpose? And that actually then self-selects in kind of a reverse fashion. But there's crossover too. I mean there's always going to be crossover between what might be a scholarly work and what is popularly read. But we have the tools now to look at reader's canons because we have social networking and it's incredibly powerful. We can ask our readers. When I -- I took a recent poll on my Facebook and [inaudible] Facebook asking readers which of seven troupes did they like best in a lesbian romance and we got 5000 views and a 10% response rate. That's amazing. And you know, of course, its crude and it's rough but we have the tools to at least look at what the reader canon is. And the scholars can fight it out over the scholarly works because isn't that what scholars do? >> Yeah, I was going to say, I mean the thing about canons is they're not like Highlanders, right, there can only be one. ^M00:44:00 [ Laughter ] ^M00:44:04 You know, canons, even scholar canons, teacher canons are inevitably plural. The scholarship on popular romance is really young. It's really just getting started. The teaching of popular romance is even younger. There are, you know, I can probably count on my fingers the number of people who have taught multiple courses on popular romance fiction. There are really not very many of us. And one of the things that -- one of the reasons in teaching my courses at DePaul that I keep changing my syllabus. I've taught, you know, 30 plus courses and very few of them have been the same. Which is insane if you're doing all that class prep. But one of the reasons for that is because I get very, very nervous that the happenstance contingency of a book being on my syllabus suddenly turns that book into a canonical novel. And it showed up on my syllabus not because I've done all of the reading and I have some kind of ability to choose or authority to -- "by the authority vested in me." Right? I choose this novel for the canon. That's not how it works. You know, about 80% of the time it's because Sarah tells me, hey, teach this book. And, well not 80. Fifty. And but a lot of the time it's a book that I've just read and I really enjoyed. It's a book that I've read, it has hit me in some way and I want to figure out why it had that impact on me and the best way I know to figure that out is to put it on a syllabus and teach it. And that's okay, I mean, we're just getting started. Ask me in 100 years because I'm going to be around, and then we'll see who's there. And just for the record, the Heyer that I teach is ^IT Devil's Cup ^NO. Right? Because it teaches really, really well after E. M. Hall's ^IT The Sheik ^NO. >> I teach ^IT A Civil Contract ^NO. >> And she teaches -- and I wouldn't teach ^IT A Civil Contract ^NO if you paid me. Sarah -- >> Wait for the mic, babe. >> There's a guy in the back. >> Oh, there's a guy. All right, so you're next. >> Oh, he's next. >> [Inaudible] I'm sure it doesn't work but I can project. >> No, we're good. We're good. >> Oh it is working. So we first heard about the timing of gay and lesbian romance fiction and that all made sense. And then we heard about the timing of black romance fiction, and that was 1994, and I'm bewildered why it was so late and why it happened then. Do you have any speculation on that? >> That's a good question. >> I'm studying this now. Do you want me to leap in? >> Yeah, go ahead and say what you got to say. >> Iola LaRoy -- ^M00:46:44 [ Laughter ] ^M00:46:47 The "earliest" African American novelist -- there's some question about it, but a very, very early one, which is like mid 19th Century, is Iola LaRoy and it is indeed a romance. Although it is almost never studied as one which is why we need me. So anyway. Beverly, you want to say something? In other words, there's a long tradition. >> I mean, you know, we have had -- there's been a long tradition but what we define as romance, 1994, with Kumani, Arabesque. Arabesque first, not Kumauni. Walter Zacharias. I think I'm saying that correctly. You know, you go back and you look at the whole thing. Publishers did not think black women read. Now every time I was in the bookstores, a bunch of other black people in the bookstore, and I don't know what they thought we were doing there. ^M00:47:51 [ Laughter ] ^M00:47:57 When Terry MacMillan, ^IT Waiting to Exhale ^NO, hit the list for like 1000 weeks, publishers said, "Oh my god! >> Yes, yes. >> Not only do they read, but they have money to buy books! Which sort of changed everything. There's a [inaudible] study that was done last year that said that the most typical person to buy a book was an African American woman who had two years of college. So we are buying the Grisham's, we are buying the Jodi Picoult's. We are buying everything. But the market is just starting to serve us. So that's why -- I hope that answers your question. Do you have a follow up? Okay. >> Could I just add something real quick? >> Sure, go. >> Ann Shockley's ^IT Say Jesus and Come to Me ^NO, and ^IT Loving Her ^NO were two of the first African American lesbian romances from late 1970's. But I think as Beverly was saying if you don't have a publisher to publish it and if you can't bring it to the audience at large, it's difficult for any genre to gain steam. So I think there's that synchrony that happens. >> Susan do you want to get in here? >> Yeah, not to be cynical or to be cynical actually. It's a publishing -- it's a business decision and yes it was based on the idea that the larger, meaning white, audience would not buy black heroines. I think it really comes down to that. And it is of course also wondering whether the black audience would buy too. But I think it was how much money are we going to make? Oh look, Terry MacMillan, we can make money. From -- because that's a book that had a very wide audience. Maybe it surprised them that is had such a wide audience. ^M00:50:02 So I do think in that case it sort of came down to a business decision. >> It's always about the bucks. You know, it's always about the business and once they -- I mean, and I think what's disappointing is that there were no initial offerings to see, you just naturally assumed. >> Yeah. >> But then that's the nature of America. >> Exactly. >> Don't get me started on that. But you know, things are different. I'm not going to say they're perfect. I would like to see more men and women of color in publishing. Anytime I get -- and this is a crazy story. Copy editor, I had written something about keeping something on the down-low. We all know what down-low means, right? Well the copy editor did not. And she sent me back a little note that said, "This is not correct. You should say keep it on the low shelf." ^M00:50:13 [ Laughter ] ^M00:50:20 >> Oh, that's great. >> That's going to break any day now, the low shelf thing. >> And I said, "How about I don't say that? ^M00:51:27 [ Laughter ] ^M00:51:30 So you know, you got to have a sense of humor. So I'm out. >> You're on Sarah. >> I have a question [inaudible]. Just keep talking. There we go. So I have a question coming from the academic perspective. If you have, you know, if you're not Eric and you're not teaching 30 courses and you have that one course that you've fought for tooth and nail and you have that romance course, do you teach historical overview? Do you teach, like, do you try to teach one in each genre? How do you choose what to teach? So you have that one course you don't know if you're ever going to teach it again, do you start with ^IT Pride and Prejudice ^NO and move through ^IT The Sheik ^NO and go through ^IT The Flame and the Flower ^NO? Or do you try to teach one gay romance, one lesbian romance, one black romance, one historical, one paranormal, one urban fantasy? Or do you try to teach "the best?" How do you choose in that one course what to teach? >> For me it would depend on the number of the course and the title. I mean this is getting into jargon. But if it was 100 level course I would consider it probably a survey. If it was a 300 level course I would narrow it down, so maybe like represent -- usually with a 300 level course you get to have a colon and you get to have a title. ^M00:52:49 [ Laughter ] ^M00:52:52 So, you know, it would be something like, you know, representative contemporary fiction. And then I could do what you just said, you know, the one of this, one of that, paranormal, or this or that. So I would just -- it would just depend on the number. And I think, one of the things I wanted to say earlier is there's a different too between an English course in romance and a writing course in romance. And so there's a writing romance canon as well. And so it's like a fourth canon. So my jam, my SUP jam is ^IT Ain't She Sweet ^NO. But I would never teach that in my introduction to writing popular fiction course because it's so Susan Elizabeth Philips, it's got an unlikable heroine. And it's got, you know, a huge nosed hero. And it's, you know, it's so, and you know, if you give that to a freshman and say this is how romance is written they're just going to be like, no. So I pick something that's equally amazing and wonderful for them. I do, ^IT Bet Me ^NO, because I love it. But it's a much more -- it hits many of the more consistent romance notes than something like ^IT Ain't She Sweet ^NO. So, I've answered two questions. >> The other thing that I'll just toss in because I was in that situation long ago, far away. It depends what you're trying to do. What are you trying to accomplish? Right? One of the reasons I used do -- when I started this little adventure of teaching popular romance courses I started by doing historical surveys. Partly because I was educating myself in the history of the genre. But what I learned was that the books that were first in my syllabus were not books that my students were falling in love with. Right? If you start them out with E. M. Hall, ^IT The Sheik ^NO, or ^IT The Sheik ^NO properly, but they said Sheik back then. If you're starting them out with older works they're not necessary falling in love with the genre. They don't have the kind of excitement about it that I was hoping to spark. And then that would eventually arrive late in the course. And I thought why am I holding off until the end of the course? Why not change the course that I'm teaching because one of my goals is to take, you know, English majors who are a little snooty and a little full of themselves and to show them what they are missing. Right? I was 35 before I read a romance novel. I'm saving them decades. ^M00:55:16 [ Laughter ] ^M00:55:19 Especially the boys. ^M00:55:20 [ Laughter ] ^M00:55:22 So a lot of it depends on what your goal is, what are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to change some students' minds? Are you trying to teach them how to write? Are you trying to get them to -- are you doing the kind of intervention where one of the things you're trying to do is to show them that in fact the cultural scripts of romantic love include a whole lot of different kinds of people, especially if you've got a whole lot of different kinds of people in your classes. That's a very worthwhile goal. It means a lot. When I have students of color, when I have gender queer students who are reading novels about people like them in my classes, it means the world to them. So these are important goals that are different from, "I will now teach you the history of the genre." Right? Let me get them -- I didn't start by reading the old stuff. I fell in love and then went back. And I am more than happy to have my students go through that same experience. And if they never go back to the old stuff that's fine with me. It doesn't cost me anything. >> Where are our runners? Okay, we have a person with a microphone here. Just start talking and apparently it works. >> Okay, I have a follow-up as part of his question that piggybacks on something you and Beverly said. What I look at when I look at 1994 is another wave of African American romance as opposed to -- it's probably 1994 as the largest mass production of African American romances, but you need to go back to ^IT Entwined Destinies ^NO, to ^IT Dubois ^NO, to, you know, a number of romances in the 1890's. Not necessarily art for art's sake but still romances. >> Thanks Gwen. >> Stand and yes you're on with the microphone. >> I have the microphone. >> Good for you. >> I have a question that's in the nature of like, sounds like a dumb question but it's something I think about a lot. And that is, what is the difference -- how do you see the difference between a novel about love and a romance novel? Ms. Jenkins touched on this I think but I'm very curious. >> Is that for me? >> I'm going to say it is, yes. >> Okay, all right, I'll be brave. I think there's a difference between a love story, or a story about love, and a romance novel. And it very often comes down to how the book ends. And I think that we all agree or most of us agree who write -- and certainly let me say, for those of us who write and publish and read romance novels, we need a happy ending. Either maybe a wonderful love story, but if the hero or heroine dies it's not a romance. That's the simplest answer that I have. >> And I agree, I mean we want our HEA, and if you're going to kill somebody at the end then you need to get out of our category. ^M00:58:35 [ Laughter and Applause ] ^M00:58:41 >> Can I just say something serious about that whole thing, just from a gay and lesbian perspective, and very, very briefly to put it into historical context? The first big publisher of lesbian fiction in the United States was Nyad Press, and they started publishing in the early 1970's. And their publisher absolutely demanded a happy ending. The first love stories that were published weren't even called romances. The term lesbian romance didn't even evolve for another 10, 12 years. But the requirement for a happy ending was there because Barbara Greer knew that the women who were reading those books were looking for a vision of life that would be affirming, that would be hopeful, that would allow them to see the possibilities. And I think that has always been important in our community but I think it's important to everyone who reads romances. >> And I loved in the film when members of the lesbian community were saying that we finally got books that didn't end with suicide. But there's a parallel with all romance fiction. You know, you've got the great warning fiction, all the, you know, ^IT Maggie, Girl of the Streets ^NO and those kinds of -- if you had sex, the sex led to an ignominious death in the river, right? It was like a direct correlation. ^M01:00:00 And so all of romance has done that on that for women in general and I would like to hope for men too that it's sad, you know, maybe you cannot die if you don't have reproductive missionary sex. Maybe you can actually live [laughter], even if it's someone who's not your husband. So [laughter], so I think that if it's sexual empowerment on every level for everyone involved and that's why things like 50 Shades, no matter how you feel about the book itself, that was part of the reason everyone was so up in arms about it. It was like, "Oh wait, women have sex again?" Like, we thought they stopped that [laughter]. So right away, you get this instantaneous backlash where you have any sort of [inaudible] -- I mean that's like the sex in that book is actually mostly missionary sex. And everyone was like, "What?" Because it had a blindfold and [laughter] the world freaked out. I mean, it's that same backlash that happens over and over and over because there's a certain contingency of our population that wants the sex to equal ignominious death in the river. >> Well, I have to condescend just for a second because although I love a happy ending myself and I see what everyone is saying. I think of it personally as, I'm not going to claim for truth but that's how I see it personally is that the happy ending is a kind of subgenre of the genre. So I'll give you an example. We all know the Jane Eyre which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. It has a happy ending, right, after many travails, it has a happy ending. If that hadn't had a happy ending and it's a romance, I think that everyone agrees on that, if it hadn't had a happy ending, I would still think of it as a romance myself and know -- ^M01:01:46 [ Laughter ] ^M01:01:50 >> And then like the big R -- >> If it's not a moment -- >> That's a big R. That's like the big R. The scholar's R. >> Yeah, this is, yeah -- this is where, right -- >> Yeah, [inaudible] and Shelley, yeah. >> So this is where I think Pam's terminology comes in very handy. >> Go for it. >> I actually start my classes usually by putting some concentric circles on the board and you know, the largest circle is the one called capital R romance and that is fiction that is not bound by the paltry limits of [inaudible], right. Fiction where, or fiction as the world of desire where anything can happen. Within that -- >> So Batman falls into that category. >> Yes, Batman falls into that category. Science fiction falls into that category, right. It's the oldest form of narrative fiction that we have. [Inaudible] falls into that category, right. The ^IT Odyssey ^Normal falls into that category. So there's romance. One subset of romance overlapping with it is love stories because there are also love stories that are realist fiction so it doesn't exactly fit into the circle. But there's a subset of romance which is love stories, and a subset of love stories which are romance novels, which is a love story with a happy ending. I'm utterly comfortable with that distinction. I think it's incredibly useful distinction. If I am going to a movie, if I am reading a novel, I want to know if the wedding at the end of that novel is a red wedding or a white one [laughter], right. ^M01:03:12 [ Applause ] ^M01:03:13 Because, and I have been bait and switched back in the days when there were, you know, when there were video stores, right, I remember, you know, renting videos that were marketed as though they were romance, like romance novels as though they had happy endings and when they didn't, that was not a happy evening [laughter]. >> Mary. >> Mary. >> Mary. >> I'm going to stand up. >> Do what you do. >> I'm going to take what you're saying. I just want to [inaudible] a little more. What if there is no canon, right, because we're talking about romance fiction and it's not just a happy ending. There are many, many more strictures and I mean that in a positive way around writing a romance novel. For example, you may be sleeping with someone that's not your husband but you damn well better not be adulterous, right? >> Right. >> Yeah, so I meant outside of marriage. >> There's way more things about a romance novel than just the HEA that create a different genre and I think if we say there's no canon because a romance novel responds so much to what's happening in the year it's written. >> Yes. >> Right? >> Right. >> So the canon for 1984 is going to be way different than the canon for now. >> And the heroes are going to be different. >> Heroes are going to be different. ^IT Fifty Shades of Grey ^Normal is going to get a tremendous amount of academic attention and it should, people trying to figure out what the hell's going on in women's lives now, right? Like how far would you go to get a rich guy something, you know, who knows? Right, what the question's going to be? But my point is, ^IT Fifty Shades of Grey ^Normal is going to be a canon for now. >> Right. >> And -- >> CFM, right? >> Yeah [laughter]. I mean, you know, a couple of years ago, I was all like, okay, this is wonderful. Romance novels are now [inaudible] the hero by making him lower class. But guess what? That's kind of died out and we're only talking three years. >> Right. >> So the canonical motorcycle man gone. Gone, if you're teaching now, right? Now you got to go for rock and roll or various other things, see yourself a hero. But also BDSM, canonical three years ago, changing very fast. So the romance fiction circle within the rest of it, if you ask me, is so mutable year by year that it's really kind of spurious to talk about it in terms of a canon unless you're tying it very closely to the cultural moment in which it's written. >> Okay. >> So what do you think? >> Very good, Mary. >> I absolutely agree with that. >> Oh good. >> But I also think that to talk about the romance canon is to sort of elevate it to use the same vocabulary that's used with precious art, right? It's to say we're a part of that as well. So -- and I think to a certain extent, I mean, I know for my sort of generation of academics, it's like canons always kind of tongue in cheek. >> Yeah. >> Because it's always associated with the Pale Penis People [laughter]. >> I resemble them. >> It's slightly technical, yeah. Is that right [laughter]? I apologize. ^M01:06:08 [ Laughter ] ^M01:06:10 >> Explain that. >> Three for three, baby. Three for three [laughter]. >> So basically, I mean, I was taught this in high school by my English teacher who's hilarious, Mrs. Bunch and she was like, "We're going to be reading a bunch of work by a dead white man, the Pale Penis People," [laughter] and she's like, "I have to teach you this because it's you know, on standardized testing." And that was like basically our introduction to this literature [laughter]. But so you know, for our generation, we kind of take hedonicity in general tongue in cheek but we also understand that there's something important about saying something as canon even if we know the canon's going to shift. >> Yeah. >> Because that is the language. It's you know, the sort of butlerian reassignment of jargon. You know, we're putting teeth into romance novels and saying they're part of something big. They're a part of something real even if we know that you know, our syllabus will shift in two years. >> Yeah. >> Because there are classics. I mean, we all know that there are classics but you know, the book I would like to just to read, I'm not going to write, is to take like a 1980s arrogant hero and put him in a 2014 book and see how long it takes the heroine to kick his ass [laughter], you know. There's two different, two different -- I mean, two different kinds of stories so yeah. Two different kinds of heroes. >> Okay. >> Hi, I'm a public librarian and I recently had put together a workshop for romance writers to come in and we had a really good audience. And I was speaking about my experience attempting to write a romance as well as the others who were there. And I have a disability and the character in one of my books had a disability and then afterwards once I had told my story and everyone else, there were several people in the audience who came in -- up to me and asked, "You know, I hadn't gotten a chance to read a book that is really identifies the disability experience in the romance genre. Do you have a suggestion?" And of course, I have a couple of suggestions. But if we're speaking about the canon, I was wondering if anyone, any of you had some good suggestions of such a title? Thank you. >> I see a woman here who's from GW, I spoke at her class last year. >> I think I see a hand. >> Who was the young woman that wrote the book about the disabilities? >> It's -- ^M01:08:56 [ Laughter ] ^M01:08:59 >> Here you and not her. >> Oh. But I do remember the young lady [inaudible] point in that particular workshop. They did address that genre and there were several that they informed us about. >> Yeah. >> The one that I did read after that class was a young man who was bipolar. They also mentioned that there was a romance novel where the character suffered from another disability, I can't remember right now but the [inaudible]. >> Sarah, who was that? Sarah, you were there? >> There's a couple of scholars who do feasibility studies [Inaudible] Gomez -- >> Ria Shane, yeah. >> Ria Shane and [inaudible]. There's a [inaudible] in the calendar. >> Yup. >> That's the one. That's the one. >> There's a [inaudible], there's ^IT The Duke is Mine ^Normal by -- >> Susan Rachman has a [inaudible] heroine. There's -- ^M01:09:55 [ Inaudible Conversations ] ^M01:10:00 >> And if we want to, I mean, if we want to think about canonical novels or iconic novels, ^IT Flowers from the Storm ^Normal. >> Right. >> By Laura Kinsale where the hero suffers a stroke and is aphasic for most of the novel. >> Right, yeah, yeah. >> ^IT The Rosie Project ^Normal. >> ^IT The Rosie Project ^Normal, I mean the whole -- this was, if you want to think about what Mary was just talking about in terms of particular historical moments. The arrival of the Asperger syndrome, autism spectrum hero and the deployment of Asperger syndrome as a way of thinking about masculinity which is what I think is going on in that set of novels, is very interesting and it's happening sort of now and it will be interesting to see how long that one lasts but that will be you know, a teachable moment. As well as perhaps, part of the reader's canon, right? And this is the difference between the teachable, you know, the scholar we can -- >> We're seeing it too. >> What's that? >> We're seeing it too. >> Yup, interesting. >> Yeah, because ^IT Flowers from the Storm ^Normal is definitely a classic. >> Oh yeah. >> Definitely a classic. >> You're on. >> Hi, I'm a reader and I spend a lot of time on message boards -- well, I spend a lot of time on All About Romance message board and I want to agree with you and agree with you too. In that when a new person comes on the board and asks for recommendations, we don't say, "You must read ^IT The Flame and the Flower ^Normal," even though ^IT The Flame and the Flower ^Normal is like, I think that is part of the canon. >> Yes. >> It may not be something that anybody would like now or you know, but we all recognize maybe as women of a certain age recognize that that was really what introduced us to romance. And maybe it catapulted us from the staid kind of Harlequin where, you know, there was a virginal kiss and that was kind of it. And then also then everybody should know how to [inaudible] all over the place [laughter]. And that was the -- >> Gabs, many gabs. >> That was the bulk that did it. I don't know, maybe there was other ones but there's Rosemary Rogers. >> Right, yeah. >> Yeah, so right, so what I'm saying is that there could be both going on at the same time. When a person comes on that board and says, "What can you recommend for me?" Well, our question to them back is, "What would you like to see?" >> Yeah. >> What do you like, what do you, what have you read in the past that you prefer and let us, you know, and we'll go further with that. And so that's appealing to the taste of today. But if we sat down and we have, and said, "Well, what is in the canon?" Everybody will bring up ^IT The Flame and the Flower ^Normal, among others. >> Yeah. >> But that one, it comes to mind. And because it's not as popular today and wouldn't be suggested. >> No, no that's right. >> There were a bunch of posts last April, right, so Noah Berlatsky in ^IT Salon ^Normal wrote an article that said, "Romance fiction doesn't have a canon and that's a good thing," and there were a lot of posts in response to this, many of which kind of busted out a canon for Noah to read. But many of the canons that were offered were canons of authors rather than particular novels. Wendy the Super Librarian who was a blogger and was an RWA Librarian of the Year in 2011, made the comment that in the romance world, it's frequently an author's body of work that is canonical, right. It's a little more like classical music, right. Bach is canonical. Which Bach? Well, you know, I'm not going to pick one, Bach! But even her post listed, I think it was three or four specific novels, right. ^IT The Sheik ^Normal was one, ^IT The Flame and the Flower ^Normal was one and ^IT Redeeming Love ^Normal by Francine Rivers. And then readers wrote in. There were 111 comments. I actually printed out the whole thing at work [laughter]. But there were 111 comments and maybe another 25, 26 individual novels or series were recommended. So yeah, absolutely, ^IT The Flame and the Flower ^Normal is on there. ^IT Redeeming Love ^Normal is on there. We can write a list but the list isn't something that you must now and go read this if you want to call yourself a romance reader and I think that's a wonderful, you know, attribute of the romance community. You know, Dan Savage talks about how the magic words, what is it, the four magic words? What are you into? Right, and I think the romance community instinctively asks that question. If people want to know, you know, want a recommendation for a romance novel, the reply is not. "Go read this." It's "What do you like? What are you into?" >> Right. >> We're five minutes away from the end so -- >> Oh! >> So again, we're -- >> I was an executive editor of Harlequin and I was there 16 years and 35 years in the publishing industry, mostly in romance. And I'd be interested in your responses to what I call the Casablanca paradox and okay, it's a movie, not a book. But issues do come up in books that Harlequin did something called the Romance Report and we'd ask, you know, what's the most romantic movie and year after year, Casablanca came up at the top of the list. Now, in terms of what Mary said about the canon, you have adultery. You have not a happy ending but I have my own theory about why that's powerful but I'd like to hear yours. Thank you. >> But to a certain extent, I think ^IT Casablanca ^Normal is -- because we know that they -- we know that, you know, Bogie and Bacall had their happy ending. So it's like ^IT Casablanca ^Normal like they split off there but we know they -- >> It's not [inaudible]. >> But we know that he got his happy ending. Does that make sense? Okay, never mind [laughter]. Because I was thinking of that. I was watching ^IT Casablanca ^Normal really recently and then I watched ^IT Dark Passages ^Normal, is that it, Dark? Anyway and I was like, I know that he's -- he gets his happy ending. >> Well, it ends with a beautiful friendship. >> Yes. >> Right, I mean, it ends with a couple. ^M01:16:10 [ Laughter ] ^M01:16:16 It just took, it just took -- >> It's a different couple. >> You know, it just took Rick a little while to figure out what he was into [laughter]. >> I have a different answer about that which is -- >> That's a lot of [inaudible]. >> This movie is a great example of what I meant by not necessarily having a happy ending. I think what's important there is not that they get on the plane and go off together. But that there is a mutual declaration of love where there had been doubt before. That's what makes it a romance to me, not simply that there's going to be an ever after. >> And then he sacrificed it. >> That's right. >> It's [inaudible] the ultimate sacrifice. >> Exactly. >> But that's the point. He sacrificed for the greater good. What we would do is say, "Wow, Rick loves Ilsa. Look, Ilsa also just admitted she loved Rick even though she has to stay married to [inaudible]. >> There you go. >> But -- ^M01:17:06 [ Inaudible Conversations ] ^M01:17:08 >> I think something can be romantic without being generically a romance. >> Of course, absolutely. >> And I think that that's the Casablanca paradox. >> Absolutely. >> And you know, keep in mind that there's something. I really acknowledge joking before about Rick but think about how different that movie would be if it ended with Rick alone. >> Yeah. >> It does not end with Rick alone. It ends on a very optimistic and emotionally satisfying note, right. >> Yeah. >> And when the RWA sat down, you know, when the RWA Committee sat down to write their definition of the romance genre to put on the website, they did not say a happily ever after ending and they did not say a betrothal. They said an optimistic and emotionally satisfying ending and at least, you know, according to Jenny Crusie's essays about this, the reason was because there were love stories that did not end the way that a romance novel does that they wanted to leave some room for. >> Someone should remake that movie with Rick and -- >> Oh, it's totally -- you don't need to remake it. It's all over. ^M01:18:17 [ Laughter ] ^M01:18:19 That's the Casablanca slash, you know -- >> Right. >> The fan flick is all over that. >> Right, yeah. >> Mrs. [Inaudible], yes. >> We are, this is the -- you've been wonderful. Thank you. We are out of time. Reassemble here in 15, if you want to hear Panel Two. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. ^M01:18:34 [ Applause ] ^M01:18:36 >> So this is our, indeed, our second panel which runs concurrently with the two, with two drop-in rooms on this floor, one in the Oval Gallery which, you know, there's a map in your program and good luck with that [laughter]. We're screening there the film ^IT Love Between the Covers ^Normal which we, in fact, sneak previewed last night. In the Montpelier Room, you can try your hand at writing a portion of a romance novel. You can visit publishers' tables where there is enormous swag and to have a look at the popular Romance Projects website. I would like at this point to hand Panel Two over to our moderator, William Gleason, chair of the English Department at Princeton. ^M01:19:19 [ Applause ] ^M01:19:25 >> Thank you, thank you. Welcome back. All right, in Panel Two, we shift gears a little bit. And we ask ourselves the question, "What do science and history reveal about love?" Now the genesis of Panel Two is the simple realization that romance novels which depict characters in love, call upon us to question the nature of love itself. Our questions to consider for Panel Two and there's a list of them in your program, address the physical and cultural and gendered nature of love. We also wish to consider cross-cultural aspects of love and the history of love and of marriage in the real world. ^M01:20:05 So with those ideas in mind, we're going to watch a film clip then I'll invite our panelists to join me up on the stage. Each of the panelists, same format as the first panel. We'll offer brief reactions to the clips, or to the questions, or introduce their other thoughts about this particular topic. And we'll then open it up to Q and A from you. So whenever you are ready. ^E01:20:31 ^B01:20:42 [ Music ] ^M01:20:47 >> First one in the water gets a kiss. >> Okay. ^M01:20:49 [ Music ] ^M01:20:53 >> It has been claimed and I think it's probably true that what we think of as love is on the one hand, a set of biological, neurological, emotional phenomena that are our common inheritance as human beings, as a species. >> This is a diagram of the uterus or womb and these are the fallopian tubes leading to it. And these, the ovaries which produce the egg cells. >> Oh, there isn't any special age. You're all going to start at different times. >> And on the other hand, that those are understood, articulated and put into practice through culture and cultures vary a lot. ^M01:21:36 [ Music and Singing ] ^M01:21:52 >> What counts as love in one time and in one place can be unrecognizable as love in another. ^M01:21:59 [ Music and Singing ] ^M01:22:04 There are cultural scripts about whom you can love and what are the social behaviors that are appropriate when it comes to love. ^M01:22:12 [ Music and Singing ] ^M01:22:18 If you really want to understand love in all of its variety, in all of its complexity, you need to go to anthropologists, historians, sociologists, people for whom difference is everything. ^M01:22:33 [ Music and Singing ] ^M01:22:39 Those kinds of changes whether it's chronologically within a culture or whether it's geographically across cultures are important for us to know not because we need to change, not because somebody's right and somebody's wrong. But because they remind us of the sort of the rightful variety that human beings are capable of and that can exist under this overarching umbrella concept. ^M01:23:10 [ Music and Singing ] ^M01:23:24 >> All right, that was terrific. Those of us on the panel had not seen all the images that were intercut with our fabulous talking head. That was Eric Murphy Selinger from DePaul University. All right, I'd like to invite our panelists to take their places on the stage. I'll identify each of them briefly. There are four bios in the booklet. We have Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History at Evergreen State College; Eli Finkel, Professor in the Department of Psychology in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; Darlene Clark Hine, Professor of History at Northwestern University; William M. Reddy, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and Ron Walters, Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. So as Eric suggested, we have historians; we have anthropologists; we have scientists [laughter]. And we'll begin by asking them to give their brief reactions and then we'll turn things over to you. And I think we'll do as we did in the first panel. We'll start with Stephanie on the far end and then move our way down the panel. So Stephanie, whenever you're ready. >> Well, a lot of you in this audience have either written or have at least read books that expand or even transcend the conventions that we associate with romance novels. But I think it's really important when we think about where we've come from and where you might want to go in your writing as we move, I think, perhaps less importantly into the digital age into a really new age of gender relationships. It's important for us to understand that I need to disagree with the clip in the very first panel that these are not archetypes that are thousands of years old. And in fact, they contradict most of the archetypes of heroism and virtue from thousands of years ago in which men were supposed to put other men and their friendships with men ahead of their love for women. The love for as Aristotle put it, "the meaner sort of man feels for a woman." That women were not supposed to be in any way frightened by sex. In fact, they were the lustier sex, more prone to sexual error and leading men into temptation than the other, than the other way. And not only leading them into temptation, actively pursuing it. So and of course, throughout most of history, marriage was not the happy ending to a love story. It was the unhappy ending to a love story [laughter]. It's when you had to leave the person you really love. And in fact, if you get to Southern France, there was a whole school of thought that because marriage was based on political and economic convenience, it could not possibly be pure love. Only an adulterous relationship could be one of love. Now, what I think is really important to recognize is that many of the archetypes and themes emerged in a very particular set of gender roles and marital ideals that were very new in the late 18th Century and early 19th Century. One was the idea that marrying for love ought to be the primary motive for marriage and that marrying for money or security was unworthy. The other was the relatively new idea that men and women had radically different strengths and weaknesses and essences and that they could only be transcended by the power of love. These new ideas posed women with huge anxiety-producing contradictions. You're only supposed to marry for love but you need security because you [inaudible] living on your own. Passionate love is fraught with danger then because a woman's economic security depended upon her choosing prudently. You knew you needed still to obey your husband but this time -- or at least to allow yourself to be instructed by your husband, to learn from him. But this time, it had to be based on love rather than on obedience. Being loved gives a woman access to ideas, talents, strengths, resources, experiences that only men possessed and a woman could not achieve on her own. And yet to the extent, precisely to the extent that a man possessed those attributes, it was very difficult for a woman, a different species to fathom his intentions and to understand his psyche and to be certain of his love. So as a result of these tensions, women came to experience romance in sharp contrast with many previous ideals as a tangled bundle of mystery and unpredictability. Marked by the excitement slash danger of loving someone you do not fully understand, someone who can hurt you but also if you are special enough to captivate him by your own brand of femininity, will protect you. The dream is that prudence will be proven unnecessary, that if you're swept away by the right kind of passion at the right time and in the right way and are the right kind of woman, this man will recognize and bow the virtue -- your virtues and bow before you suspending his exercise of power for you and you alone. That has been the happy ending of the traditional romance novel. And I know that -- and I would like to lay down a challenge for you in a new era where increasingly we are finding that women satisfaction is not based upon fear or even admiration for men. How can we transcend the idea that love, there's a certain amount of sense in which women have tended to confuse being intimidated with being infatuated over the years. How can we make it, both in fiction and in real life, how can we make it safe, sexy, not sexy to be safe, not to be insecure? How can we make equality erotic? And I think that's a serious challenge for us in both fiction and in real life relationships. >> I am Eli Finkel from Northwestern and checking on my iPhone notes here. One first observation is I am a stranger in a strange land [laughter]. I was tempted to do this, the whole thing shirtless [laughter]. Stephanie talked me out of it. I really said I'm doing it. She was like, not, do not. >> I exercised my feminine powers. >> Yeah [laughter]. I have to say she is right. ^M01:29:59 So I'm here to talk about science and there is a whole discipline that we call relationship science. It is a data-based way of understanding how romance, passion, love, commitment, relationships, initial attraction, dating technologies, how all these things work. And so I'll talk about a few ideas. This is actually a vast, complex, interesting field. I want to give you a flavor for it because I assume many of you are maybe not even familiar that there is a scientific approach to these issues. One that seems particularly relevant to the topics at hand here is there's been a lot of research on individual differences, personality differences in the extent to which we believe in romantic destiny. I'm accusing you guys of being high on average, above the average members of the population in romantic destiny and let me just say that if you're high in romantic destiny and you are with somebody who's a truly spectacular fit and have no conflict, you are over the moon. But you won't find such a person. Most likely, you will have some conflict and romantic destiny is associated with declines over time. If beliefs in romantic destiny is associated with declines over time and romantic satisfaction, love bricks break up and the reason why is because you have a belief system that says love conquers all. There is perfection out there and then every single person will disappoint by comparison to that. That's my happy news [laughter]. I'm pivoting to the less happy, just I want to give you a feel for how scientists like a one-minute feel for how scientists tend to approach these sorts of questions. So here's an example of a study that we did. We took 120 married couples from the Chicago area. We had them right about, do a lot of different things anyway but one of the things they did was they wrote about conflict in their marriage every four months for a two-year period. And in the second year, we randomly assigned half of those couples to do an additional writing task where they wrote about the conflict from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved. So everybody writes about the conflict. Half the people are randomly assigned to do this additional task. So what's interesting about this particular study relevant to this group is romantic passion tends to decline in marriage. I know this is probably a surprise [laughter]. Happily ever after -- or like the happy ending to me, I always thought it meant sex like I don't even understand the group at all [laughter]. But the happily ever after thing, right, like it sort of ends with the beginning of happily ever after but the fact is the science on this is dreary. Relationship satisfaction and particularly passion go down over time. I was pretty excited in our study that this 21-minute intervention that we did actually didn't reverse the downward trajectory of romantic passion over time but it stabilized it so the people who were in that condition, they showed the decline at the beginning of the study then they went into the intervention and the passion level stabilized. The people in the control condition that didn't do the extra writing task, their passion continued to decline. Anyway, that's a feel for how we scientists tend to approach these sorts of questions. I'll leave it there for now. >> Well, that's pretty good [laughter]. >> Thank you. >> I am here primarily because I'm such a great fan of Beverly Jenkins and Brenda Jackson [laughter]. ^M01:33:18 [ Applause ] ^M01:33:21 I've mentioned to, I mentioned last night to a group of women who were standing around that as a historian, I rarely venture into fiction. I'm so caught up with trying to retrieve the past and imagine what people must have been feeling back in the days that who left no written records by the way, or very few. And but as an outlet, I did become quite addicted to detective fiction. And I can just, you know, for 10, 20 years whenever I had a spare moment or was on the plane, I was reading a detective novel. And it occurred to me in the late '90s that all the detective novels written by wealthy white males when they had a black woman character, she was never really beautiful or particularly talented and that was sort of, you know, annoying [laughter] after a while. So I decided that I needed to find me some beautiful black women who were active and sassy and did what they wanted to do and was searching for love in all the right and wrong places [laughter]. And that led me to Beverly Jenkins and Brenda Jackson. And what was so beautiful about Brenda Jenkins and Beverly Jackson is that there is a historical context in their novels. They are very contemporary but they're rooted in the past as well. There's a past sensibility about how black women must have felt even when historians were not documenting their feelings. Some of the daring things that they did, the honesty, the character, the determination, all the courage, the bravery was there. And Brenda and Beverly weave these characteristics into these women and make them truly heroic and I love them. So what do I -- but when I stand back and think about romantic love and modern romance and whatever, I can't help but think anew about the slave narratives. And one of them as powerful slave narratives that captures the mystery, the commitment, the adventure, the beauty, the different disguises was ^IT Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom ^Normal by William and Ellen Craft. Now, William and Ellen Craft were slaves. And they were able to get married but [inaudible] but Ellen insisted that they would not consummate this marriage because she would not have children as long as they were slaves. And that was because the slaves that were produced would be the property of the owner. So there's no happy ending there. But she convinced -- she convinced William to disguise himself as her owner and she dressed up in a disguise as this wounded male slave and they essentially would transom all kinds of means to escape north and eventually went to England and of course, they did get married and they became very ardent passionate abolitionists. And I came across a great descendant of theirs when I was doing my research on black physicians in hospitals in Colombia, South Carolina. And he -- in the early 20th Century was passionate and about healthcare delivery. So my interest in history, my desire to look at the past, to find these episodes where you see the true humanity of people who were considered no more than property come through was one of the things that I thought historians need to appreciate a bit more of. We need to put a little bit more love into the histories that we write. And so that was one of the things that I wanted to just emphasize here. There is a past, present, and a future. And I think that the writers of popular romance give us that trinity and Beverly and Brenda, I just want to thank you for making me a better historian. >> Oh, [inaudible]. >> Because now, I have -- ^M01:39:02 [ Applause ] ^M01:39:07 >> Okay, I need to start with a slight correction. I am a historian by training. I have a secondary appointment in anthropology. And I like to think of myself as an anthropologist of the past but there's actually a lot of historians up here so don't be fooled [laughter]. And I've just been working on the history of romantic love and in doing this work; I became convinced that the first love stories actually -- this is not debatable. The first love stories of the kind we are familiar with were written in the 12th Century. So I set out trying to figure out why that was the case. Before the 12th Century, romantic love was considered to be a weakness, not a source of strength. It was considered to lead men and women to fail in their duties. Think of Paris in the Iliad. You know, when he's failing on the battlefield, Aphrodite jumps in and carries him off to make love with Helen. ^M01:40:02 That was the standard view in the -- in ancient times. Starting in the 12th Century, however, we have for the first time, the familiar image of the knight and his lady, both of them inspired by love to grand gestures of bravery and self-sacrifice. Love makes them stronger, not weaker. Why did this change happen? That's where there's a lot of debate. And my answer has to do with a change in Christianity. In the 12th Century, the church for the first time, attempted to impose laws on civil society inspired by the belief that all sexual pleasure was sinful, even sexual pleasure enjoyed within a legitimate Christian marriage, according to theologians of the 12th Century, was sinful to some extent. For this reason, divorce was outlawed. Very strict rules of consanguinity were imposed. Inheritance rights were changed so that illegitimate children could not inherit and so on and so forth. For the church, it was appropriate for husband and wife to love each other in a Christian way but the church made no place for a concept of a sexual love that was inspiring, self-transforming or morally good. And it appears to me that development of courtly love by troubadours and romance writers in this same period represented a kind of pushback against the clergy. By writing in the vernacular, not in Latin, they reached out to the largest possible audience. Sound familiar? By writing in simple verse, they tried to make sure their songs and stories were easy to understand and to memorize. They wrote for oral performance. In their stories, the characters proved that their love was no mere self-seeking desire and no sin. The lovers proved this to each other by acts of courage, of loyalty, of self-denial, of self-sacrifice. Their object was first, the wellbeing of the beloved. Second, the chance to be together and third, if possible, sexual intimacy. To act with these priorities in mind was to prove one's love was real or true and this was the first time we see the expression, "true love" being used in vernacular languages. Not all their stories had happy endings but on this, I understand how this is a big controversy. Well, okay [laughter]. But when a 12th Century love story does not have a happy ending and we've already -- Stephanie's already alluded to this, when a 12th Century love story does not have a happy ending, it's usually the fault of the husband. The jealous husband as in the famous story of Tristan and Isolde where King Mark goes wild with jealousy and destroys everyone's wellbeing, not just his own. This was a direct result of the abolition of divorce by the church. There was plenty of divorce going on up until mid-12th Century. From now on, husbands and wives were stuck with each other in arranged marriages and for the first four centuries, this new kind of heroic, morally good romantic love was mostly adulterous. Inherent in the pushback of the new authors of romantic literature was a quiet pretense that love was blessed by God. This is a wonderful feature of the courtly love literature. Authors pretended not to be aware that the church had condemned all interest in romantic partners as shameful. They pretended not to be aware that lust led directly to hell [laughter]. They quietly assumed that God inspired love and worked behind the scenes to bring lovers together. As many scholars have noted, this was blatant heresy. But it was precisely because the literature was so trivial, so not serious, so popular that it was never attacked as a heresy. Nobody wrote this up in Latin. In fact, a couple of people did write up something like this in Latin and they were quickly condemned for their heresy. By the way, the cult of Saint Valentine is a typical product of this medieval, underground, highly subversive attempt to pretend that love is sacred. Quietly starting in the 14th Century, authors and readers began to pretend that Valentine was the patron saint of lovers. It's like the patron saint of sinful, nasty, dirty people as it would, the church would look at that [laughter]. The practice of sending love notes to one's beloved on that date spread rapidly thereafter. And in fact, for centuries an unofficial and entirely subversive set of writing practice [inaudible] and iconography and everyday forms of interaction as well, I can prove this to you, there are plenty of great love stories, if anyone wants to listen. Where -- which I've tried to document real couples who actually followed some of these same plot features, the same practices and behaviors that you find in the romances. So these were writing practices, iconography, everyday behaviors that carried the dangerous message that love was something good. Lovers proved their love was no sin by the courage and selflessness that they displayed and I argue that this is unique to the western tradition. You don't find this business of proving that one has true love by being selfless in other traditions and, you know, if you want to know more about that, we can talk about it. >> Okay, these are very tough acts to follow [laughter]. And I'm actually going to junk my original comments and comment on some of what's come before. When I first tried to engage the question, what do the science and history of love reveal, my answer in the case of science was going to be not much. And Eli has, of course, corrected that [laughter]. But I think it's a very healthy correction because the science I have in mind was some much associated with my own institution in fact, and it was a science that was not of love but was of sex and of reproduction, and who should reproduce and who should not reproduce. And it was a science that I've regarded as quite ethically impaired but having absolutely nothing to do with love as far as I could tell. And there was a famous course at Hopkins, a sex ed course taught by John Money and the students called it, Sex Money [laughter]. But it was entirely about performance and preference. It had absolutely nothing to do with emotions. My response to the question in regard to history what does love reveal? It was going to be disappointment [laughter]. And disappointment because historians, of course, believe in change over time and believed that there have been profound changes in all sorts of things including sex. When my colleagues, when I told them about a project I was doing, this would be about 30, 40 years ago, that said sex has no history," this was before Foucault when sex acquired a history [laughter] but some of us thought it had a history before that. And it really -- historians, I think have something of a contradiction. My colleagues may disagree with me about this but we have a profound commitment to change over time. And that's what's come true in many of the comments. And we've expanded the realms of change in recent decades. The history of emotions is a new hot subject. I learned as of Monday that there's a new book out on the smile and the history of the smile which apparently began in France in the late 18th Century [laughter] of now -- >> They forget all about it in the interim decades [laughter]? >> They, well -- >> They didn't have dentists. >> A bit more than that [laughter]. I only have the author's awful pun to explain this. He said, "It was frowned upon [laughter] which may say something about historians in language." And that brings me to my second point. I think sometimes we're caught by our own ideology and perhaps our own emotions of what we want to convey. And this may be an issue with romance fiction as historically based. On the one hand, we do believe that everything has a history. On the other hand, the language trap is we use words that we assume are transhistorical such as love. And sometimes it's very hard to negotiate that, I think as a historian and as a writer because it would be a horrible romance novel to say and they were in love in the 19th Century prudish mode of expressing love. So I think that there may be some things to talk about in terms of what we bring and don't bring to romance fiction. And with my own homework, because I did want to get this in. I did prep and I prepped in the academic historian's way. In other words, I tried to identify romance novels that deal with topics I know something about [laughter]. I hit gold quite early on when I found a novel with the title, ^IT The Abolitionist's Secret ^Normal since I write on abolitionists. It turned out it was the second novel in a series. The first one of which dealt with a woman's rights advocate and another thing I deal with. ^M01:50:01 And the third in the series dealt with Temperance, with a character named Temperance. I could never imagine a really steamy sex scene with anyone named Temperance [laughter]. But the novel helped me get over that [laughter] with that precondition. Now, what I have to say about this novel is I could pick a lot of nits with the novel but I also very much appreciated that the novel was taking seriously people I take very seriously. And something else I respected about that and really one that gave the novels a lot of slack as a historian, was the novels that are not really writing history. History is the setting for my novels. And at that point, that was fine. I think where I have trouble with fiction of all sorts and sometimes with movies of all sorts is when they claim to be historically accurate and really aren't. I don't care if they take liberties with history. It makes for a whole lot better novels. I would write a very dull novel and I once tried it and realized I just had to explain everything [laughter]. And located at some body of historiography and so I think that history can provide much for novels but I think we have to respect the difference between fiction and what we do as historians. >> I agree. >> All right, panelists, thank you very much. ^M01:51:38 [ Applause ] ^M01:51:45 It's time to open the floor to your questions and comments for our panelists, for yourselves about the science and history of love. Same drill as the first panel, seek out a microphone, obtain the microphone, stand and speak into the microphone. >> Hi, I'm Susan Wizer, one of the questions was about love and the feminine, I think. It was some phrasing like that. >> His love of feminine -- >> [Inaudible] feminine topic exactly. So what I would like to hear your thoughts about is why women have made so much progress in sexual openness, at least in this part of the world but men don't seem to have gotten more romantic in the sense of being interested in romance. They are not the primary audience for popular romance fiction. They are not the audience for romantic comedies. They don't buy bridal magazines, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what are your thoughts about women and romance and women and emotion because when I ask my classes this, the answer I always get is, "Well, women naturally have more emotion than men." So I would like to hear what you think about these questions. >> Well, I'll jump right in there [laughter]. I think that a lot of what we think of as love and are feminine is interpretations of it, are in fact, historically and culturally specific too. And when you go back to the medieval ages, to ^IT The Wife of Bath ^Normal, the tremendous bawdiness of some of the characters there. Or if you just go into history and you look at colonial Americans talking about -- we do have some records of what they talked about and the women and the men, there's very little difference in the sort of things they talk about and the affect they show talking about it. So the kind of difference that you are talking about, I think also developed in this period of the 19th Century that I was talking about where women were put into this very difficult bind. That you were dependent upon men economically, you had to obey them ultimately or at least they had more resources and that things you had to learn from, and yet you were supposed to love. And you had to work out a way of empowering yourself as an individual in a period when there was no way to empower yourself as a group. And one of the things that happens there, it's actually interesting, if you look at novels and letters from the early 19th Century, men embraced the romance ideal faster than women did. Women were always talking about how you had to be prudent. You had to be careful. Romantic passion was something, you know, that you could not afford to indulge in. So it brought the notion of friendship and companionship. Then by the late 19th Century, you get women as we begin in the 20th Century to get actually the transformation from courtship and calling to dating. And men and women have to, you know, explore each other's attraction. They get a little more permission to do that. The double standard gets a little bit down. Then women have to figure out a man's intention and you spend a lot of time discussing men and feelings and signals with other women. So this is extremely important. It's part of a woman's definition of intimacy that I think is Francesca Cancian has pointed out, it involves a feminization of love so that women begin to see love in terms of this communicative thing and they miss out on what was historically also a very important part of love, the instrumental part of it. So I think that we're still having to come to terms with that. Men are more interested in feelings, at least no, they probably always understood it -- they're more willing to express them. There are these massive changes going on in male-female relationships and desires now. And to my mind, I think that they mean that we need to rethink a lot of the conventions of romantic love. So there's my two cents on that. I tried to keep it short enough. I could go on forever on that but [laughter]. >> I would only add that in the late 19th Century, as men are sort of identifying and defining and shaping a meaning of masculinity, what does it mean to be a man, one of the things that has to go are these feelings. So the whole construction of masculinity dictates that you not express your feeling, that you work, that you provide and that you become this morally upright, you know, person and all of that. And that you have to help these women who do have feelings, you know, and that can be just the detriment to your masculinity if you share that kind of emotive feeling and then you can't control her. So I mean, power is wrapped up into controlling your home, right, controlling this passionate woman [laughter], controlling these kids, being active in politics, and running the church. You don't have too much time for romantic sex. But the brothels are there. >> I just want to say one thing which is there is an 18th Century novel, a famous 18th Century novel called ^IT The Man of Feeling ^Normal and I think somebody counted that the main character breaks down and cries about 45 to 50 times [laughter]. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And there was a brief period in the 18th Century when this was very prestigious for men and they were envious of women's greater sensitivity and tried to imitate them. But -- so these, there's a constant that women are regarded as more emotional but this, their stock either rises or falls from one period to another depending on whether emotions are considered to be good or bad. >> You know, one thing that strikes me and this may come from watching sports casting is the degree to which athletes now will say they love one another. And that's hard to imagine that 40 or 50 years ago but they're expressing love for their teammates. >> May I just add one thing though? Because actually, when you go back before the mid-19th Century, love is a word that is used more often of siblings, cousins, God, community, family than it is of partners. And again, we have seen a narrowing of our definition of love to the dyad that has both positive and negative aspects, I think. >> Who's next? >> Okay, the discussion of femininity versus masculinity in these subjects is really interesting to me and one thing that I've struggled with, with my love of romance novels is how often the male protagonist is an alpha male. And it's starting to change more now than it was, you know, 20 years ago when I started but it's still very much, to me it seems [inaudible]. And I'm wondering especially in view of what Dr. Coontz said the erotica of equality or to make equality erotic, you know, where would you see that going and how do you see that affecting the dualism of gender that we're currently operating in? >> Well, I have a guilty confession to make in this crowd. >> This is going to be good [laughter]. >> Right. >> You guys have no idea what's coming [laughter]. >> I never read romance novels. For me, the emotional soothing that many of my friends get from romance novels, I have always gotten from detective novels because they solve a problem, they right a wrong, they do a mystery and then later, I got absolutely addicted to the ones with the female characters -- ^M02:00:06 -- because those female characters did something really different for me. They did have sex. They didn't get drowned ignominiously [laughter] but they didn't end with a marriage or even a love. They ended by solving their problems. And so I'm, you know, I'm not saying my way is the good way to be. The only, I think, romantic of -- I love to take little girls and make sure when I have -- I spend a lot of time because my son has not yet graced me with a grandchild [laughter]. To my -- I spend a lot of time with other little girls and boys and I always insist that they see the film, ^IT The Last Unicorn ^Normal. Where the happy ending is the woman doesn't fall in love because if she did, she could never be a unicorn again and rescue her other unicorns. And the man has to find another way to be a hero. So my -- it is -- I've used this to let -- to sort of share with you that we all have different kinds of emotional needs that are met by sorts of things. And I find it so interesting to think about how could we bring the two together? How could I get more love and sex maybe in the -- in my escape reading but how could you get more heroism, and action, and larger principles of rightness in yours? So for what it's worth, sorry [laughter]. >> Hey, that was good. >> Yeah, Eli -- does the science of attraction tell us anything about the dominance of the alpha male figure? >> He's kind of hot. ^M02:01:51 [ Applause ] ^M02:01:53 I have -- ^M02:01:54 [ Laughter ] ^M02:01:58 -- I'm happy to shine a little bit on the science of this stuff so we -- within a field that some of you will have heard of called evolutionary psychology. There's a dominant perspective coming from the animal literature but extended to humans in the late 1980s and it's a pervasive view that women are more interested in a man's status and resources than a woman would be. I'm sorry, than a man would be in a woman's status and resources and conversely, men are more interested than women are in a partner's physical attractiveness. And we have, I would like to say systematically destroyed that. I don't know that they know it yet. But we've done a whole bunch of research that shows -- I mean, that's an easy effect to replicate so if you want to be an amateur social psychologist, just you know, go outside and start handing out questionnaires that ask people to what extent are these qualities important to you in a mate? But we were unpersuaded by that, certainly if people want to draw evolutionary conclusions, and so we looked at -- well we conducted a bunch and then we did a meta-analysis, a comprehensive analysis of all studies that have ever looked at existing relationships. So we defined them. It could be totally minimalist so we've done a bunch of speed dating studies. There's other speed dating studies. Also marriage, right, but these are people who have actually met face-to-face. Now, when people have actually met face-to-face and you're assessing how happy they are in their relationship or how much sexual desire they experienced for each other, any other type of indicator of relationship wellness, you no longer are just looking at people's theories about what it is that appeals to them. And it turns out that every -- that all of our studies plus the massive meta-analysis of every study that's ever been done, we replicate the same sex differences that everybody else finds when you look at self-reports, also when you look at internet dating like who sends the first contact email. It turns out that on internet dating, if you're looking at emailing behavior, or messaging, or left and right swipes on Tinder, what you get is that physical attractiveness is more important for the woman, men are more into it, and his earning prospects are more attractive, right. But again, people are just depending on their theories. What about when you look at cases where people have met face-to-face? It turns out that everybody likes people who are hot [laughter], rather than people who are ugly and everybody prefers people who have, to a lesser extent, but everybody prefers people who have some amount of ambition and earning potential. And there is no sex difference. And we weren't able to find any moderation. We weren't able to find that this difference is a function of how old people are. We weren't able to find that the difference is a function of whether you're looking for something casual or serious. We weren't even able to find evidence that this differs across nationally. There was a vague hint that maybe more traditional cultures showed some of these effects. But the alpha male, right, he may be appealing in a romance novel and he may be appealing on a self-report but probably the degree to which a confident assertive person is sexy these days, is equally strong for a man or a woman. Yeah, it's sort of hot. ^M02:05:03 [ Applause ] ^M02:05:07 >> Hi. >> Where's our next microphone? >> I actually, yeah, I want to follow up with a question. I know I've read this on a number of publisher's websites, et cetera. When you were looking at your studies on long-term relationships, et cetera, when they've assessed specifically the romance readers asking them these questions about their sexuality, the responses were much higher. And they've actually shown that romance readers have a much higher response on satisfaction with their sex life and indeed, how active they are. So I was curious to know whether you've looked at that at all or whether is there any particular breakdown of subsets. You were speaking, I believe, in the generic. >> Yeah. >> Okay, and that sort of analysis and whether there was any for the breakdown because I think I can -- I asked around the room. I don't know if anybody else has read these statistics but they do say that. Because romance readers are encountering sexuality and assessing sexuality in others and therefore in themselves, they actually bring it more to their relationships and I'm wondering if that's something that's been examined. >> I honestly don't know. I mean, I would love that finding. If that's true, I could easily -- if, you know, if you were asking based on what I know about the science, what would my hypothesis have been because I'm not aware of these data. I usually could have gone either way so one easy hypothesis predicting the other pattern would be that real relationships have warts and I don't really know the romance canon as well as maybe one or two of you guys do but [laughter] -- but my understanding is that there's something very idealized in this HEA world. And so I might think that you live in a world that's full of fantasy but in reality, your boyfriend, or husband, or whatever girlfriend is not going to have those things so that could be troubling. I could also imagine, I mean, there's a, cognitive psychologists talk about something called priming. The idea basically is so let's try this. Fire truck, what's the first color that comes to mind? >> Red. >> For most of you, I bet that was red, right? So the idea is that something that happens that you stumble across. This is the idea behind like billboard advertising too like you stumble across something and it just makes these ideas a little bit more salient or vivid to you than they would be otherwise. And so I could see the prediction going to the direction that you talked about if it's the case that people who read about romance and sex just find themselves a little fierier as a result of having done it. Now, of course, it could be they fierier [laughter] in the first place and that's what's causing them to do it. But I would not be at all surprised -- like, here's an interesting study. Maybe what we should do is randomly assign, you know, a hundred couples to have like either subliminal or superliminal like sex or like [inaudible] or something like that [laughter]. And measure how often they have sex and it wouldn't surprise me at all that they just have a little bit more sex on their brain. They get over whatever the startup costs are of having sex. It turns out that -- no, I'm serious, it turns out that one of the major reasons why people have too little sex -- I mean, sex is a good thing. People mostly want to have more of it rather than less of it. Ideally, they prefer that it be good. But most of the time, once people are having sex, they're like, "Whoa! Like that's kind of awesome!" But they forget how great it's going to be because they're busy and they're stressed and it takes some startup cost. Somebody's got to initiate something and then once you're in it, it's usually pretty good. So it's possible that they're primed and because they're like sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, they're like "Hey, baby." ^M02:08:16 [ Laughter ] ^M02:08:23 >> Could I, can I just add one thing to this? ^M02:08:25 [ Laughter ] ^M02:08:30 >> I was talking to you when I said that. Hey, baby [laughter]. >> I do believe that physical attraction is really, really important. But it seems to me that at least when I'm reading the African-American women, you know, writers -- they are very much interested in a broader cultural kind of envelope, if you will. So that music becomes one way for a man to express his love, the kind of records he selects, or when they're out having a drink and there's a jukebox there, or some other, you know. These kinds of sort of signals elicit an even greater or multilayered response. So it's not just the hormones, it's the mind, it's the memory, it's the anticipation, it's the smile, it's the eyes. It's not always the pectorals but that's important too [laughter]. So it's a very complicated process and I just wanted to throw that out. It's not just sex or the cost leading up to it. ^M02:10:00 It's all the different signals that the body emotes and that women can read and decide whether somebody is alluring enough to invest her time to run a thousand miles to freedom, you know. ^M02:10:16 [ Applause ] ^M02:10:19 >> So one of the things that keeps coming to my mind and this is for Professor Finkel particularly, like the kinds of analyses, for example, that Professor Ray does with the -- what are the cultural scripts about love in these 12th Century texts? It seems to me there's a lot of misinformation and sort of mistaken assumptions about what happens in popular romance novels, particularly about this idea that the relationships in romance novels are idealized which really couldn't be farther from the case in most romance novels. And it strikes me that it would be very, very useful to have someone who studies relationship science. Take a look at the scripts, not just the sexual scripts but particularly the kind of relationship behavioral scripts and the problem analysis scripts that are going on in these novels. The novel -- the happily ever after is the end of the novel. That means if you've got a 400-page novel, you've got 398 pages of warts. It's even within paranormal romances where somebody is a fated mate, right? I've been imprisoned in a, you know, vampire dungeon for 400 years [laughter] and I'm a werewolf and I smell my fated mate miles above me in Paris [laughter], that's -- ^M02:11:46 [ Laughter ] ^M02:11:49 And I literally chew off my leg to escape this trap and it'll regenerate because I'm a paranormal being. But even in those kinds of novels, the couple's got to work it out. >> They do. >> The half-vampire, half-Valkyrie that I've fallen in love with, you know, doesn't want to be with me at the beginning. So I just think as a research topic, it would be fascinating to see because as I said, my sense is that there are a lot of assumptions out there about what's going on in the novels. Frequently, you'll find supposed studies that aren't based on the novels. They're based on the titles of the novels which tells us a lot about the titles of the novels and nothing about the books themselves. So I just wanted to throw that out there -- >> Yeah. >> -- as a possible topic. >> I have two things to say. The first is I don't know anything about this except really what I saw in the video last night and the HEA, I didn't know what HEA was. And I told you what I thought happy ending meant [laughter]. So my understanding based on last night and this morning is that okay, there's 398 pages of plot and narrative arc but at the end of that, he chews his food with his mouth shut and he doesn't leave the seat up and what does happily ever after mean? It doesn't mean we're squabbling over this or that. It means that we triumphed over adversity. It's a redemption narrative as you were saying to me earlier and so I think that is -- so if I have characterized the like two pages of the conclusion correctly, then I think what I said stands. Again, not because I -- and let me actually say the other point. I agree with you that is, to the best of my knowledge, there has not been the level of systematic scholarship about content analysis and historical change and maybe, you know, genre difference and why this man's pecs are on this particular cover like I think those are all interesting topics. But I think I disagree with you -- or I think we have a different way. Yeah, I meant something specific. I meant the end of this happily ever after is in some sense the end of the book but from my perspective, it's the beginning of everything else, right? If there was this period of courtship and conquest and then a narrative tension and all that stuff but at the end, what does happily ever after mean, right? And so it's that part that I would -- in that, you're responding, I think, to my response to your question, right? And it's that part that I would say, "Boy, I could imagine that that's leading people to have assumptions about say marriage, maybe not about courtship but about marriage, the next 68 years that are implausibly high." >> Yeah, I want to speak as an editor to these questions that have come about the alpha male and you just touched on that also, Eli, about -- I mean, think about buying a house. Some people like a house in mint condition and some people like fixer uppers because there's more for them to do and they can make it their own. And we found that, you know, when we get the new junior editors and they would be appalled by particularly Diana Palmer. Her heroes, they're so arrogant. They were so nasty and you know, the women seemed a little masochistic. Why does she sell so well? And my mentor, Isabel Swift said, "Well, think about it. If he were there, there'd be nothing for her to do." The whole book is the story of how she tames the beast. Its transformation which is a little like what you said, redemption because of on the other side, you take something like redeeming love which was mentioned earlier, the ^IT Soiled Dove ^Normal romance, very hot because in there, it's the guy who, you know, he brings her redemptive love. You have that in ^IT War and Peace &Normal even in classic literature. So it's like a story has to have energy. It has to have conflict which is a big problem for many romance authors. You know, often it's like as an editor, I would say, "Well, I don't see why these people aren't together in page two." You know, there's nothing -- nothing keeping them apart especially, nothing internally. And with the alpha male, often you know the most powerful -- it's like you go back and he had mother issues, you know, or he was an orphan. There has to be something to be overcome. There has to be something happening and that's why often it's the alpha male. Thank you and if anything, especially in your reality studies that goes to that, you know, go back to the analogy of the mint condition versus fixer upper, what do people want in the real world? >> Are you asking me? What is a reality, what is a reality study [laughter]? The science? >> Yeah. >> The scientific studies. >> I don't know. >> [Inaudible] I think [inaudible] about real people's behavior and you mentioned the dating of what people want. >> And maybe I could just throw in, Bill, your book compares European but also South Asian and Japanese structures of desire and longing. And I don't know if you want to comment on the role of this particular kind of construct outside of say, 12th Century Christianity. >> Well, it's hard for me to summarize it. I mean, outside of the western tradition, you don't find these mind versus body dichotomies and as a result, you don't have a tension between appetite and some other kind of emotional attraction. Very often, the two are regarded some kind of package deal. And as a result are often regarded as spiritual in nature. So the problem is how to manage this inherently spiritual force so that it generates something good because it may have potential to generate something [inaudible]. That would be how I would very broadly characterize Hindu and Buddhist approaches to sexuality in the past. I mean, I'm not -- I'm not trying to generalize about today but certainly about historic periods. So that the business of a courageous gesture to prove that your love is true, it doesn't ever come up. >> Stephanie? >> Well just, I'm stepping into Eli's territory here but I hope that you'll agree that again, one of the tensions that we have to think about as we actually negotiate our real-life relationships is that in real life, fixer uppers are not usually a good investment. ^M02:18:11 [ Laughter ] ^M02:18:18 >> Hi, I'm curious about the role of age in the romantic ideal. I mean, as described thus far, the ideal involves everybody being hot, raging hormones, ideally she's fertile, et cetera, et cetera. What happens happily ever after implies some longevity. Is it possible to have romance after menopause? How does that work? ^M02:18:42 [ Laughter ] ^M02:18:58 >> Take notes, Eli. >> I want to answer -- I want to answer the question by referring to one of the novels that Beverly Jenkins wrote. The woman had three children by previous, you know, relationships. It takes many, you know, chapters to get through all of this but she eventually found a guy and they got married. They were both well past menopause and middle age, and the children were grown, and it was one of the most exciting few pages of [laughter] in the whole novel because she had her first orgasm on the wedding night. ^M02:20:00 And she was absolutely astonished at these feelings that she had never experienced before. And I thought, what a nice gift for the author to include this lovingly beautifully rendered passage about love after your prime, so to speak. You know, third chance around that there's always hope and it does not end at a certain age. You can discover these feelings again. And that's what Beverly did and does quite frequently in her books. So I think I'm promoting Beverly a lot here [laughter]. >> I have one very quick thing to add. So let me just talk about the science thing. So if you look at -- I mentioned earlier that the sad fact that if you look on average at the time course of passion in relationships, even satisfaction in a marriage, for example, it tends to go down. Again, just speaking on average. But that's of course and like sexual frequency, for example, but that's of course, correlated with age. Right, so if you're following a bunch of people, is it the fact that they're getting older or is the fact that their relationship has greater longevity. And the answer is a little bit of both but the interesting comparison is when people start new relationships in their 50s, 60s, 70s like how often do they ride the hobby horse and it is a lot. ^M02:21:26 [ Laughter ] ^M02:21:31 [ Applause ] ^M02:21:34 >> And if you want a new audience, the divorce rates of people over 50 have doubled in the last 20 years and for people over 65 have tripled. As we enter a new stage of life, the extension of the healthy active lifespan and the greater possibilities for repartnering so just thinking in terms of your future market, you might bear that in mind [laughter]. >> Yeah. >> So I had a question. I'm actually terrified of speaking in front of groups so this may not come out at all coherently. But what I've been noticing in this panel is that it's so focused on sex and what's missing, I think, is that the bulk of the books is really about the relationship development. It sounds like you may or may not have read the actual historical romances. Some of you have read them, some of you have not, but there's so much more to them than just sexual attraction, the sex in the books. I mean, that's just kind of an extra. There are so many well-known romances that don't have the sex at all like Georgette Heyer, the original Signet Regency series, those had maybe a chaste kiss. It was really more about the development -- I'm starting to [inaudible]. I'm really not good at talking [inaudible]. >> You're doing great [laughter]. >> I had to be class parent once for my kids. I can't even remember their names [foreign language]. It was terrible. I had twins. They're like, "Which kid is in which class?" And I'm like, "Oh [inaudible]." So anyway, what I think is missing here is the discussion of the relationship development because there is so much than the cover. I personally actually can't even remember the covers or titles of the books I read; only I tend to read like certain authors over and over again. The happily ever after for me is an important thing but it's not about the physical relationship is much as it is, we've met. We've overcome obstacles. We've solved some problems. Kind of like the motifs in a fairy tale, the romances are an enriched fairy tale. So you've taken your basic rags to riches or your basic finding a prince and you've added the character development that makes it so much of a richer thing. Eloisa James, I see you sitting up there. Woo-hoo! So [laughter] she has done the most fantastic job bringing the fairy tales into new life for people who really don't care about basic fairy tales to read them as an enriched romance. And so I think that some of that is missing in this. I'm sorry, I don't remember your names but the woman on the right who has read the mysteries and you say that your joy in the mysteries is to see the problems get resolved. And that same thing happens in the romances and it depends who you're reading. There are a lot that have like spy aspects and so they're trying to save someone or overcome some kind of problem in the Napoleonic Wars or whatever. So there's a lot of that [laughter] and there's a lot of the [inaudible], honestly, so many Regencies. But there's a lot of that and so I think that you have to have read some to come to an understanding of where the work -- it's not just about warts. It's about character development. >> So well -- >> I'm almost done. >> If I -- >> I'm almost done. ^M02:25:14 [ Applause ] ^M02:25:15 So I took a class called Greek Novel in graduate school and our professor had -- you had to -- it was, so it was Greek Novel. It was really Greek popular fiction which really rarely gets a mentioned in the classics. And he had everyone read a current popular romance. And so that was a way for the connection like the courtly love and the things like that. You have to really have read it to come, to have a true understanding of where it is in literature. >> Well, if I could just add one thing. I guess I must not have been clear in my discussion because I was not talking about sex. I was talking about the evolution of these novels as a way of assuaging women's anxiety about making a relationship work in worlds in which they had different resources than men did. And I have to say that I have since read several romance novels. It's not that I haven't read them. But it's interesting to me that different anxieties and needs get assuaged by different kinds of genres. I go back to mystery novels and detective novels because there is a clear order there and I get that and I love the fact that a woman can have sex and be sexually attractive and have a good relationship and yet have her eye on a different goal to solve. So I think you're absolutely right that these novels that you're talking about and I've not only read some but had all my students read them and give synopses of them so that I got a better idea before I came and dared to talk to a group of people like you [laughter]. They absolutely are dealing with the issue of how you work out relationships and one of the challenges that I want to throw out to you is that more and more women are not turned on by the guy who knows more, has more resources. And in real life, for example, we have seen in the last 20 years, a stunning change in predictors of marital satisfaction and stability. It used to be the highly educated women were the least likely to get married. Now they're the most likely to get married and the least likely to divorce. It used to be that in a marriage where a woman had more education than the man, that was a divorce risk. Now it is not. It seems to be less of a divorce risk than the man having more education than the woman. And there was a wonderful thing that I'm sure, leading it back to sex, that you probably saw several months ago, this big article in the ^IT New York Times Magazine ^Normal about how equal marriages get less sex. It was based supposedly on a study taken in 1991 that showed that where there were -- where men did more of the core housework, those women, the marriages expressed less sexual satisfaction and less sexual frequency. Well, those of us who have a different idea of, you know, want a different outcome, immediately said, "Yeah, okay. But 1991 is a year when you would still have a lot of marriages from the '50s and '60s and several researchers, including Sharon Sassler from the Council on Contemporary Families, went ahead and said, "Let's measure only what happens as marriages formed since the early '90s." And there to the great delight of all of us who pretend to be objective researchers [laughter], it turns out that the couples who had the most egalitarian relationships reported the highest sexual satisfaction and the most frequent sex. So there. >> Boom! ^M02:28:49 [ Applause ] ^M02:28:53 >> You might have touched on this, I think. But back to the alpha male and Eli's studies, I mean, when we see the alpha male, it's a chemical reaction. It's science. It's survival of the fittest. You see him and your body is ready for sex and to procreate. >> That's true. How did you know that [laughter]? >> Well, when I met my husband at 15 [laughter], my ovaries jumped up and said, "Yes!" >> That is a freaky thing. >> It is! But so then, he's dumb as a box of rocks [laughter]. And then, you know, you meet the intelligent beta male who's horrible in bed, you know, so what is -- >> With that -- time, time, time -- >> No, I -- ^M02:29:38 [ Laughter ] ^M02:29:40 >> At least the 20-second timeout here. I -- >> No, don't -- wait, wait, wait. I'm not even saying that it's a stereotype. >> Okay. >> I'm saying in this -- I'm not saying all smart men are -- >> Are dumb as rocks, thank you [laughter]. >> Okay. But so what do studies show, I mean, sure you're going to see the alpha male, your body's ready to have sex. You go. You have a one-night stand but you can't carry a conversation. ^M02:30:00 How are you going to live with him and love him for 30 years? The beta male, you can teach him to have good sex [laughter]. You know, practice makes perfect. >> I have done it. It's a little work, but it's worth it in the end [laughter]. >> What [inaudible] studies show -- >> I don't -- I don't think the studies show that male attributes lump like that, so I don't think if you know how good a man is in bed, you know much about his intelligence, and I don't think if you know about his intelligence, you know much about how good he is in bed, and I don't think if you know about both of those attributes, you know a whole lot about whether he's kind. So, I think these are largely independent dimensions; there's no doubt that there are some like really well-endowed dumb ass men out there and whatever the [inaudible] is that I can never get right, but I don't believe -- I don't think there is -- I go so far as to say, I don't think there's any evidence at all that male qualities lumped together in individual men in the way that we stereotypically think about them. >> So, what you're saying [inaudible]? >> [Laughter] No way. No way. Men have one facet but it changes from day to day. >> I just want to put in a word for history here. All this vocabulary we're using is extremely recent and extremely local and most human beings would not know what we're talking about even if it was translated for them. That's just a little note. >> I'll speak for history also. I'm reminded how far we've come from the mid-19th Century advice manuals that I read, the closest things to sex manuals. My favorite line from all those manuals is one I actually had made into a sampler which I since lost and the line was -- this is from a liberal perspective, "Surely if sex is worth doing at all, it is doing well [laughter]." >> I've noticed that -- I think one of the big sort of conflicts in romance seems to stem -- >> Where are you? Will you raise your hand? >> Oh, here. >> Okay. >> I thought one of the central conflicts in terms of [inaudible] with romance novels seems to come from like a battle of the sexes kinds of things. And I was just wondering particularly for the historians what kind of -- well, exactly we know about how like same sex relationships have developed over time and how that can fit into the romance genre. >> Well, there have always been same sex relationships of course, and most cultures throughout the past, more of them have been tolerant and accepting of them. Same sex marriage has been very rare and when it's occurred, it has usually occurred between people who play opposite social gender roles, you know, the -- do the female side, two women, one of who does what was traditionally seen as the male side of the division of labor. So, they -- the -- and it really is not until the 19th Century, very late 19th Century that you get the notion that there is an identity that is based upon your sexual interests, that there is such a thing as a heterosexual person and such a thing as a homosexual person. And in the early 20th Century as we began to see our identity as much more formed by sexuality, and I have to agree, this is just something that would be a -- just peripheral description in many societies of the past, what sexual interests you had, far less a key part of your identity. That has become now, it is central and perhaps in the long run, not good for our long-term relationships, so central to our sense of identity. But one of the fascinating things about same sex relationships is that one of their big strengths that we're finding is that in real life, they tend to repair quarrels better than heterosexual couples. They tend to interject humor, they inject endearment in the middle of even a big fight. And I personally suspect that that is because in part, because of the discrimination they face, they do not rely on the dyad as much as heterosexual couples do. They have their -- there was an experiment once that some researchers in Canada did and they put a woman in a room with her best friend and had her discuss problems with her relationship. When she was heterosexual and her best friend was also heterosexual, 45 to 50 minutes of the whole hour was devoted to discussing the woman's relationship with the absent male partner. When the two women were lesbians, about 10 minutes were devoted to that and then the conversation moved to their friendship and their relationship and their communities. That's in some ways, you can see it's all the flip side. You don't have that tremendous support or did not historically before same sex marriage, have that tremendous support for the couple relationship. But the fact that you have a community system and you value friendship as much as the couple relationship, may in the long run make relationships easier maybe to leave, but also easier to repair because you don't have that anxiety that you do of a heterosexual couple that any, "Oh my god," really strong emotion may destroy this thing. So, this is another area, the changing heterosexual dynamics, the development of same sex relationships and their openness, is something that's opening whole new horizons, I think, for you fictionally, and for us in the real world as well. >> Oh, that'd been a tribute to underscore what Stephanie said. The words heterosexual and homosexual date to roughly the 1890s, which is about the same time that the word feminism in its modern meaning appeared. So, a lot of things are going on at the end of the 19th Century in terms of the way people map sexuality and relationships. And we're still living with and pushing against that kind of mapping. >> Yes, in the traditional Christian way of looking at what we call sexuality, another word that didn't exist before the 19th Century was to distinguish between natural acts and unnatural acts. Unnatural acts were all called sodomy and the only natural act was what we call the missionary position. So, you could engage in sodomy very easily with your wife at home in bed or -- and go to hell for it. Or engage in sodomy with all kinds of other people, you could also engage in natural acts of fornication. And many theologians thought a natural act of fornication was much less sinful than any unnatural act and as a result of what we call homosexuality was a sin of a subcategory of sodomy and it was from 13th Century on -- it was a capital offense in many states. But the prosecutions were extremely rare. Capital offense only for males, by the way, prosecutions were extremely rare. And many people were known to have same sex interests. This was -- theologians consider this to be a bad habit like other sinful acts, bad habits can be broken by prayer and self-denial. >> Could I just add one thing? When you consider like women's position in the late 19th Century and add race and gender together, the race, gender, and class together, the sexual scene becomes very, very complicated. Coming out of slavery, black women are stereotyped as the mammy, the Jezebel, or the, you know, woman who essentially is not at all interested in sex or should not be interested in sex because the larger society has typecast her as this wanton creature. And so, the politics of respectability come into play and for the next, you know, a century, black women are going to be concerned with respectability politics. That's the only way we're going to get this larger society to view us and treat us with respect and afford us with decent treatment and what have you. At the same token that this is going on, black men are being stereotyped as being this threat to virtuous white womanhood, so the whole rape myth escalates as actually a means of political control of keeping them from entering into the public arena and politics and economic development and all of that kind of thing. So, there isn't as much emphasis within the black community on all of these sexual explorations [inaudible], I mean it takes to the 20th Century before we have this breakthrough the romantic literature in a very public way in celebrating sexuality. ^M02:40:21 So, the point that I would simply make and making it inelegantly at this point because I don't have 50 minutes to go back and end this lecture [laughter] is that we have to be aware of the complications, not just of the homo and heterosexual love, but how the intersection of race and class and gender affected the sexual expressions and the culture and even just the enjoyment probably of black women in particular. Now, as far as black homosexual literature, we're in an explosive area now, and more and more work is coming out. I'm assigning a book on the down-low written by Jeffrey McCune to my new class that I'm teaching this quarter called ^IT Black Masculinity and Gender Studies ^NO and one of the things that my students really wanted to know was how come you don't talk enough about black male sexuality. And so, this is one of the ways that I'm trying to complicate our understanding of sexual of, you know, sexual expression. So, we're in a transitional phase right now, that's all I'm saying. It's only about 20, 25 years. It'll be exciting to see where we are in another 50 years. >> Darlene, that was quite eloquently said and actually, that's brought us right to the end of this panel. I've got one announcement, then I'm going to ask you to join me in thanking our panelists. But if after lunch, you are planning to go on the tour slash expedition to locate the allegorical figure of romance, remember, these are the details. Meet at 12:50 outside the Montpelier Room and you'll get a tour of the Great Hall with Director John Cole. Do we need a coat? John, are we going outside? >> No, we're going through the tunnel. >> Oh, it's the Tunnel of Love to the figure of romance [applause]. All right, please join me in thanking our wonderful panelists. >> Welcome to our third panel which runs concurrently, I'll remind you again, with the drop-in rooms on this floor, in the Oval Gallery. Consult the map in your program, you'll see that we're screening the film, Love between the Covers, by [inaudible]. There did seem to be some film watchers and in the Montpelier Room, you can try your hand at writing a portion of a romance novel, visit Publisher's Tables and have a look at the popular romance projects website. And I cruised by there and there's still a lot of swag left, so just saying. I would like at this point to hand panel three over to our moderator, Mary Bly who is Professor of English at Fordham University and who writes romance as Eloisa James. ^M02:43:34 [ Cheering and Applause ] ^M02:43:41 >> Okay. So, I have a script here, so I'm going to go with my script, all right? An active large community has grown up about the romance genre, who knew? Our questions for consideration, consult your program for a partial list, "Address the nature of romance in communities; Ask us to explore their love for their books; Ask us to examine the values they share and their effects on the books themselves." So, I think, you know, really interesting, I want you to not only be thinking about what these readers like but how they're affecting us as writers and how the circle goes in tying it back to the last panel. We might also want to think about the role of technology in the romance community, in other words, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest. The fan to bestselling career trajectory of some romance writers, and what the existence of such an active romance community suggests about contemporary culture and its values. So, with these ideas in mind, let's watch a film clip and then I'll invite our panelists to join us. Each of our panelists will give a brief reaction to that clip or the questions consider. I remind you guys, I'm a professor. You've got three minutes, you got three minutes, not 10, okay [laughter]. We will then open it up to Q and A from everybody and I just want to encourage the readers out there who've come to me and said, "Oh, I had this question but I was too scared to ask." Let's make the romance community the one where the academics listen to you. Okay? [Cheering] Right, roll the -- ^E02:45:13 ^B02:45:30 [ Music ] ^M02:45:39 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M02:45:48 >> It's been dazzling that your icons that you've been reading for years -- >> Are now your friends. >> You know, they -- it's this lovely sense of, "I loved your book. Let's have coffee." >> You know, you think, "Oh my god, with Eloisa James or something like that [laughter]. I get all squealie. >> I still do that. I almost passed out in the elevator with Nora Roberts. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We're friends forever, one, two, one, two -- >> If you're an up and coming musician, you don't get to ask the Beetles to critique your song. I don't know why it is like that. I mean it's, you know, we're just sort of we're all kind of rolling along with this thing, good intentions. We're surely going to have good -- well, we do have good karma because we have the majority of book sales. Yeah. >> Writers are readers and many of them were readers first before they became writers and they'll be readers again and they read each other's work. So, it's not us to them, us the writers and them the readers. We are them, right? >> Right. ^M02:46:49 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M02:46:53 >> I just got rushed by like these 12 women and they were giving me presents and they wanted their pictures taken with me. You know, the Science Fiction Fantasy community is a little more hands-off, so everyone else's fan was like, "Hello, how are you? It's nice to meet you. I enjoyed your use of the ray gun on page 70." >> Well, part of RWE is that you can join RWE if you're kind of like, "I'm thinking someday about writing a romance novel." And it's like, "Come on in, sister. There's room for you here." ^M02:47:22 [ Music ] ^M02:47:28 >> The first time I came, I didn't know a soul. I was kind of nervous. You know, every time people would say, "What do you write?" I'd be like, "Um, I write romances with two women," and some people would go, "Oh, really?" and some people would walk away and other people would say, "Well, that's cool." ^M02:47:43 [ Music ] ^M02:47:48 >> I have yet to see any genre that has quite such a pay it forward attitude and there's always the competition and the backbiting in any genre of course. >> Everybody is struggling for the top. I mean nobody really enjoys -- >> One spot at a time [laughter]. >> Nobody really enjoys making $6000 a year which I made for 30 years and it's, I mean I couldn't have supported my family if we lived in the car. >> Sometimes, we have a tendency to try and think three years in advance and what we're going to do and we haven't even written the first book yet. So, concentrate on writing that first book. Don't worry about how long the series is going to be. Don't set yourself up for more anxiety. Just keep writing, just keep writing. >> Nobody's getting paid to teach. Everybody comes of their own goodwill and -- to pay it forward. >> At other writers' conferences, the writers on the panel are there to sell their books [laughter] and that's it. They're not really trying to teach you anything. They're just there to sell their books, "and here's how I did it in my book" [laughter]. >> The question is, "What is a pantzer?" A plotzer is obvious, a pantzer is somebody who flies by the seat of their pants, right? ^M02:49:02 [ Music ] ^M02:49:08 >> Once he is hit back this way, he's got control of the weapon. She's going to be running [inaudible]. >> She's playing on the wedding service, you know, is there any men here who objects to this? >> He's objecting to his own wedding. >> He's objecting to his own wedding. >> It's a light urban fantasy about a young woman who finds out she has super powers after she comes back from her honeymoon. >> No, no, no. She's saying, "They're only reading the first chapter and rejecting the book." I'm sorry, but that's all you got to sell with. >> So, look at my badge. We have here a row of silver [inaudible] ladies. The sad thing is if I ever won, I would get a gold but I never win. So, I only get -- I'm like Susan Lucci of [inaudible]. >> Oh my gosh, she lost so many times. ^M02:49:49 [ Music ] ^M02:49:57 >> Because now, we're switching heads, right? ^M02:50:00 Her former fiancé who stole the money for the abortion he wanted to get? I mean you can't get more [inaudible] and horrible than he is. If you're going to submit this to a non-inspirational press, then you need sex. You set it up beautifully. >> In case you're wondering, she did not add the sex [laughter]. I gave it a shot. Okay, I'm going to introduce the panel now, so first up is my assistant, my wonderful assistant Kim Castile, author's best friend. Next, we have Robyn Carr, number one best-selling romance author. Brenda Jackson, where are you, Brenda? Star of the film. Anne Jamison, Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah, currently at Princeton, I think [laughter]. Kathleen Gilles Seidel, Romance Author, past chairman of the Washington Romance Writers which is the local chapter of the RWA. So, she's representing the RWA. Allison Kelley, the Executive Director of the RWA was coming to meet us but had a family emergency, but she wanted to say, "Hi," to everyone. She wishes she was here. And Sarah Wendwell, Romance Blogger, Smart B*tches, Trashy Books, the smartest bitch of all, here we are. Okay, so we're going to do the same thing that everyone else did. We're going to start down there at the end with Kim and ask everyone to give a brief talk about what any aspect of the romance community that you want to talk about. Kim. >> You're going to time me, right [laughter]? >> Well, how much [inaudible] have you run? I don't have my phone, so -- >> I am actually going to make a few comments about the clip. Those of you who saw Juliana Stone who was talking about the Beetles is my best friend. Eloisa is my employer, my mentor, my sister, my best friend. And I wouldn't have any of those things if it weren't for the romance community. I met each of them online through our love of romance novels, specifically historical romance novels and they're just a huge part of everything and everything I have. Now, I can't imagine not having that and if it weren't for romance novels in general, I wouldn't have a 24-year marriage either. My husband has very high standards to live up to. You do great, babe [laughter]. And it's amazing, a lot of what we talked in other panels is about the diversity, African-American novels, gay and lesbian novels, and the romance community is open to all of those people. I help Eloisa with a lot of fan interaction, her Street team, and we have people from Malaysia, from Romania. I have sent packages to nearly every country in this world and, you know, I don't know the specifics of people's sex lives, but I'm sure there are gays and lesbians and, you know, anything. So, I don't want to offend anyone by saying the wrong term [laughter]. But the point is, we don't -- we're not meeting face to face at a college that we're both English majors at. We're not at a speed dating for, you know, Jewish people. We're strictly here because we all love a romance novel and we're not judging anyone by their color, their religious background, or any of that. We're -- and I think it's much more welcoming company -- community and I think that's really great because I don't think you find that very often in real life. You know, I think no matter how hard we try not to, you do tend to judge upon first impressions, whatever that may be. And with this, we don't and everyone is welcome and Eloisa has always had a reader community. You know, she started with the Squawk Radio blog that was touched upon and then she had a bulletin board and I would just like to say she is so amazing, the paying it forward. There was a very core group of us there and now, I'm her assistant. I mean what better job is there? Several of them are published now, Courtney Milan, Tessa Dare, all started from this group, from Avon Fanlit and Eloisa gave them this safe haven to complain about [laughter]. One of them, one of my dear friends was an editor at [inaudible]. You know, now she's freelance and it all started from her giving us a safe community place to go and be ourselves and encourage creativity. You know, she was one of the first to read Tessa Dare and if any of you haven't read her, you should. She's really great. And I mean, again, you don't see that kind of pay it forward very often and on a personal note, I'm a high school dropout. I live in backwater Indiana, we're the RV manufacturing capital of the world. No, literally -- that is our claim [laughter] again, I'm serious, people. I'm not joking. You know, we have an RV museum, that is all there is there [laughter]. I make now more than me and my husband made, both manufacturing. I actually have health insurance. I get vacations, I have benefits I never imagined. Where else would a high school dropout get that opportunity other than from someone who was, you know, just open to anyone? How -- and I just have to say, I have no college degree and I've never once been made to feel less because of that. You know, everyone is always, "Give me some advice about Facebook," you know, and they actually value my opinion and that's something that's very life affirming and I don't think that many people in the world anywhere, in any industry get that, you know. And I think one of the things I strive for is that personal relationship because the others do make it a relationship. I know that Robyn has -- is it Jack Sparr [assumed spelling]? >> Yeah. >> Where she sits down with the readers at events. They have a Jack Sparr, she sits with them, I don't quite know what you do [laughter], well I've never been invited. Just saying. But you know, how -- I'm sure Eloisa would never have had the chance to sit down with Shakespeare or [laughter], you know, and -- >> I wouldn't say no. Okay, your time is up, honey [laughter]. >> All right. Well, I'm just saying Eric's world of immortality, it could have happened. And it's a very personal relationship and it -- I said this in the movie and I stand by it because as readers, even for the writers, a number one best-seller, she is a reader and she doesn't say, "Oh, my favorite author has a book out today. I'm going to go buy it." She says, "I'm going to go buy my friend's book. You know, my friend wrote this book." It is -- it's amazing. I met Christin Higgins with her first book and we became instant friends and to have seen the trajectory of her career, to see Eloisa's career take off the way it has, there is a lot of pride in that and they share it with their community. They share it on their Facebook pages, their newsletters, and I can't think of any other brand or industry that is too personal that you can say, "I'm going to go buy my, you know, I'm going to go buy my friend's hard work, you know?" I'd say it about Taylor Swift but it's not reciprocal [laughter]. >> Robyn? >> Yes, ma'am. I'd actually like to have an RV if you want to be honest. >> Well, come on. I will set you up. >> When my son was in Iraq, we Skyped almost every day and sometimes it was a little bit awkward because I'd be really in the zone, you know, and I'd hear that [noise] and I'd think, "Oh geez, I can't not answer. He's at war." I mean, you know [laughter], "Yes, darling." One day when we were talking, he said, "Do you know David Baldacci?" and I said, "Not personally. Why?" And he said, "Well, somebody gave me a David Baldacci book and said, "Read this, you might like it."" And I said, "Well, you might but is there any particular reason you've never read one of your mother's 40 books?" [Laughter] and he said, "I don't have one." And I said, "Stand by." And I emailed him the first ^IT Virgin River ^NO book. And 24 hours later, he said, "You know, this is actually really good [laughter]." And I of course, was -- like he knows. He doesn't know anything. He went to lunch after 24 hours of ^IT Virgin River ^NO and said to some of his crewmembers, his hospital staff, mostly women. "My mother's been published for over 30 years and I'm just now reading the first one of her books and it's really good." ^M03:00:04 And they said, "Well, what's her name?" And he told them and they said, "Oh my god, is that the Robyn Carr who writes the ^IT Virgin River ^NO books? But that's actually not my point. My point is [laughter] I said, "Would you like the second one?" And he said, "No offense mom, but it's a chick book." Oh no, don't be alarmed. That's overly simplified but it's a chick book. It's written for women, about women, and in most cases, by women and that's what exactly what it's meant to be. It's meant to reach women on every level. They're most vulnerable points, they're most fearful points, they're most courageous points, and anybody in this writer's community that doesn't know what their readers want is asleep at the till because no matter how you feel about social media and online reviews, the response is immediate. They will immediately tell you exactly what they like. Dear Ms. Carr, I know how Mel felt. I lost my husband at a very early age." "Dear Ms. Carr, I know exactly what Liz was going through. My baby died." "Dear Ms. Carr, I know how they felt because I escaped from an abusive relationship," "and my boyfriend went to war," "and my father was senile and I'm caring for him." They know what they need and they want a place to confront their most vulnerable emotions in a safe place because their emotions are -- they're stuck with their emotions forever. So, in many cases, I think the books we write, no matter what your fantasy is, whether you want to get in fairy castles or dystopian survival, it becomes less about sex and love and more about hope. And that's what most of my readers are looking for, something to look forward to. They really want characters that on some level, they can make role models, so that they can find their happy ending and their easy way out of a bad situation. So, that's about a good place to stop. Three? Three. >> I knew you'd do better than me on time. >> Hello everyone. I'm Brenda Jackson. In the last panel, the ^IT Flame and the Flower ^NO came up and that was a book written by Kathleen Woodiwiss and I couldn't help but smile when someone said, "It may not be well received in this day and age, probably not." But what I remember most about reading it while I was pregnant and then I went to my husband and said, "I need to name our child Brandon Birmingham [laughter]." And he said, "Hell, no." But I kind of got my way in that his name is Brandon, but he wouldn't let me go as far as naming him Brandon Birmingham Jackson, so I got my way. But as far as the film, what I think touched me most about the film that we just saw, the film clip, is the romance community. When I first became a writer, before I became a writer, one of the things I did was go to RWA and I was a groupie. I was a writer wanna-be. And I met Nora Roberts, Linda Howard, Jane N. Cranst [assumed spelling] and what inspired me most about those women is they did not mind stopping, you stopping them in a hallway to autograph your book or just to chat and tell them how much you enjoyed their books. And one of the things that I always said if I ever became a writer, that I would always have that openness with my readers because I didn't want women to just read my books. I wanted them to just to read my books, I wanted a relationship. I wanted them to tell me what they liked about my book, what they didn't like about my book, and I wanted to garner that type of relationship. And that's why, even when snail mail was out, when I first started writing 20 years ago, email was not even thought of. So, you did snail mail and you wrote me, I wrote you back. And some of those same friendship I have today and I had other authors that would tell me, "Oh, I don't write them back. I don't want to write them back. I just want them to buy my books." And I would tell them, "You don't know how much you're missing because you're not garnering a relationship with your readers." And I go on a cruise with my readers every two years, I have a book club, a national book club of over 3000, I have a fan page of close to 40,000 likes on my fan page. My readers are more than just readers, they have become a family to me, and I think that's what you find in the romance community. You have a family. Thank you. >> I want to just say one thing, there's two seats up here. So can two people hanging in the back come sit up here? Anne? >> I [inaudible], I write about a community of mostly women, also, who are writing very often stories that could be classified by -- as romance although not always and there's a lot of commonalities between that community and the romance community. There's a lot of overlap of people, of individuals, many of the people here, I know. I've already heard some confessions came out of Fan Fiction to become published authors. But there's a lot of -- there's a lot of differences as well between those communities and I want to name a couple of them here. One is that Fan Fiction traditionally has been and still overwhelmingly is a gift economy, one in which writers write stories directly to readers for readers with the hope that they've already identified a particular taste, say a taste for Mulder Scully or for Zena, Alternative Universe, or whatever it may be and if they put that story out there, there's a good chance they'll find readers who want to read their story and then the readers will give back by telling them what they think. And there are other ways readers will give back to the writers what may be offering editing services or making virtual [inaudible] in a previous generation, helping produce the zines by people that publish them. And there weren't -- there wasn't any economic -- there wasn't any financial benefit to the writers and that was felt to be really central to the way that those economies worked. In addition to that, the impression that I'm getting from this conference is that the romance community is not quite as contentious as the fan community. A Fan Fiction community is very often beset by tremendous amount of very bitter conflicts, often about relationships and should you write about this kind of relationship? Is this relationship bad for people? Are you harming other people by writing this relationship? And at first, you know, when I first started studying these communities, I thought, "Well, it's really strange that people are ending friendships about fictional relationships." Television characters, I find that strange [laughter] but it's not funny. It's not funny to them because they are proxy battles for, you know, for these deeply held beliefs about representation and character and who gets to tell which stories and when. And so, I now have a different understanding of a lot of those flame wars as they're called. Last thing I want to say is I think like a lot of the romance writers, the fan community, Fan Fiction communities now are feeling they're a little bit under threat by changes. I think in the case of fan communities, it's often said they're feeling under threat by capitalism and by the publishing industry's sudden interest in them and they have fears that the community that they have built has fostered writers in a variety of ways, is going to be exploited and that's a matter of grave concern. >> Kathleen? >> Allison Kelley was going to come and talk about the National Romance Writers of America. Since she can't be here, I'm instead going to talk about the local chapters of the RWA. We have over 145 local or online chapters and our local here, the Washington Romance Writers is one of the oldest. We started in the early '80s and one of the strongest. Most of your volunteers here today have been people from the Washington Romance Writers [applause] and, you know, a lot of them have taken two days of vacation time [inaudible]. We have about 260 members, we have monthly program, and last month, we had more than 50 people come. ^M03:10:01 We also have an annual convention known as "The Retreat" which sells out every year and I think there are a number of people in this room, including people on this panel who could attest to how fabulous it is. Other services we provide, we have like a clearing house for people who want to join a critique group and share their writing with other people. Four times a week, we have meet-up sessions in coffee houses for anybody in the chapter who likes to work in public. We have an annual luncheon to get authors together with book sellers, librarians, and bloggers. It's happening in October this year. If you want an invitation, stop by the WRW table in the Montpelier Room. This year, because the first day of the National Write a Novel in a Month as on a Saturday, we hosted a write-in day in which one member, which was actually me, opened her house to 48 romance writers to write all day, so the house was full of romance writers and extension cords all day long [laughter]. So, the chapter provides education and support, all the professional resources you need, but that support also spills over outside our professional lives. Do you remember from the movie, Susan Donovan who wore the prosthesis? She's one of our members until she moved. Susan's amputation was a horrible shock, the result of a rare infection and towards the end of her long hospital stay, WRW members and their families went to her home, brought her bed downstairs, made her bathroom wheelchair accessible, built a ramp to go up to her house because otherwise, she could not have come home. And that was the chapter. When I was in cancer treatment and really one chemo cycle really struggling, somebody from our chapter took three days off work and moved into my house to take care of me. So, as wonderful and enriching as online communities can be, there's also a time you need somebody to fix your bathroom and come make you dinner and, you know, that still has a lot of value. I think a Sociologist, particularly one who's willing to ask the hard questions, would be fascinated by the romance community. We are a group of women who have a great deal in common in terms of our talent, our abilities, and our interests; but we come from wildly different backgrounds. One of the things we do have in common is certain lack of boundaries. ^M03:12:54 [ Laughter ] ^M03:13:00 I have flashed a room of romance writers [laughter]. What did you say? Every romance writer whether she's writing the sweetest, inspirational, or the oddest erotica is pushing herself, even exposing herself. So, the filters that most people have in place until the third drink, we don't have [laughter], and so as long as we feel safe, we have a lot of fun. Back in the mid-1980s, we did feel very besieged by the mainstream culture, so we felt we had to appear professional. You know, now that we know that we function professionally, we worry a lot less about how our behavior is judged. So, at the Washington Romance Writers retreat next month, during an event we call "Romance Jeopardy", Jennifer England who is a senior vice president and publisher at St. Martins and I will be dressed as Elvis impersonators [laughter]. You will not see any pictures of that because it's a safe place and people don't post pictures of it. We heard through the grapevine that Laurie wanted to come film Romance Jeopardy for her movie. We told her, "No," because some things are just too much fun to let the world know about [laughter]. >> Sarah? >> I'm Sarah Wendell, I run a website called Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and the entire mission of the site which I worked really hard to condense like 10 words, which is really hard, is that what I want to do is connect romance readers with one another and with the books they want to read. But it took me 10 years to figure out that's what I was doing because most of the time, I was like, "Well, this seems like a good idea. I'll put it on the Internet." That doesn't always work out but it worked out for me. ^M03:15:03 I'm really, really fortunate that my website is my job, and my job is to talk to romance readers all over the world. I could not tell you how blessed I feel that this is what I do. And it's nice because if you sort of look around the room, we all know why we're here. We're all interested in the same thing, and we all know why we're here. So it's a lot easier, especially if you're an introvert to walk up to someone you don't know and say, "Hi, what are you reading?" And have that person be completely open to any kind of awkward conversation you might start because introvert. So we all know why we're here. What I do is I do that all over the world, and I underestimated two things when I cofounded Smart Bitches and in the 10 years that I've run it. I underestimated the number of readers -- actually three things. I beg your pardon. The number of readers in other countries where English is not even the fifth or sixth most common language. Those readers learn English to read romance because that's how they get it. It's not translated into their languages. It's not brought into their countries. So I get emails saying, from Bulgaria, "I apologize for m y English. I only read it. I don't write it," which, oh, come on. You cannot apologize to me for your English because it's not like I speak Bulgarian. That's amazing [laughter]. And I had no idea how many romance readers there are around the world who are as isolated as we often feel. And that was the other thing that I underestimated. How many romance readers exist in a state of isolation because they're told so often they should be ashamed of what they read. Now, I'm not actually ashamed of reading romance, and I'm old enough where I have no craps left to give at this point [laughter], but I'm also betting that you're not ashamed either. But when you're told over and over and over that you should be ashamed, you just don't talk about it. And then you sign on to the Internet and there's umpteen nine billion of us going, "Oh, my god. Romance." And I still get email, "Where have you been all my life [laughter]? I had no idea." And I'm like, oh, just wait. There's nine zillion blogs. What are you interested in? We have it for you. The other thing that I underestimated, which has very little to do with community, is I underestimated how often authors Google their own names [laughter], because for the first year the number one source of traffic for the site was people emailing a link, so it was Hotmail and Google and other email providers of people emailing a link. And that was how our community was first built, by people going, "Did you see what they said? Oh, my gosh." But then that filled in with people going, "Oh, my gosh. I have thought that, too, and I thought I was the only one." "I thought I was the only one who liked this book." "I thought I was the only one who read romance." "I thought I was the only one who really, really liked gravity-defying sex scenes." You're not alone on the Internet, which is completely awesome. But what happens is more and more people know to look online for the things that they love because they know they're going to find someone who loves it, too. And what that means is that now we can move into physical spaces where we can meet each other face-to-face, already having broken that ice, because we already know what we all love. And I think it's lovely and almost ironic that the thing that we love is about love. And there's all those studies that talk about how, when you read fiction, you become more empathetic. So have we tripled down on empathy by reading romance? Because all of the romance fans I meet are some of the nicest, kindest, and most welcoming people. And so I'm really, really proud that I get to talk to all of you every day. That is the best job ever. Thank you -- ^M03:18:29 [ Applause ] ^M03:18:33 >> I just want to say that we have two chairs down in front if one of you guys stopped up in the back wants to come. Okay. At this point we're going to go over to Q and A, and I'm [inaudible] I'll call on you if you don't ask a question. ^M03:18:45 [ Laughter ] ^M03:18:47 There. Someone get her a microphone. >> Did you bring questions? >> Did I bring questions? >> Yeah, like if there were no questions, were you prepared to grills us? >> Have I been teaching for 20 years? >> I thought -- just figure. I wasn't sure. >> If nothing else, we'll go to ^IT Romeo and Juliet, ^NO right? ^M03:19:01 [ Laughter ] ^M03:19:02 >> That's a romance? ^M03:19:03 [ Laughter ] ^M03:19:05 >> No one told me it's a tragedy, so I believe her. >> I just want to know if it's going to be on the final. ^M03:19:09 [ Laughter ] ^M03:19:11 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M03:19:13 >> That's all we care about. >> Okay, did somebody? Yes. >> Okay. Robin, you mentioned earlier about reviews and how important they are. I'm a first-time author. I have my first book published in August. >> Yeah. ^M03:19:27 [ Applause and Cheering ] ^M03:19:31 >> So, I'm told by my publisher I sold almost 300 copies of my book. I have 16 reviews on Amazon. >> Nice. >> So what is your advice? I beg people, beg them. Now I've started putting papers that I've had printed up on how to write a review on Amazon into every book that I sell, so how do you get people to take the time to write reviews? >> Darling, I'm sorry. I never have. I send out newsletters and I send out eBlasts, but I've never asked for a review, and some books get a lot of immediate reviews, and some don't. ^M03:20:10 And in many cases the books that are the least liked get the most noise, and it's painful. I mean it doesn't matter who you are. Ten really great reviews can be decimated by one stinker. >> I was told by somebody that I might be happy [laughter]. >> That's what I have. >> Lots of other reviews. >> Yeah. I don't know. Does anybody have any advice? I don't know how you go about generating those reviews. I just throw it at the wall and hope for the best [laughter]. >> I am just going to say be careful of how you word your request because Amazon has very strict rules about soliciting reviews, and they might all get deleted, so. >> Thank you. >> I have a little bit of advice, and that is if you formed a community who likes your books, in other words, what everyone's been saying, you write back to everyone who writes you. You create a place on your Facebook page that -- we're almost talking -- it's interesting how often people are saying "safe." Safe really means that you're guarding against the trolls, right? So your Facebook pages becomes a place where people can come and not talk about politics, and -- I don't know about your guys. I was sick for a whole day after that burning cage episode. >> Mm-hmm. >> Nothing goes onto Facebook about that, right? You create an Eloisa self, and that self has got to be -- it's got to be genuine. Kim cannot do my Facebook page. It has to be me. If you grow that community, it will grow, and those people will then want to do a review for you. But it's not something you can kind of get at with book number one, alas. >> Thank you. >> Mm-hmm. >> Hi. I just wanted to make a comment about where our community is. Last night while you all were watching a move, I was at home with boy scouts watching ^IT Jeopardy. ^NO Anyone else watching ^IT Jeopardy ^NO last night? Double Jeopardy. One of the categories was Women Authors. The $800 clue was, "Nora Roberts was the first inductee in the Hall of Fame of this genre." ^M03:22:14 [ Laughter ] ^M03:22:17 Sadly, I was going to save this for Allison. Sadly, they didn't say "RWA." They just said "Romance." And then it was also Meg Cabot was featured, Amy Tan, Maeve Binchy, and Louisa May Alcott, which I thought was the odd ball in the group. But I was very proud last night that this was on ^IT Jeopardy, ^NO so I think -- >> Yeah. >> -- romance has come a long way to be praised by Alex Trebek. ^M03:22:39 [ Laughter and Applause ] ^M03:22:41 >> Huh? >> Yes. >> If I could address the previous speaker, I have this problem where all the thoughts run to the front of my brain and try to exit at the same time, and all I can come up with is yeh [assumed spelling]. But I know a little, tiny little thing about reviews. I write a lot of them. First thing is, don't sweat them. What you actually want is A's and F's because what you want is somebody to go, "Oh, my god. I love this book." And somebody else to go, "I hated it." And somebody go, "Ooh, well what -- where am I going to fall?" The worst thing you want is meh. Meh is hard to write. It doesn't do anything for a reader. And also the reviews, they help elevate your book in various mysterious and constantly changing algorithms. And they have that little beautiful star thing where there's like the stars get filled up, and that's really great, because I've written three books and I like the stars, too. It's human nature. But they're not for you. They are for readers to evaluate whether or not they want to read your book. The best thing to do to help your book get more reviews is to write another book, and then write another one after that. And if you really, really hate the review that you got, turn off your computer and go write a book because you're still writing a book [laughter]. Do you know how many people on the subway in New York right now would love to write a book someday [laughter]? You're already ahead. Win. So the piece of advice I can give you is in terms of speaking to your readers comes from Courtney Milan. She gives a wonderful workshop about the back matter of your eBook if you're self-publishing or if you have any input as to what your eBook has at the very, very end. They've just hit the end and the music is swelling and the sunset and the riding and the horses, and then The End. The back matter is what comes next. And to quote Courtney, "Your readers never going to love you so much as they love you at that very moment." And that's when you want to say, "Would you like to see my newsletter? How about my website? Would you like a reading list in order of all the books? You've just read Book Two. Would you like to read Book Three? Here's a link." That's where you invite people to become part of your community, and that, as Eloisa has said, that community is what helps you build a backlist, and backlist is awesome. So I hope that's helpful. And I'm sorry I wasn't more coherent earlier. All the thoughts were heading [background sound] and all at once, and I was not going to be coherent [laughter]. >> Hi. My question's a little bit -- I just came from Capitol Hill, and I actually like this room a lot better than the politics I just came from. ^M03:24:48 [ Laughter ] ^M03:24:49 >> Welcome. >> But I -- ^M03:24:50 [ Laughter ] ^M03:24:51 -- I got to be honest. My head's splitting. I focus in an intellectual property and I have written non-fiction. I've been published for a long while and I'm looking to shift out of it. But my concern is the Internet and technology. I'm curious how you all feel about how the Internet and taking our copyrights, books, brands, you name it, and if you would like to talk about that a little bit. And I also wanted -- I'm curious because I am shifting course away from non-fiction to fiction. Self-publishing versus looking for a publisher. ^M03:25:24 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M03:25:25 Your thoughts. >> Take like 10 minutes. >> Okay. All right. Let's just go with Question Number One first because it's huge, and then we'll deal with Question Number Two. So, anybody want to -- >> I love the Internet. I think it's wonderful. I think it's awesome, and I mean that sincerely. I got to figure out who I was as an adult while being online and interacting with people from around the world. I have a pretty awful perspective from a lot of authors' point of views, and I think one of my publishers is in the room, so just imagine the degree to which I'm about to show my behind. I don't care if you buy my book, borrow if from the library, if it fell off the back of a truck, if you found it in the street, if you stole it. Don't do that. If somebody borrowed it, you borrowed it from somebody else, I don't care. If you read my book, thank you, awesome. I appreciate that. That's my position as an author. I just -- oh, my god. My publisher just gave me a thumbs up. ^M03:26:16 [ Laughter ] ^M03:26:19 I'd like everyone to go and play the lottery right now -- ^M03:26:20 [ Laughter ] ^M03:26:22 -- because that's weird. Okay? In terms of your intellectual property, I totally get the ideas that are frustrating about having what you write suddenly available in a million different places all at once. Oh, my god, it's everywhere. And if you want to play Wackamo with Pirates, you're going to become exhausted. The best thing that you can do, I think, from my perspective, is to keep writing because people are not stupid. There are always going to be people who are like, "I don't want to pay for anything, so I'm not going to." But I also believe, because I read all these romances -- I have author empathy -- I also believe people are decent and good, and ultimately, if they're going to be like oh, my god, I just bought this Robyn Carr book, all these virgins in the river. I need all 90 of them now. ^M03:27:01 [ Laughter ] ^M03:27:04 They're going to go buy them. That reader who is passionate, who is a passionate reader, they're going to go buy that book because -- show of hands. How many people have borrowed a book from the library and then be like, "I must own this right now." See. This happens. So don't sweat it is my point. Just write awesomeness. >> Excuse me, Sarah. >> Yes, ma'am. >> There are no virgins left in virgin wood. ^M03:27:24 [ Laughter and Applause ] ^M03:27:31 >> Damn it [laughter]. >> We are talking about an HEA, after all. >> That's right. ^M03:27:35 [ Laughter ] ^M03:27:37 >> Come on out of the river. >> I have thought a lot -- or learned a lot about intellectual property recently. And I think everybody in the commercial publishing world learned a lot about copyright, including those whose profession it is, learned a lot about copyright when ^IT Fifty Shades of Grey ^NO was published in a way that I think that the entire world assumed would have been impossible, and that it was a fanfiction that was search and replace revise 89% identical to the fanfiction that was posted online, and the movie's coming out this week. >> Really? >> I think -- I think -- ^M03:28:15 [ Laughter ] ^M03:28:20 >> Oh, my gosh. Oh, my. >> Don't you ever go online? >> No. ^M03:28:23 [ Laughter ] ^M03:28:25 So I mean, I think that it really -- what we learned from that was that a copyright was actually having the short of chilling effect that people who are opposed to copyright often believe that it does have; whereas, a lot of people felt that there were many more protections extended to books than actually are. However, I mean, in line with what Sarah was saying, I mean, I think you couldn't possibly say that ^IT Fifty Shades of Grey ^NO harmed ^IT Twilight ^NO in any way. And I was always sort of hoping that Stephenie Meyer might sue EL James because I wanted to watch Stephenie Meyer say, "Your porney BDSM story, it too closely resembles the chastity romance I have written about vampires." ^M03:29:10 [ Laughter ] ^M03:29:13 But, obviously, that was never going to happen. In fact, it couldn't. But I think the broader point really is that for -- you can go find ^IT Fifty Shades of Grey ^NO, search and replace, and put in Harry Styles. You can go find any book pretty much search and replace and put up on Wall Pad featuring Harry Styles as the hero. Harry Styles is a pop fan singer from One Direction. And now some of his fanfictions about him are also getting large contracts. Those aren't hurting anybody else's original novel sales yet because most of the people who are reading pirated books, they're not people who were going to buy the book. But, lo and behold, they can get it for free. Mostly they're people who were never going to buy that book, whether for economic reasons or because they're just not book buyers. So I think, while we are in a time of sort of tremendous change, a like paradigm shift of how people are going to make money for creative work, that right now those people, the piracy problem isn't as much of a problem for writers as it maybe has been in other industries. ^M03:30:15 >> Can I just add one thing that's really, really frustrating as an author? You may be right that those people never would buy books, but there's nothing like going to a site where it says 169,000 people downloaded [inaudible]. >> Yeah. >> Mm-hmm. >> Yeah. >> Do the math. >> That's a lot of money. And the thing that's really, really annoying is people are out there saying they present it as a moral good, right? I believe that all intellectual property should be free. If you go to a pirated site, what you'll notice is there'll be ads on that site, and the ads are key to you, to the searching that you've done on your computer. So, actually, I'd been to a small catalog and then I followed up a pirate who was listing Eloisa's books are free on Twitter, went to that site, and the small catalog came up with an ad. So I wrote them. It was like how dare you, blah, blah, blah. And they said, "Well, actually, we just bought Google advertising." So what is happening is that the pirates who stay there doing it for moral good are actually making a huge amount of money from Google advertising as people go to that site to read all of Eloisa's free book and to download them, whereas, in fact, Google is then paying a lot of money for those people -- to the pirates. So it's a commercial site of piracy. It's not just harming the authors. It' kind of more complicated Internet environment somehow. But I would agree. You just have to put it out of your head because what can you do, right? >> I just want to add. There's three different stages of copyright infringement as far as fanfiction. Eloisa has always been -- if they write fanfiction, that's fine. But I can't read it. I will never read it because that's a really sticky legal situation. There are other authors that you will see on their websites say, "I do not condone fanfiction. If you see a fanfiction of my novels or characters, please notify me or notify my legal department." They're really against the fanfiction. And then you have the pirates who are -- I buy this book or however I get it, and load it up on the Internet for my bajillion closest friends. That is taking sales away. But then you also have the fanfiction writers who literally will take a book, and this has happened to Eloisa. She put the book up there. She gave it a different title. But it was word-for-word Eloisa's book, saying she had written fanfiction. I mean, that is a huge copyright infringement, not to mention her morals are in the poo pile. ^M03:32:49 [ Laughter ] ^M03:32:51 You know, that's not cool. >> But readers notice that almost instantly. >> Yeah. >> The people who notice the plagiarism are almost always the readers because, unlike my brain, they read a book and go, "Oh, my gosh. This is Harlequin Presents Number 972. Only it took place in Greece. And this is word-for-word this. And the readers are the ones who notice. And that stuff counts now. >> This is happening all the -- I mean, there's no greater sin or crime in the fanfiction community of taking one person's story -- >> Oh, mercy. >> -- and copying it and saying, "I wrote it." I mean, it is the most policed area, internally policed area because, if you think about it, those writers, they're not making money. But the only thing they have to gain is the reputation and credit for the story. So those are snapped up right away. But another thing that I've seen happen a number of times is somebody has taken a popular fanfiction and self-published it on Amazon. I mean, not the writer of the fanfiction. Some other person has said, "Oh, that was a successful story. I'm going to change the names and publish this fanfiction as an Amazon independent book, and they've done this many, many times. So I don't to mean to suggest that the Internet poses no problems for plagiarism. As a college professor, I think I really -- ^M03:34:04 [ Laughter ] ^M03:34:07 -- could believe that. But it also makes it really easy to catch people because we can search. And so I can run it through turnitin.com. So in the same opportunities it gives the plagiarist, the same opportunities it gives me to catch them. >> Good. So someone else. The next question? >> My question on the -- my name is Deni [assumed spelling] -- has to do with Kindle Worlds. What do you think about Kindle Worlds? That's the new site that Amazon has where authors and I think Hugh Howey and several other people are allowing fanfiction, if you will, force people to write in their worlds as well as generate income from that fanfiction. >> I don't know about that. >> I've never heard of that. >> I never heard of it. >> Never heard of it. >> I don't know anybody from the fanfiction community who has the slightest interest in Kindle Worlds. >> I think it's really awesome when you're this big, huge company with lots of [inaudible] money. You get to try stuff. And you can try stuff and maybe it doesn't work. As a reader, I'm not interested in it. But I also think that fanfic isn't something that you can say, "Here, make the fanfic police." Fanfic is an organic response to what you've created. And there's a really wonderful book called ^IT Cognitive Surplus ^NO by Clay Shirky. And he talks about how we basically inherit a cognitive surplus of brain energy with each successive generation, because everything we do is more automated, like we don't have to hang the wash on the line and then rub it on a thing and put it in the bucket and hang it back up. We just put it in the washing machine. Yes. So we have all this extra brain energy and we're sort of running out of things to do with it. One of the things that we do, according to Clay Shirky, is that we create in response to what we read. So we no longer passively consume entertainment. We create in response to it, and that's what fanfiction is. We read something. We're like I really miss Hogwarts. There's no more books. Except now there is. I need to go hang out there. I'm going to go hang out there in my imaginary Hogwarts where I'm extremely MarySue, awesome wizardess chick. >> Yeah. >> And everybody loves me. I want to go back to that world and I want to visit. I don't think you can be like, here, make the fanfic. Fanfic is an organic, creative response. So, okay, cool. I'm interested to see what happens with Kindle Worlds, but as a reader, I'm not interested. >> Part of the problem is that they're authorizing certain kinds of stories and not others. And if there is one thing that fanfiction is for, it is for telling the unauthorized stories [laughter]. If somebody's going to say, "Well, okay, you can write stories about my characters, but no sex, no torture, no, whatever," a lot of -- I mean, there are plenty of fanfiction writers who are not writing those kinds of stories, but so often the impulse for fanfiction is to say, "Oh, my gosh. I cannot believe Hermione ended up with Ron," and to write that story. And really, then, when the writer comes in and said, "Yeah, actually, that's a big mistake," that's really upsetting for the whole community. It's kind of like, hey, well, shut up. This isn't about you anymore [laughter]. >> When you write it and you publish it, it belongs to the readers. >> It's ours now. Go away. And so Kindle World is sort of trying to have it both ways, and I think people are just not interested because that's not the fanfiction impulse. There are other kinds of writers who are interested in Kindle Worlds. People who would like to make money and think it would be fun, but are not coming out of fanfiction. It's just a different impulse. >> I'm, as a writer, I'm really uncomfortable with fanfiction. But then I think about -- as a child, my sister and I always played Laura and Mary, and we would extend those stories, and we played the ^IT Wizard of Oz, ^NO and we would extend those stories. And I think it's a similar impulse to go on living in that world. ^M03:37:55 [ Inaudible Speaker ] ^M03:37:56 Yeah. >> Were you Mary? >> No, I was Laura. >> Okay. ^M03:37:59 [ Laughter ] ^M03:38:02 >> I thought so, but I just wanted to -- >> My sister's older and blonde, so it was not -- >>Just raise one interesting question about the Internet that's got to do with the author platform, because we're talking community. >> Right. >> The author platform is also constructed in a way, it feels sometimes to me, like I'm constructing fanfiction fiction about Eloisa, like, hmph. >> Mm-hmm, no, yeah. >> I fight with my husband, and I go on and put something fun on. Meanwhile I'm thinking, you know, I hate you. ^M03:38:28 [ Laughter ] ^M03:38:31 Whatever. For example, there's Mary Bly and there's Eloisa James. Well, I'm one of the very few fictional personas that has a memoir, because I wrote ^IT Paris in Love, ^NO which is a memoir of Eloise's year in Paris with my family, right? And a highly romanticized picture of me on the front. Do you see how weird that is? I'm creating sort of a -- there's the Eloisa world and then there's the Mary Bly Shakespeare world. And then the fanfiction kind of comes into the middle somewhere. A lot of people are reading about my books which I actually really like because I feel like one of the things the Internet has done is allowed us all to be creative, right? So many people want to write. Where it gets more difficult is when they're writing Eloisa slash fanfiction. ^M03:39:21 [ Laughter ] ^M03:39:22 Then, as Kim says, I'm really like I'm not wanting to read this. ^M03:39:26 [ Laughter ] ^M03:39:27 But on the other hand, in some way I have allowed the Eloisa universe to grow so that it isn't entirely in my hands anymore. It's something that's constructed between the readers and me, right? It is really a community effort that has constructed Eloisa over the last 20 years, so, okay. Someone else. >> Can I ask a question real quick? >> Yeah, go. >> Brenda, you've written this enormous family of really awesome men. ^M03:39:55 [ Laughter ] ^M03:39:57 Have you met them? You should meet them. ^M03:40:00 On the covers, especially. Have you encountered fanfiction about that family if people continue those stories that you're aware of? >> I'm going to be honest with you. I just asked Robin, "What is fanfiction?" ^M03:40:10 [ Laughter and Applause ] ^M03:40:14 >> I wrote a book. >> I brought my computer. We'll look some up. >> So I don't -- I really don't know because maybe my readers know about the Westmorland's and the Madaris's, the Steele's, and my family, and like someone said, they would be the first one, and they are the first one to tell me someone else stole scene number so-and-so out of your book. That was your kissing scene, and we know it was. And I'm like, "Really?" And I have gone back and reread the book, the book that they accused of taking from my scene, and I'm like, "If I would have read that scene I would not have recognized it as my kissing scene," because I've written so many kissing scenes. ^M03:41:02 [ Laughter ] ^M03:41:03 So I'm curious now. I'm going back and check. But as far as I know, no one has emulated any of my families. My readers out there, have you seen anything like that? >> A Westmoreland fanfic? ^M03:41:17 [ Inaudible Speakers ] ^M03:41:19 >> Wow. >> That they would have told me by now. >> I've looked for it, too. I can't find any. I can't. I thought -- >> Westmoreland's or virgins? >> Virgins. >> Oh, okay. ^M03:41:27 [ Laughter ] ^M03:41:30 >> Maybe it's the Westmoreland's. ^M03:41:32 [ Laughter ] ^M03:41:34 >> I think we missed one question, the second half. What was that about self-pub versus pubbed? >> Oh. >> [Inaudible] pub and self-pub, yeah. >> Somebody just said no. >> Okay. We're going to the next question. Forget it. >> All right. >> Okay, cool. >> Hi. I'd like to bring this a little bit back. We've been doing a lot about how the authors relate to the readers, the readers to the authors. But there's this other element to the community that we haven't really discussed much, which is the reader to reader interaction. Okay. And that's the other aspect, I think. Sorry, you're emblematic of that with what you've had with your website bringing people together, be it either a commentary on something or everyone just falling out of the chairs spewing coffee because they read the review of the ^IT Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay, Part Two. ^NO ^M03:42:13 [ Laughter ] ^M03:42:14 Which, if you haven't read it, you've got to go read that review. >> There's also a Part One, too. >> Yeah. There -- it's painful. You're laughing so hard. But I mean, there's this element of the reader community and the endorsement of it's okay to be like this. You know, we talk about RWA, but that is primarily a writer convention, and it is meant for aspiring or trying writers. There's some elements for readers; not a lot. There are some readers' conventions. I was, full disclosure, mistress of ceremonies for years at a romance reader convention. And so you can clearly -- there's this, but it's small, it's usually home-grown and lasts for a while until exhaustion creeps in. And so we have this online community of readers. What's that done for the dynamic of the reader-to-reader interaction? And then how, for the authors in the panel, again, I want to distinguish this from readers interacting with authors directly and vice versa. How does that reader-to-reader community which, of course, you all have access to and could see, affect what you've done as a writer? >> Oh, let me, let me, yeah. No matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we spend on advertising and PR and all of that stuff, at the end of the day, it's always word of mouth. >> Right. >> That's what the reader-to-reader community does. It's the difference between saying to one of your fellow readers, "What are you reading?" "Oh, I can't remember the title. It's -- I don't know. And it's by, you know, that -- I can't remember," and saying, "Oh, my god. I'm reading about the Westmoreland's. Do not leave the store until you get a copy." ^M03:43:51 [ Laughter ] ^M03:43:52 And that's the word of mouth that pushes those books over the top and makes them extremely popular, that huge excitement and enthusiasm. It's always word of mouth. It always is. >> Yeah. I agree with Robin in that it is word of mouth. But what I found out as far as readers to readers, when I started my book club, my national book club, and my support team, is that I brought people together who enjoyed my families: the Westmoreland's, the Madaris's, and from there, friendships were formed. And they're lasting friendships. And as far as readers to readers, I give them a avenue where they can meet readers who love the books, who don't look at them as they're crazy, who want to know who was the baby born in the Westmoreland family. They're not real people. The first time I did a -- ^M03:44:48 [ Laughter ] ^M03:44:50 -- the first time I did a -- >> Get out. ^M03:44:52 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M03:44:54 -- the first time I did a Brenda Jackson cruise, a Madaris cruise, we all had our Madaris family reunion t-shirts -- ^M03:45:01 [ Laughter ] ^M03:45:02 -- on, and we went on this cruise. And people and -- because it was integrated -- white, black, anybody who wanted to be part of the Madaris Family -- people on the cruise were getting confused like -- ^M03:45:15 [ Laughter ] ^M03:45:23 -- and that part -- and she's part of your family now. ^M03:45:26 [ Laughter ] ^M03:45:29 And my pastor said well, because he went on the cruise. He said, "You can't get these many people going to their real family reunions." ^M03:45:38 [ Laughter ] ^M03:45:39 "But you can make up a family and all these people come and claim to be part of the Madaris Family that really doesn't exist." And I think that's what books do: bring people together. And like Robin said, when they asked name me a good alpha male that -- >> Lane. ^M03:45:59 [ Laughter ] ^M03:46:05 >> You see, they take it so -- they're so emotionally involved -- >> Yes. >> -- in our stories -- >> They are. >> -- and they take it very seriously. >> And that's the flip side of a discussion this morning about canon. You know, we have a collective canon, and then each of us has a personal canon, and the books that we consider the most vitally important are all different, yet there are also some that we can all agree on. So there's a whole realm of different essential books for us to read based on that reader interaction. And I want to be part of the Madaris family. ^M03:46:33 [ Laughter ] ^M03:46:35 >> And you know, I don't think you can have just -- I don't think you can talk just about a reader-to-reader community because the authors are the glue that -- that's what brings you together. It's not grandma's pecan pie recipe. It's the love of these books, the love of these characters. And they're the ones that police it; they're the ones that set the tone of it; and they're the glue of it. >> They are? >> I mean, even take out the money aspect. They're the reason that we come together, you know? >> I don't entirely agree with you thought, because I think that readers come together over a shared love of a type of book as much as they come together over a specific book. Because one of the things that happens when readers talk to one another is that -- say, you've got a community like, oh, I don't know, romance, that is largely ignored and treated as substandard and easily dismissed. And so we lack a language to talk about what we love because no one talk about it. So we're going to develop our own language. So now we have things like HEA, and Too Stupid to Live, and Beta Mau, and Caregiver Alpha. And we know what a dom is and a sub is, and we demonstrate affluence in our genre that's not necessarily based on an arm there, but it's based on what we're looking for. So I have a happy -- I have a very deep love of books where someone gets caught in a snowstorm. ^M03:47:49 [ Laughter ] ^M03:47:50 I love a good snow-bound romance because you're not going to die. It's not a hurricane. If you've got food and heat you're fine. There's a hot guy [inaudible] by yes. Everyone in Boston is like no, that's not true, Sarah. >> Right. ^M03:48:02 [ Laughter ] ^M03:48:03 >> But that's my love, right? So I'm looking for that troop. Well, now I can name it. I love contemporary snow-bound romances and I'm sure, if I punch you, you'll got like oh, I know one.. >> What about -- >> I wrote one. ^M03:48:12 [ Laughter ] ^M03:48:14 So we're all after a common language. So what happens with reader-to-reader communication is that we develop ways of talking about the things that we love. And if there isn't a term, we're just going to invent one, and then we all use it. >> I think the first fanfiction I ever made it all the way through was ^IT Spike and Buffy Caught in a Snowstorm. ^NO >> Yes. >> Yeah, Now I mean -- oh, my god. Please tell me the link. >> You're the, you're the -- no, she's just amazing. She also -- she writes, she's read [inaudible]. >> I need this. >> It's so good. >> Give it to me now. ^M03:48:43 [ Laughter ] ^M03:48:46 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M03:48:47 >> Can't even remember what it was called. Oh, my god. >> You know what's really funny though? >> Snowstorm -- ^M03:48:51 [ Laughter ] ^M03:48:53 >> Because I know you from there. ^M03:48:54 [ Laughter ] ^M03:48:56 >> This newsroom is like a setting, right? >> The forced proximity. It's like a house party. >> But how many of you have an obsession with heroes who have lactating heroines? >> What? >> Ahhhhh. >> Have what? >> There's a ton of this -- ^M03:49:11 [ Laughter ] ^M03:49:15 >> Heroes who have girls feeding heroine. >> There's a great article in that. I was shocked by how many there are? So, I mean, I think there's -- >> Oh, lactation porn >> -- there's one -- yeah. >> Also dinosaur lactation. >> Okay. ^M03:49:27 [ Inaudible Speakers ] ^M03:49:29 Who has a mic? Do you have a mic? Yes, you've got it. >> Hi, this is a hard moment to follow. ^M03:49:36 [ Laughter ] ^M03:49:38 I'm also going to show my age. I wanted to say or ask the panelists and anyone else who wanted to comment, but I'm old enough that I had the privilege in the early 1980s to take a class with a woman named Janice Radway who had -- >> Oh. >> -- just written a book called ^IT Reading the Romance, ^NO which has become a real staple in popular culture studies beyond just romance. ^M03:50:01 And I see some people have heard of it. And as I remember what Jan argued was based -- she spent a lot of time with then readers groups that were mostly, I think, based around bookstores and some were exchanging mailed newsletters. It was before the Internet. And I think it was before the large variety of the kinds of publishers that you see now. But she ultimately came to her own conclusion that she felt that women who were -- many women who were participating in reading romances were actually damaging their -- sort of the quality of their life by engaging in the kind of escapist fantasy that -- so the example -- I know. And that's clearly not the attitude here. >> Right. Yes. >> But you don't -- ^M03:50:43 [ Laughter ] ^M03:50:46 -- say that the example would be that if you're in a difficult marriage you might read romances all the time instead of figuring out how to get out of your marriage. That was the example in the book. I'm just saying. ^M03:50:55 [ Inaudible Speaker ] ^M03:50:56 >> I'm going to take this one first. >> And so what I was wondering is clearly in this community that's not the attitude. I'm hearing a lot of empowerment. There was a lot in Laurie's movie last night as well. But I was wondering -- I've heard a lot of people refer to the issue that people disparage romance. Some people disparage romances so you keep it to yourself. But I haven't heard anyone really talk overtly about that stereotype, that they're escapists, and it's, therefore, bad for women. And I'd like to ask, especially in terms of the community building, if you could address that directly. >> That's why my site's called Smart Bitches. >> I want to frame this -- ^M03:51:29 [ Laughter ] ^M03:51:30 >> Can I frame this for a second? We got to keep in mind that Janice withdrew a lot of those suppositions in the further editions because her research was flawed. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Right. >> It's flawed in terms of class, particularly. But there were other problems as well. So it's one of those weird things that has stuck around and crops up, especially, I'd have to say, in right-wing articles that are saying that this is encouraging women to want sex that their husbands cannot provide. ^M03:51:56 [ Laughter ] ^M03:51:59 I think it's unfortunate that that has become a staple given its flawed basis, especially coming out of a great teacher. But let's just keep in mind what kind of research we're talking about there and then go on and see what these guys have to say. >> Well, I also think if you read those books from the '90s carefully, when they come to their concluding paragraphs in which they say these inflammatory things like, "We are contributing to our own oppression by reading romances," they start introducing all of these conditional phrases. This may be, this could be, it's possible to speculate, that all of a sudden in their conclusions they get really squishy about being willing to commit to what they obviously believe because it's unsupportable. And I guess my -- partly because they're often literary critics who are now venturing into sociology, into psychology, and they just don't have the training to do that kind of analysis. But I also think that's -- these issues are kind of a dead horse now. >> Yeah. >> We've been through this. We process this. Radway has the -- we've moved on. ^M03:53:19 [ Laughter ] ^M03:53:21 >> I really want to touch on this. >> Okay. ^M03:53:23 [ Laughter ] ^M03:53:24 >> I think that's a load of crap I'm not familiar with -- >> What I just said? >> No, no, no, no, no. No. No. >> Okay, Kim, let's -- >> No. Whatever that study was. I'm not familiar with the author you're talking about. But I think you have to take a -- you can read a romance as a how-to manual. I was raised with no nurturing whatsoever. I did not know how to bond to people. But I found books and I used that as a how-to manual. I used it as this is what you strive for and you don't settle for less. You know, statistically, I should be a crack whore on the corner, not in a committed relationship for a quarter of a century. I had no example of what a marriage or a healthy relationship was. Romance novels taught me that. And, I mean, you can say I'm going to read this. It's fluff. It' doesn't mean anything. Or you can take it and you can read it as what it is. It's hope that this is what you can have. This story may be fiction, but it doesn't have to be your fiction. You can make this come true. I would much prefer to have a romance novel be my future than say a Dean Koontz novel. ^M03:54:38 [ Laughter ] ^M03:54:41 >> Good point. >> Smart Bitches started in 2005. And so I started writing about romance after, well after, Radway's book was published. But I still felt the vestiges of that. These are bad for you. They -- unrealistic expectations, yada, yada, yada. Beware of fanny pack. You have too many cats, et cetera. And I wrote a -- my second book is called, ^IT Everything I Know I Learned About Love I Learned From Romance Novels. ^NO And every chapter breaks down the positive things that you learn from romance novels. You learn who the hero is. You learn how to be a heroine. You learn that happy endings take work, that conflict is real, that you can work through it. And that someone appreciating you for who you are is the root message of most romances. That you are lovable and worthy of love exactly the way you are, and there's nothing wrong with you. And I didn't realize at the time, but what I was doing was trying to basically throat-punch everything that Radway had contributed to my feelings of shame, that I was reading these books and there was something wrong with me, and then I was like, "Oh, the hell there is. I'm perfectly healthy. Just talkative." So -- ^M03:55:42 [ Laughter ] ^M03:55:44 -- that book on one hand makes me mad because I've read it and it makes me mad. I don't know which edition I read but I was still mad. On the other hand, it's powerful because we still talk about it and we still have the opportunity to say that is completely untrue and here's lots of scientific evidence to the contrary. >> You know, it's one really interesting thing. That's exactly what Sarah's saying. Because I'm a professor and a writer I get taken around on gigs to universities occasionally, right? And they always stick me in a class that's got creative writers who are all writing literature, and then generally some women's studies students who are like more excited. So I was in this class and I have a bunch of guys on this side who are all writing very literary fiction. And then I have a bunch of women's studies on this side who are all excited about female empowerment and women having orgasms. And at some point -- and they'd all been forced to read ^IT Once Upon a Tower, ^NO which has -- my characters have extremely bad sex. And then they finally have good sex and he finally figures out how to do it. And it's a young man, said, "You know, that's a total fantasy." ^M03:56:45 [ Laughter ] ^M03:56:49 This doesn't only come from Radway. It comes from some deep senses of inadequacy on the parts of the people who grab that idea, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> So he said, "No guy could do it as many times as your hero does." And there's dead silence in the room. It's the [inaudible]. I'll just look at him. And he realizes what he said. He gets really defensive. He says, "I know, I know, because I'm gay." And there's dead silence in the room [laughter]. And then this young woman picks up and she says, "In my personal experience it hasn't happened." And there's dead silence. And then the whole side of the women's fiction room goes, "Well, guess what, honey. You've been dating the wrong people." ^M03:57:26 [ Laughter and Applause ] ^M03:57:30 And he turned into this thing. But what it made me think about later is -- I'm sure that all the writers on this panel occasionally get letters from guys, and they're like, "You're making -- my wife had this feeling that I should have this equipment the size of the Hubbell Telescope. It's your fault." It's not like a bag of gold. The bigger the better. They've got a lot of things they think, but there is some deep unhappiness that also lies behind that myth, the Radway myth that keeps coming up. But in a way, we need to respect where that's coming from. Or at least not just this -- we dismiss it, but on the other hand, we have to recognize there's a real feeling. It pushes it to the front of our culture over and over again. >> That's why it's still there. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. >> Mm-hmm. >> Coming up again. >> Yes, you had your hand up. >> Sorry. >> Brenda had something to say. >> Oh, oh. ^M03:58:20 [ Inaudible Speaker ] ^M03:58:21 >> I have a question that I don't know how to formulate it [inaudible] you can help me. I'm going to need a microphone though. >> Oh, you need the microphone. >> Yeah. ^M03:58:30 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M03:58:31 >> It's coming. >> Oh, Brenda. Just start talking. >> Okay. Before she asks a question, the last question -- I got more mail, emails, real mail, from men after I wrote my first ^IT Desire ^NO book, ^IT Delaney's Desert Sheikh ^NO because I introduce a kiss in there that was so powerful. The lady had -- Delaney had the big o and she passed out. ^M03:58:55 [ Laughter ] ^M03:58:58 And women all of a sudden wanted that type of kiss. ^M03:59:01 [ Laughter ] ^M03:59:03 And men were writing me saying, "You're setting up unrealistic expectations because my wife wants that kiss." So I'm like, well, you're just going to have to work hard -- ^M03:59:15 [ Laughter ] ^M03:59:17 -- give her that. And so I think that's wonderful that they were even trying. ^M03:59:22 [ Laughter ] ^M03:59:25 >> That was ^IT Delaney's Desert Sheikh. ^NO. >> Sheikh. ^M03:59:27 [ Laughter ] ^M03:59:29 >> Delaney -- >> That's D-E-L -- >> That would be -- ^M03:59:30 [ Laughter ] ^M03:59:31 >> ^IT Delaney Desert Sheikh. ^NO. >> Right. >> All right. >> So, like you, I'm also a college professor and I read what college people, faculty, are saying about students coming up. And one of the universal complaints about high school graduates coming into college is that they can't write. >> Mm-hmm. >> And here I come into a room of people who are writers, who say to other people, "You can write. ^M04:00:00 You can write a novel. You can write a this. You can write a that. How is it that there's this whole group of women out there who are potentially wonderful writers, when there's so much complaint about the way writing is taught, grammar, punctuation, you know, all of that, that people can't write a sentence, they don't know what a verb is, they end with prepositions which is now allowed according to the ^IT Oxford -- ^NO That's just going to free up a whole lot. ^M04:00:27 [ Laughter ] ^M04:00:30 These women -- I have been to countless conventions and conferences of all sorts of academics. I'm a sociologist. A lot of people sit there and they don't understand what these people are talking about. Students don't understand what faculty are talking about. There's so much -- >> It's tragic. >> -- not understanding of one another, so much use of jargon. And here we have six of the most -- of fabulously articulate women with broad vocabularies, with a sense of humor, with an ability to be concise, and everybody out there can be a writer. Where di you all go to high school? ^M04:01:04 [ Laughter ] ^M04:01:07 >> It doesn't happen in high school. >> I think it comes down to reading. >> Yeah, it comes out of the reading. >> It's a -- I'm not going to say you students can't write. But it's your students haven't been reading. >> Yeah. >> That's right. That's exactly right. >> And our readers -- guess what they do? >> And what the writers do. We all read. >> Was there a question -- >> Most of the most popular romance writers we have today did not study writing or English. I went to nurses' training. They don't teach you how to write novels in nurses' training. >> So for you it came from reading? >> It came from reading. I mean, really and truly, I was reading -- I was an Air Force wife and young mother -- >> Yea. >> -- reading a book a day-- hi. You're reading a book a day and I thought I bet any dummy can do this. ^M04:01:57 [ Laughter ] ^M04:01:58 And ahh, and really any dummy can't. It's really quite hard. But once you get started, if you love that process and you just can't wait to get up in the morning to make that story a little longer, and you hate to go to bed at night because you're not quite done thinking about, and you put yourself to sleep with more plot and more characterization. That's a good hint that you're going to probably be a writer, and that's how it goes. And you learn. >> And I do have formal training in -- I mean, I have a PhD in English Literature, and what did we do? We read. I mean that's what getting a degree in any literary field is, is you're just reading and you're reading all the time. >> I don't know how many of you were here last night for the screening, but one of the main characters, Len -- Len -- I hope I'm pronouncing that right -- was a surgeon, and she gave up medicine to write. I'm sure, in her senior residency or whatever, they were not teaching her grammar or punctuation. She learned it from writing and developing her talent. >> I would say one thing, is that, an English professor, I'm like a bitch on wheels when it comes to grammar. [Laughter] In case you didn't know, like is not a conjunction. >> Oh, it is. >> However -- >> It is. >> I -- >> She hates semicolons. >> Yeah. But when I'm reading, and I'm talking now about -- >> Is it you? >> -- self-pub books coming out to -- you can go on about the run-on sentence, but what I'm seeing from a lot of people who do not know that like is not a conjunction, and moreover speak -- write completely in run-on sentences, is they can grab dialogue, right? Grammar is a wonderful thing in its place. But often with writers, especially those who are writing about the young, they're writing in run-on sentences, and if you try reading the dialogue aloud to yourself sometimes, they're catching this wonderful fluency of the way people write not, which does not fit in to like is not a conjunction. So I try to keep a balance there on -- I get a lot of et tu brute type things because I sometimes have my characters speak ungrammatically. And it's not that I don't know it, it's that we don't always speak grammatically, and the younger they are the less they do in regency England class levels come in. >> Okay. Yes. >> I have a question that I don't know if this is the right panel to ask it. But I'm wondering about why the -- it's so common to use a pseudonym in writing romance? ^M04:04:33 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M04:04:35 [ Laughter ] ^M04:04:36 I've had no [inaudible] on several topics and I will write under a pseudonym when I write about romance, and when I'm writing about serious topics I will use my own name. And I think like -- always wondered by just contributing to the ghettoization of romance that's like doing that, or is it something like a form of belonging to a community that part of belonging to the community is often having a [inaudible] for a -- >> Right. >> Can I add to that before she finishes -- >> Yeah. >> -- because that was mine. ^M04:05:05 [ Laughter ] ^M04:05:06 Or it was very close to it. >> Right. >> My question also -- so while you're answering that, my question was also -- I notice that it says Mary Bly and Eloisa James. >> Mm-hmm. >> And there seems to be a while back it was always it seemed that there was always a pseudonym. When I started to write I couldn't even think of writing under my own name because then people wouldn't take me seriously in the computing world. So I had to keep it two different ways. And I bragged to my husband about -- oh, well, you know, Lewis Carroll was a mathematician, you know, like -- ^M04:05:43 [ Laughter ] ^M04:05:45 -- a hero now, so. But the same thing. I'm noticing that some younger writers don't bother. They don't bother to change their name. I met Bella Andre a couple of years back. She told me her real name, and blaah. I don't know. I don't even know it. My other question is, how do you keep your community together? Do you separate them? How do you deal with your community? So you say you've got two different books. I mean, if now we've got pseudonyms, some are using a real name. How do you keep that community together? And when do you become you? ^M04:06:23 [ Laughter ] ^M04:06:24 >> There's actually another component to this. When I sold my first book to Harlequin, a long time ago, one of the very first questions that Harlequin asked was, "What's your pseudonym going to be?" And I came up with them. And then after I'd sold the second book, I was like, no, I want to use my own name, and I always have. And that has tremendous legal advantages. If I had used a pseudonym for Harlequin -- I don't know what the contract is now, but in those days I could not take that pseudonym and write for another company. >> That's changed now I think. >> That may have changed, but I think still for a lot of -- ^M04:07:05 [ Inaudible Speaker ] ^M04:07:07 Yeah. >> Shirley? >> Can I have a mic? >> Here. >> Shirley, yeah. >> Right. >> Hi, guys [laughter]. In 2002 I was President of RWA. >> Right. >> Yea. >> We had a great person who was at Harlequin's, and that was changed. The pseudonym issue was changed. RWA lobbied for it for quite a few years, so it is about [inaudible]. And she and the team at Harlequin decided that all contracts, current, past, and none for the future, you could use your own name because Harlequin used to own that name, as she was saying. >> You mean your own pseudonym, too. You could keep your pseudonym. >> You could keep your pseudonym. You could take it wherever you wanted because the authors who had made their names famous wanted to write for other people. They did not want to leave Harlequin. They just wanted the opportunity to be able to write somewhere else. And Isabelle agreed with that, Harlequin agreed with that, and they changed it. This was Harlequin. I don't know about any of the other companies. Most of the people that I knew who went to other companies had other reasons for using pseudonyms. Maybe the person over here who says she writes academic books under her one name, fiction under another name. I know people who do that. >> Carole [inaudible]. >> And it was for that same reason they wanted. I know people who write for -- who work at Catholic schools and don't want the Catholic school people to know that they write romance because they look down on it. We don't, but, you know, that's the public [laughter]. That was -- >> Yeah. >> Is it time -- >> I'm going to talk about the opposite of -- the benefit of using a pseudonym. I have a friend who writes urban fantasy. Well, she used to write urban fantasy. She's [inaudible] now. And I get that urban fantasy fans are a different subspecies of us. But -- ^M04:08:54 [ Laughter ] ^M04:08:55 -- she has a young daughter and one of her readers, because she wrote under her real name, they found her address and they put it out on Twitter. And she had a very little girl and it became a serious issue. And she's not the only author that's happened to. And then, not to mention if you write under your real name, think about how many books you're going to sign. Eloisa signs hundreds and hundreds of books a year. Some of my friends, they have their autographing signature and then their legal signature. So there are different legal ramifications for either, pro or con. >> Right. >> I'm Brenda Jackson, the real Brenda Jackson. ^M04:09:35 [ Laughter ] ^M04:09:38 >> The only one. >> I don't use a pseudonym, and I never have. I never wanted to. The only time it even came across was when I was asked to write children books. I don't want a child to see a Brenda Jackson book and say, "Mom, I read Brenda Jackson." ^M04:09:55 [ Laughter ] ^M04:09:56 So I would consider it at that point. But otherwise, I am Brenda Jackson. ^M04:10:00 >> Okay. We got to close up here. So, sorry, no more questions. We're going to take a 15-minute break? Is that right? Okay. I'm supposed to announce that we're running out of time, but I went past that. ^M04:10:15 [ Laughter ] ^M04:10:18 I was supposed to ask for a volunteer to sum up, but we don't have time for that. So now we're at the end. That's all mine says. ^M04:10:23 [ Laughter ] ^M04:10:26 [ Applause ] ^M04:10:28 >> I am indeed still Pamela Regis here at the fourth panel, yeah. My identity has not shifted. But for those of you who don't know, I'm co-organizer of the conference. I would like to thank the WRW volunteers who made it possible. A round of applause for them, please. ^M04:10:44 [ Applause and Cheering ] ^M04:10:48 I would like to thank the Library of Congress for their hospitality and their excellent help. A round of applause for them, please. ^M04:10:56 [ Applause and Cheering ] ^M04:11:01 And this is just my thanks for the panelists and the moderators who donated their time to come here and put it together. So, a round of applause for them, too, please. ^M04:11:09 [ Applause ] ^M04:11:13 And I would now simply like to hand Panel Four over to our moderator, Sarah Frantz Lyons who is Executive Editor at Riptide Publishing and Founder of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. Sarah. ^M04:11:26 [ Applause ] ^M04:11:32 >> So I have my little script here, too. In Panel Four we will consider what is trending now and think about this question. Where is romance fiction headed in the digital age? It's a tiny little question. It won't take very long [laughter]. Not long at all. On to the topic at hand. Digital publication of romance fiction, including self-publication, has given authors unprecedented access to publication. Together we will try to assess where the digital age has already carried romance or I might actually say where romance has already carried digital publication, because which comes first, right, and where it might be headed. Both digital publication and romance and the -- together. So with this large question in mind, let's watch the film clip as we've done before. Then I'll invite our panelists to join me. Each of the panelists will offer a brief reaction, and then we'll move to the Q and A like the other three panels [laughter]. Turn off the lights and roll film. ^E04:12:33 ^B04:12:51 >> It isn't so much that fans or readers find you. But they find each other. >> We now have the ability to talk back to the author, to the publisher, to the bookstore. We now have a very active and immediate voice ^M04:13:05 [ Music ] ^M04:13:11 >> It can be anything from research to career advice to just a moment to celebrate what's going on in your life, or complain about it, depending on how things are going. >> They never met, other than the blog. And they're true friends. And it all started with that blog and a love of reading. >> The romance reader is a special reader. They are hyper-engaged in the genre. Romance readers are the readers who will read a book a day. They're voracious readers. >> Romance readers have been very early adopters of eBooks, and I think in part it's because there is a certain amount of bookstore snobbery. And when bookstores aren't stocking romance books and you're a romance reader, and you walk in and you say, "I'd like to start this series by Julie Quinn." And they say, "Well, we have Volume Five and Volume Seven." Well, if you're a serious reader you want to start with Volume One. And then you have to try and find this volume and, of course, they're willing to special order it for you, but you could get a Kindle, and then you could get all of them. You could finish the first one and you could get the next one three seconds later. And so I think romance readers, especially voracious romance readers, have really adopted quickly in part because print bookstores weren't meeting their needs. >> Romance authors have been the most innovative, the most experimental, the most forward-looking in this eBook revolution. ^M04:14:32 [ Music ] ^M04:14:36 >> Authors are the future of publishing. ^M04:14:37 [ Applause ] ^M04:14:42 This is the single most dramatic transformation that's happened in the last few years. The power in publishing is shifting from publishers, so that's the future. >> We have seen self-publishing, indie publishing, actually go from being called vanity publishing when we started -- >> To self-publishing. >> To self-publishing. >> To indie publishing. >> Mm-hmm. >> Just in a span of a few years. It's been revolutionary. >> I view publishing really right now as like the wild, wild West. People are kind of like homesteading and staking property and trying to make it work. Some people will flourish. Some people will have some hard times. They need to pack up their bags. ^M04:15:19 [ Music ] ^M04:15:24 >> Writers can start a book today with the full confidence that one way or another they're going to reach readers. One way or another they're going to get published, whether it's with a traditional publisher or self-publishing. And that is just a liberating feeling for every writer. >> So when I'm working on a project which I am most of the time -- I write 25 pages a day. I am a publisher. I'm a multi-million-dollar-a-year publisher. It just so happens that the main content creator, rather the only content creator, is me, and I also have like a based eight hours of business to take care of every day. If people aren't trying to look at the idea of would I be better off just writing and working with a publisher, and letting them handle all that versus would it be a good idea to be sort of splitting my time between writing and running my business? That's a question everybody has to answer for themselves. I really like running my own business. I'm an entrepreneur. I like being in charge of everything and I like making every decision. >> Going down. >> I would so much rather be writing. I would so much rather be writing. I like the other things a little, but I don't like them that much. And I don't like them enough to invest time. >> Mm-hmm. >> I know they're really deeply important to my career, but I like the books. I'm a writer. That's what I do. >> We'll wait for the lights. All right. So I'd like to invite our panelists to take the state. I'll introduce each briefly. More detailed biographies are in your programs so please check them there. I'm pleased to introduce John Fine, former Director of Author and Publisher Relations in amazon.com. ^M04:17:16 [ Applause ] ^M04:17:21 Liliana Hart who is a romance author, incredibly successful. So publisher -- ^M04:17:26 [ Applause ] ^M04:17:29 With really amazing shoes. >> Yeah. ^M04:17:30 [ Laughter ] ^M04:17:31 Angela James, Editorial Director at Carina Press with Harlequin. ^M04:17:35 [ Applause ] ^M04:17:38 Dominique Raccah, who is Founder and CEO of Sourcebooks. ^M04:17:43 [ Applause ] ^M04:17:46 And Tara McPherson who is Professor of Cinema at University of Southern California. ^M04:17:53 [ Applause ] ^M04:17:58 So we each -- each panelist has their response. Dominique, did you did your slideshow set up.? Yeah? Okay. Awesome. So Dominique will start and she has a slideshow. Dominique, you'll start. >> I'm going to talk a little bit about some data that I think many of you heard about, and I'm going to talk about the impact of romance readers. So, obviously today, all media are in transformation. But I think one of the things that we haven't quite said to ourselves is that the transformation of the book is different. It actually creates itself differently. And a lot of it has to do with the eBook reader, who that person is. So when you, in 2010, when you were asking questions about why people wanted to read digital books you would get answers that looked like that. You would hear about portability and the ability to carry lots and lots of books at the same time. And instant access to a large selection of books. Now, if you think about who that person is, who is that person? By the way, it's probably many of you in the audience, right? It is actually a voracious reader, right? This is a person who reads a lot. And if you looked at the demographics of that person it was a her. It was her. And it was -- and that is distinctly different from other media, okay? It was a woman. She was 45 to 54. And she read predominantly fiction. So heavy fiction readers. Many of them, many of them are romance readers. We're the innovators and the early adopters of eBooks. This transformation is being driven by you, okay? Now, if you look today, you forward today, you're going to see that eBooks are even large, and romance is even larger piece of a larger pie. So as eBooks grew ^M04:20:00 -- romance actually grew with eBooks. The question I most get is, will eBooks kill print? And the answer is -- we can now definitively, I think, answer this question. And the answer is no. And the reason for that is because there are lots and lots of different kinds of books. Just think about all the different ways that you interact with books. You interact with text books. You interact with picture books. You interact with professional books. There are lots of different kinds. Not all of those are transferring to digital in the same way. So eBooks are actually replacing our cheapest format, mass market books. That's actually how that transformation's going. And hard covers have actually not shifted a lot. Neither have trade papers. But I think the most interesting thing we've seen, and what I love about digital, I have to tell you, is the data it provides. Digital has a footprint and, therefore, we know more today than we've ever known before. This is the most interesting thing I've seen. Different authors' careers in digital. So, first of all, let me tell you that in 2013, Bowker said that there were 3500 books being published every single day, okay? So, if you're a writer, you got to just think about that number, okay? And the thing that's more interesting, as I suspect, that number's just going in one direction, right? Now, here's the thing that's kind of cool. This is three different authors, three debut authors all launched at almost identical times, and they're all romance authors, okay? And what you can see is that Author A got the -- found the bulk of their -- so debut authors, right? They have no necessarily platform. They're just starting out, right? Author A found a lot of their audience at Walmart and Target, mass market bookstores in physical form, okay? That was a lot of that audience. Author C found a lot of their audience in libraries, right? Author B found the bulk of their audience in eBooks. If you had only produced one format, if all I did was library books for one author, one of those authors, it would really limit their vision of who they are and what they can do. So it's important for you to think about where your reader might find you, because that's what digital has brought. So what we know today. Well, the transformation of books is really different from other media, and print will probably live on. And it's more important than ever before for you to find your audience, and to know where your readers are. So, thanks an awful lot. I'm Dominique Raccah. ^M04:22:36 [ Applause ] ^M04:22:40 And just a personal comment. I tend to get really, really shy up here, so I always put presentations up to help you to kind of see what I'm seeing in this space. Thanks. >> Thank you. Angie. >> Just a personal comment. I've known Dominique for a long time, and she's never been shy. ^M04:22:59 [ Laughter ] ^M04:23:02 >> I know. I was going to tell you don't, don't. Dominique and shy just -- >> I get really nervous. You didn't know that. See how cool that is. >> I have to derail this topic for just a minute because I was fascinated by the previous panel. And when Kathy was talking about playing ^IT Little House on the Prairie, ^NO how many of you were sitting in the audience going, oh, I played this and that? Come on. Yeah. I was Princess Leah [laughter]. And this is actually relevant. It is actually relevant because Princess Leah, I always thought of as a pretty good heroine. She did have to be rescued. But she was sassy and she was a heroine that I could really get behind. And that was hard for me when I was growing up. I'd been reading romance since I was in fourth grade which was like 10 years ago. ^M04:23:42 [ Laughter ] ^M04:23:46 Thirty. ^M04:23:47 [ Laughter ] ^M04:23:48 And when you're a long-time romance reader, as I bet many of you are, 30 years ago, it was actually pretty hard to find diverse romance. I was reading what the publishers wanted me to read and there were only a limited number of publishers. I lived in a small town. I grew up in North Dakota, so I was only reading the books I could get my hands on in North Dakota, which, conservative North Dakota, they weren't the really fun books all the time. I hadn't heard about Kathleen Woodwessen [assumed spelling] for like years until I think after I left North Dakota. So digital was actually eye-opening for me when I discovered digital in 2001. I discovered it through ^IT RT Magazine, ^NO through ^IT Romantic Times. ^NO That's what they were called at the time. And I was reading reviews and I thought how can I get that book? And it was digital or it was a small press and they had digital available, so I was able to actually find the heroines that I wanted to read, those sassy Princess Leah type heroines who kicked ass. I was able to find sexier books. I was able to find paranormal because publishers weren't publishing paranormal back when I wanted to read it. So digital really transformed my reading life. It was quite amazing. One of the things I was thinking about as I watched the clip earlier, and again now, is that Mark Coker said that he felt like the power of publishing was shifting to the author. And I would actually argue that the power of publishing is shifting to the reader -- >> Mm-hmm. >> -- in a way that it never was before because now -- before we could email publishers and say this is what we want to read and they say you vote with your dollar, with your wallet, and so if we didn't buy something then they knew we didn't want to read that. But now with digital, we can write directly to the publisher. We can write directly to the author. And authors and publishers can also see in real time via lists, via communities, list serves, social media, exactly what the readers want to read. So digital has really transformed the loop. Before, we really didn't have a loop of communication for publishing. And now we have that, So readers have this power to say to the publisher and the author this is what I want to read. I don't want to read about regency, romance, and dukes anymore. I want to read about aliens in space. So I really feel like digital has allowed the reader to assume a position of power and to really have a say in what they're reading. But there's something else that I think that digital has done for publishing, and I want to ask you guys a question. How many of you in here are authors? A lot of authors in the room. How many of you are published because of digital in some format? Quite a few of you. How many of you are aspiring authors? How many of you aspiring authors or published authors feel that there is more hope for your career now because of digital? ^M04:26:51 [ Applause ] ^M04:26:52 >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> One of the things that I say -- Jane Porter said in the video, she said that publishing is a bit like the wild wild west. And I think that she's very close to the truth because it's very likely some of us will survive, some of us won't. But one of the things that we leave out in when we talk about the wild wild west and we talk about digital publishing is the hope that it gives people. It has given authors and readers a greater sense of hope, hope that they can get published, hope that they can make a career out of it, hope that they can write something that they weren't able to write before. As a society we have long been attracted to things that provide us hope. The wild wild west, the Gold Rush. I mean, how many people rushed to that? And that's what digital publishing and self-publishing do now, is it provides a sense of hope, so people rush to it because there's all of these opportunities now, which is not to say that traditional publishers, which I do work for a traditional publisher on the digital side, doesn't do. But we are able, with the digital worlds, to do so much more than we were able to do when we limited to the bookshelves. So I think when we talk about digital we should never leave out that the most important word there is hope. >> Thank you. >> I was Maria Von Trapp when I was like 10. ^M04:28:16 [ Laughter ] ^M04:28:18 >> Did you want to sing a few notes for us? >> NO. And you don't want me to. And I liked being a nun like with the gays and stuff. And those of you that have read my books, I don't know where the nun thing came from, so -- ^M04:28:30 [ Laughter ] ^M04:28:33 -- I grew out of that phase, thank goodness. I think, for me, just watching this clip -- what a unique perspective that I have, personally. I am that voracious reader, the one-book-a-day reader, and when I wasn't teaching in the summertime I was a two-and-three-book-a-day reader. And I know what it's like to go on Facebook and see Julia Quinn say, "Oh, my god, y'all, you have to read this ^IT The Spymaster's Lady ^NO by Joanna Bourne and go immediately and buy every book that Joanna Bourne has ever written because Julia Quinn said so." And without reading the blurb. I didn't care. I just bought the books, and I read them and I loved them. That's that word of mouth. How important that word of mouth is just social media wise and through technology, how much faster we get word of mouth. And I see it with my own books, you know, when I first started, even with the self-publishing, just how much faster -- I mean, because I take the time. I've got a street team and everything and every one of my street team members gets a package in the mail of stuff from me, like goodies and bookmarks and stuff like that. I have beauticians and people that work in salons, and they set up these displays, and I don't ask them to do it. They just do it. And they're passing word of mouth that way. But they're also so vocal online about how much they love it. ^M04:30:01 I know, as a reader, what I want from my heroes, those people that -- I'm one of those people that freaks out when I'm in an elevator with Nora Roberts or -- I mean, because that's the movie stars to me. So I understand that aspect of it and how important -- just how important it is as a reader, how much it's impacted how I am as an author, to think about those things when I'm writing my books and how I market them. I just ask myself what I would want because it's that important. As an author I also know how it is to sit at the computer every day and look evidence [inaudible] 940 pages, and I know what it feels like the next day to write one page in 14 hours and to hate every word that I wrote on the page and throw it away the next day, and then some of the 40 pages from the day before that. And I know the struggle and how important. I also know the struggles of publishing and why I decided to self-publish. And you can only be told so many times that romantic suspense is dead and that no one will ever buy it, right? Three million books later. So I understand where writers are coming from, and I also understand the publishing aspect of it. I am my own publisher. I am the CEO of a multi-million dollar publishing company and I'm my only author in my stable. I understand about covers and how to contract and formatters and editors and how expensive it is to hire employees and pay for their health insurance. I understand the business aspects of it. So to really get a good look at all three aspects. I know that my situation is unique from a lot of people. And I know a lot of you are in that space, too, where you're reaching out and -- digital made my career and digital technology made my career. I would not be where I am today if I'd not uploaded those books on the KDP almost four years ago. Everything in the future from now on -- I mean, it's just going to get bigger and it's going to grow better and as long as I keep writing books and keep producing content and keep engaging with my readers. I would not -- that's the other aspect of it. I uploaded the books but my readers -- it's all between me and them. Nothing matters but them. I'm the publisher so -- but I'm also the author and that connection between myself and my readers, nothing else matters. They're really, really important. And I make a point to get online with them and engage and form relationships, and when we're at RT I'll say, "Who's there?" I'll say, "Let's go to breakfast," or if we're at RWA and, "Let's have a lunch or coffee or whatever." And get groups of them together and we form those online attachments, and I make sure to check in with them every day if I can, and every couple of days if I'm on deadline or really busy. But technology has made that possible. It's made my entire career possible, from both the -- for my readers and for just my publishing aspect of it, too. I don't see it slowing down. It just gets bigger and bigger. My sales have doubled every year that I've been doing this. >> Okay. John. >> Is this okay? First of all, thank you for having me. It's really an honor to be here. I'm not an author and probably never will be one, but it's a great joy to help people who have stories to tell help tell those stories. There are so many great themes that have already been sounded, and I feel like I'm just going to echo them to some degree, starting with the film clip. I mean it really captured in I think it was about two-and-a-half minutes so many different things: community empowerment, opportunity, obligation. To me, as a First Amendment Lawyer by training, and I've had the opportunity. I was Head of legal at Knopf for a long time before I joined Amazon, so I've had the opportunity to sort of observe this growth in storytelling over the last 15 years at a variety of levels: the very top level of sort of literary traditional publishing and the more nascent forms, not just here in the United States but also globally. And if you want to talk about optimism, it's amazing to go to India or to Japan or to any number of other countries and they are just now starting down this road of digital liberation. The means of production have been democratized. So it's not just a sense of empowerment and a sense of hope here in the United States, but also in other parts of the world. And, in fact, that optimism is one of the most striking aspects of this transformation, this paying it forward, this sense of community, this willingness to help others. I see that everywhere. It is not historically something you would say about authors -- that they are optimistic by nature. At least my own experience -- ^M04:35:34 [ Laughter ] ^M04:35:37 -- and I think that that really is a remarkable thing. It's not just in terms of the ability for you to tell a story, and I think that's wonderful, because we have different reasons for telling our stories. It might be your great grandmother escaped from Russia and she's got a great story to tell, but really just for your family. But it's a great way to preserve it and make it available and make it great. But really, if you want to be successful at this, you have to, as Joe Konrath, an early pioneer in this area, though not in the romance side, said several years ago at PA, the first time we talked about self-publishing at PA, he said, "Bottom line, don't write shit." And that is such an important aspect of being able to get your story out there, find an audience, and keep an audience. And one of the other aspects of this transformation is the growth of the help you need that you couldn't get before to make sure your book is well-edited, the cover is well-designed. Unfortunately, part of the revolution has seen many of my former colleagues, many of our colleagues, leave the traditional publishing structures for good and bad reasons. But they're out there now and that's another example of how digital has really transformed and will continue to transform what's going on. I do think we need to call out the romance writers, in particular, for being on the frontline, the bleeding edge at times. RWA, I think, was the first national writers' organization to welcome self-published authors. Is that right? I mean, just to give you a little background on this. The science fiction writers have just announced their willingness to start doing that, and they still haven't explained how they're going to do it, and I've been involved in those conversations over the last few years, and I just am very impressed, and applaud not just RWA but that entire community that's very well represented here for doing such a great job. I do think that normally I would say that all of these changes are really leading to empowerment of the author. I don't often agree with Mark Coker, but I do on some level agree with him here. ^M04:37:36 [ Laughter ] ^M04:37:37 But I actually -- and I also think it has empowered the reader for great reasons. But I actually think what it's really done is forced the rest of us to demonstrate that we can add value to the primal relationship which is between the reader and the author. And that means everybody here who is not a reader or an author, and most everybody here is a reader. But the folks like me who are on the side helping people be creative and tell their stories and helping them navigate some of this stuff, I think we have to bring value. We have to make a difference. And there are lots of ways to do that. I won't speak too much longer, but I think one of the really interesting aspects of this incredible transformation through digital is its -- as we create, as I've called it in the past, the tsunami of content. I've been corrected because tsunami's people tell me the waters recede. We don't see that happening yet. But what that cries out for are incredible structures around curation and guiding readers to the right authors, and authors to the right readers. And I think the building blocks are there. But what's so interesting to me about that is as technology continues to unleash this incredible amount of content, some great, some not so great. Of course, it's always been like that, so let's be clear. Traditional publishing did not necessarily have the franchise on quality publishing [laughter]. Occasionally were some shitty books out there [laughter]. The ability to continue to tell these stories, help people tell these stories, is only going to grow. I'll leave it at that for now. >> Hi. I want to say it's really fantastic as someone who works primarily in digital media right now to be at a conference where most of the panelists have been women and the audience is mostly women. So, thank you for this opportunity. The reality today is that nobody knows what's going to happen with publishing or with the books. If anybody tells you with any degree of certainty that they do know, you should probably run the other way. I think it's safe to say that Amazon giveth and Amazon also taketh away [laughter], right? But I feel pretty certain that books will endure. They're lovely; they're tactile; sometimes they're smelly; they're much better to take to the bath than my Kindle which might electrocute me. They'll also mutate into crazy new forms, things that I think we cannot yet even begin to imagine. ^M04:40:00 And by this I just don't mean print in our e-books, but these lovely hybrid creatures that will emerge, I think sprung from our digital devices, from the fingers of students who I'm teaching now at one of the world's largest cinema schools. And I think there are three elements to the digital that are really worth paying attention to right now. One is the explosion in do it yourself media or the kind of publishing we've been talking about on the panel so far. And we saw in the lovely clip of the film, the move in very rapid order from what we used to call vanity publishing to self-publishing to indie publishing. And a few people will do extraordinarily well, you know, in this environment, right, exceptionally so. And others will get lost in the tidal wave, that kind of deluge of digital data that I think we all feel ourselves drowning under almost every day. So if you're pursuing a self-publishing route, be prepared to take on a lot of the elements that publishers have performed for authors in the past -- copy editing, marketing, designing. Mary Blye gave some really good advice yesterday -- find yourself a brutally honest editor, brutally honest, right. And that person doesn't need to be it a publisher, I mean, Mary's is, but you could find extraordinarily good readers amongst the people sitting next to you in the audience and they will then help you prove your writing. Two, social media is a really rich space right now and we don't know where it's going either, right. It's great for building an audience in the form it exists today. So, you know, Twitter and Facebook work really well that way. I think less utilized, but very rich are Instagram and Pinterest. But also the kind of blogs like Eloisa James maintains that really takes advantage of the visual, right. The kind of lovely dress up costume dolls that are on that side, right. There's a lot for us to do with the visual today. If you want to self-publish and don't want to do these things, you should hire Kim, right, because she's clearly doing a good job. As Lynn mentioned, you could learn a lot about your readers in this space as well. Think of Twitter or Facebook as a new kind of survey instrument that's a lot more nuance than old school marketing techniques and much cheaper as well. And more importantly, these tools are really fantastic for building communities of smart bitches who read all over the place. Something that's been really central to the romance community all along. You know, here online you can find your people and then you can meet with them at conferences and drink with them in bars. But I want to go back to the visual for just a second. To the third element of digital media, what in, you know, the department I teach in we call multimedia still sometimes. I am not a romance purist, I read really promiscuously across genres, and sorry I have to confess, I don't even need an EHA anymore at, you know, often I don't even prefer it anymore. My courses that I teach in the university teach across popular formats and media. I teach Harlequins, I teach historical romance, I have a special weakness for vampire fiction. Also for soap operas, for other television forms like ^IT True Blood ^NO, for film both romantic comedy and melodrama. Across these, we see some similar patterns. For instance, soap opera paid the bills for most network television for about 30 years. Women's pictures often drivingly called weepies were enormously profit -- profitable, real profit sinners in the golden age of Hollywood for at least three decades. Increasingly we see a blurring of the boundaries between formats. Here we can learn from fans, from fan fiction, from the viding community. My students are proficient with images and video, they're also proficient with text, they're lovely writers many of them. They will tell romance stories across media platforms, not only in print. In webisodes, in video games which we cannot yet begin to imagine, but I suspect will be fantastic. In weirdly hybrid formats and we should embrace that change. And now a little bit of a rant. The scholarly community on popular genres, I teach in a building called the George Lucas Building. Has its buzz words these days, a lot of words like transmedia and world building, consistently this scholarly work builds on male fandom, as if boys with lightsabers invented fan communities. Yet I'd say women genres really shape more of contemporary culture than any other form, seriously. I don't think you can imagine today's deeply serialized television formats without thinking about decades of soap opera. What would ^IT 24 ^NO and ^IT Mad Men ^NO be if not, you know, really soap operas with lousy gender and racial politics. Likewise, the tradition of lesbian African American fiction that Lynn and Beverly traced for us this morning, pave the way for scandal and for ^IT Orange is the New Black ^NO. Perhaps the digital will help the power of women genres to build community and I think as we've heard again and again last night and today, more importantly to build hope, to gain the recognition that they deserve. It's also exciting to think about the possibilities for a concept like world building, how you take characters from one platform or medium and move them to another for romance and its fans. So I'd say we should see this digital landscape as one of immense opportunity, to push boundaries, to build even richer communities and to build new audiences. I think in that way, the digital could help us all work toward a happy ending. Thanks. ^M04:45:49 [ Applause ] ^M04:45:55 >> So the guiding questions we have for this panel are in your program. They are, how has the digital revolution changed publishing? How well is the romance industry and the romance community [inaudible] poised to ride the digital wave? And what is the future of romance fiction? Again, a very small question. And I would love to get questions from the audience, Q and A just like the last three panelists. Come on. In the middle there. ^M04:46:21 [ Inaudible Speaker ] ^M04:46:23 I think we have microphones running around, there we go. >> Okay. You all talked about the deluge of e-books that come out every day, and I know that some of us who have been around awhile, we have all heard about discoverability. So I'd like you all to talk some thoughts about discoverability, especially Liliana. I mean, how did your fans first discover you and how did you take off like you did? >> I am a big proponent -- proponent of writing more books and not wasting your time spending money on advertising. I did not spend a dime on any kind of -- of ad or anything, I mean, the first year. And now, I do it just because I need the text connections, honestly. But -- but I didn't do it, I wrote more books. And I wrote more books that people wanted to read. You know, all of my -- I have three different series, which you know, that was a mistake on my part to decide to just launch with three different series, but you live and you learn, you know? But you know, so I wrote -- I wrote three different series, but even if, you know, just the one, there's a strategy, this is a business. And coming at it, you know, I -- I do understand the reader aspect and the author aspect and the emotions that go into it. And -- and as authors, you know, we -- we are highly sensitive and ego driven people. And -- but there's -- there also has to be the CEO behind that. And -- and not everybody is cut out to be the CEO behind that. Some people can't do anything but the emotional and, you know, Earnest Hemingway, you know, that's -- that's cool, you know, but the people that -- that can do it, you know, you've got to take a step back and look at the strategy behind it. And I launched like a traditional publisher. And if you ask my readers and I, you know, I'll -- I love surveys and I love data and I put stuff up on Facebook all the time or Twitter and I take these surveys and I'll be like who -- who else do you read besides me? What do you read on? You know, I ask questions like that. I want to know and every other author that people say that they read besides me, they're all traditionally published authors. Never are there indie authors like lumped in with my books. And it's because I launched like a traditional author. Like my covers, everything about it, you know, everything -- the formatting, the -- the editing, everything is done by -- well, you know, the -- my -- my cover designer designs for traditional houses. My editor came from a traditional house. My -- I -- it's a business and I know what sells. And I launched five books at one time to have a backlist and it caught the algorithms and -- and I continuously put out -- and I held books back. I had five that I launched at one time and then I -- I released books on -- at the time, things have changed now with the Amazon algorithms, but they caught that 30/60/90 day algorithm and I would release on those 30/60/90 days to always stay bumped up at the top of the algorithms. But if you release consistent content like that, you're going to sell books. And it's -- it takes longer, but I always recommend to people, don't just start with one book, so you're going to get lost in a sea of millions of books. ^M04:50:02 Be patient and wait until you can do it right and you can start, you know, start making money. That's the business side of me. I also know how it -- hard it is to sit and wait on one book and -- when you know you could get it out there and you want to market your heart out and -- and buy all these Facebook ads and -- and do all that stuff, you know, but you know, patience is -- is key to be successful I think. And to -- to go out with a boom and which is what you want, you know, and to gain that visibility. >> I think, you know, one of the things that I've seen over the years is if you ask 10 different authors, you'll get 10 different answers. And it will very much reflect, I mean, the question I've been asked most often other than is print dead, is should I self-publish or should I independent -- or should I go with a publisher. And it -- it's such a unique decision based on who you are, what you're writing, who you're trying to reach, what -- you know, what's your goal by telling this story? And again, not to send Pollyannaish about it, but one of the great things about this change is that it's an ecosystem or an environment -- I hate that term ecosystem -- environment that can accommodate many, many different approaches to this business. And that wasn't always the case. I do think it is a challenge to have this deluge of -- of content. As a first amendment lawyer, I think it's a high class problem. I think it requires a huge effort on our part, it's sort of publishing 8.0 if you consider the Homeric oral tradition, publishing 1.0 and Guttenberg 4.0 and 8.0 I think is or whatever you want to call it, is helping readers and authors find each other. It's -- it's something that I think is taking a lot of our thinking these days. >> Okay, one more thought I think is you might want to ask the question, where are your readers? And so -- and if you don't know the answer to that or if your readers might be in a lot of different places, I think being available to be discovered in a lot of different places and -- and putting hooks in there to actually have that occur is really mission critical. You know, so -- so that would be -- >> And you can't just think about it in terms of other books, right. I mean, that's the -- the great thing about Kindle or any of these readers or devices is it's now as easy to read a book as it was to get a game or watch a movie or listen to music. And you can do it standing on line at the checkout counter. And you have to think about that aspect of it as well. It's not just you against other books. >> And -- >> Oh, I'm -- >> -- that argument's been made well and you guys have made it often. And -- and I think it's a great argument. The concern is that when you -- when you do that, right, John, that you end up having a conversation about books being much cheaper or being -- >> I don't think you have to have that conversation. I think -- all I'm suggesting is there's lots of things we can do with our time these days. >> Amen. >> And you want to make sure that as a -- as a writer, you're making -- your -- your work's available in ways that you can get to your reader, just to your point. That's all I'm saying. I -- there's ups and downs and all kinds of plus's and minus's to all of this, but it's just making it as accessible as possible, not just in terms of buying it, but also after you've -- you bought it, being able to read it. These things help. Again, if your readers prefer print, it's not going to make a difference. So again, I go back to it really depends and -- and -- >> Yeah. >> -- Dominique echoed this, you know, who are your readers? Where are they? What do they want? >> And, you know, and she's exactly right, finding out who your readers are -- Sarah Wendell and I were talking about that at lunch. I think what self-publishing has really done is filled the gap in the traditional market. She was talking about how she released a Hanukah Christmas story because there are none available. You know, when -- when New York told me that romantic suspense was dead, well, you know, it's clearly not, it's clearly not dead because I'm selling like crazy, you know? And, you know, it's filling those gaps in the market, you know, when -- when new adult came along, when -- you know, there's, you know, Chicklet's been dead for awhile and -- and people are finding success self-publishing Chicklet because there's a gap in the market. And you know, I think, you know, there's strategy involved in knowing what readers and what pockets of readers want and -- and then producing that content. I'm not saying that you should ever write to the trend, don't do that. You know, write what you want to write, but I think for -- for just strategy wise, if you write some of those certain genres, you know, you're going to be more successful, you know, it's -- Courtney Milan is amazing, but it is hard to sell historical romance and self-publish. It's just hard to do it. And it's amazing that she does it, especially at the pace that she writes at. And so, you know, it's things like that that you have to look at ahead of time. It -- it's an overall business plan. I go back to that and I'll say it a million times, it's a business, look at it like that. >> So, for example, if you're writing western historical, let's just use a very specific sub-genre, okay. Western historical, the Wal-Mart buyer is awesome for western historical, less good at digital, right. That -- when you look at that -- when you overlay a whole ton of authors who write that genre, that's the pie chart you're going to see. Okay? So, you kind of have to have that understanding, as I think one part of the equation. >> Do we have another question, in the back? >> Yes >> Back of the room. >> I was wondering if anybody would care to comment on what you see as the role for libraries as we move into this new venture. >> Yay, libraries. >> This -- this shy lady over here wants to like say something. >> Can I actually say something about libraries as well. I -- I'm editorial director of Queer Woman's [phonetic] Press and libraries at the moment are one of our, like growing markets. We're -- we're growing by like 1000% every year for libraries because libraries have discovered that there are queer readers out there or there are readers who like queer romance. And we're working as hard as we can to get as many of our books out to libraries, print and digital because the librarians are the ones who find those niches sometimes because they have their authors -- their readers coming up to them and saying, you know, here's a book -- are there any other like them? And if they, you know, like -- like Lynn was saying, if they find that one lesbian romance that is on the shelf or something that has a lesbian romance aspect to it, they take it to the librarian and the librarian will then go and -- and buy their books. So I think librarians are huge for discoverability and digital is really helping that with the niche market again. >> I would -- I would tag on to that and say that I think libraries fill that really wonderful market in between the bookstore, the brick and mortar bookstore and the online bookstore and the digital space because the library carries both editions, right, the print and digital. So they cover a really wide market and the librarians are those people I think, as Sarah was alluding to who are right on the ground talking to their -- their reader -- their local reader and saying, what do you want to read? And I -- I don't know how many of you come from a smaller area, but anybody who comes from a small area, you know that you either don't have a bookstore that does that all, or if you do have a bookstore, it's a larger bookstore that's mostly getting in those orders that the chain wants. The national chain wants. So a library really fills this wonderful niche gap for us and as also for digital, is the librarians on the ground are the ones who are handing, actually handing e-readers to their patrons and saying, here, here's how you use this. So for my digital market, that's bringing readers to me, not just people who want to check out from the library, but readers who are then going to come on their e-readers or on their phones and say, hey, I did this once. And you know, I read this at the library. I want to read more, you know, lesbian from Riptide. I'm going to go find that on my e-reader. So libraries really hold this very key position in our ecosystem. >> We haven't done a good job -- how many people here have e-readers of any sort? How many of you have borrowed e-books from the library? Interesting, and not bad actually and probably a more savvy audience then I'm used to seeing. But even the most -- >> Welcome to the romance world [laughter]. >> Trust me, I feel like I've been in it for awhile. It's really amazing to me how few people take advantage of the ability, whether it's overdrive or kindle or maybe there are a couple of others. And I think it is because we haven't made it. When I say we, I mean the publishing industry -- have not made as easy as we can or as it should be for folks to download audiobooks as well, to their devices. And it is important I think, I mean, one of the other great aspects of this that we've seen, just to touch on the technology again, and libraries as well, is the growth in audiobook publication. For a short time, I ran Brilliance Audio for Amazon and it was really a new sort of gig and experience for me. And to see that was almost six, seven years ago, to see how it's exploded over the past few years. And I -- I live on -- on the audiobooks. We need to do a better job of working with the libraries to -- to make that a more efficient exchange. >> My overdrive in library sales in 2014 increased over 1000%. You know, so just in that short of a time, I mean, I'm -- in June, I'll be at four years of self-publishing. And just in that short of a time, you know, you really saw, I mean, there's a big increase happening in libraries right now. I love what's happening -- happening with the libraries and getting books to new readers. >> Dominique, did you -- >> Yeah, I mean, we've been in e-books for 15 years, so tech and digital, it's really a big part of who we are and we started actually with libraries, and we started with overdrive. ^M05:00:05 I think we were publisher number two for overdrive. So, you know, I think that -- look guys, you know, we're all about -- we as a community are about reading and books and books changing people's lives. And there's no place where that really -- that experience lives more than in libraries. So I agree with John, that we got to make it easier and, you know, and I think part of our -- there's some challenges to be had and some conversation that need to be had. The truth about digital and we can't avoid it is we are going to get to have difficult conversations and we should have them. >> Yeah. >> Question -- oh, does somebody have the microphone? In the back, Bill. >> One of the courses I teach is on the history of American popular writing and it's a study of the changes in books over time, but also in the changes in book technology, the technology for producing and distributing books. And the digital era is another one of those changes. One of the things that's interesting in looking to the past is seeing in the way new technology can actually change the way stories are told. And -- and make new kinds of narrative, new kinds of form or even new kinds of stylistic things possible. And this is not a popular example, but one example. When Henry James started using a dictaphone, he began writing his novels in an entirely different way. And his late style -- >> It's true. >> -- is really influenced by the fact that he talked his books. So I'm just curious -- >> Mark Twain too. >> -- not a -- not a dictaphone, although he was a techno file. >> No, he used -- he used one of the early -- Edison gave him one of the very earliest device -- >> He was fascinated with all kinds of recording devices. >> So sad. >> So I'm just wondering if digital, in addition to or beyond being a way of reaching readers or delivering content, is it having some kind of impact or can it have some kind of impact on what -- >> I think it is. >> -- can happen meritively [phonetic]? >> Well, I think a couple of different things. And actually I think you're probably best -- I'd love to hear what you say. But one thing that's really interesting to me that we've seen is the rebirth of short form. It's really amazing. A whole bunch of companies have done it. I mean, the extent to which it had passed from, popular thinking was illustrated when we launched Kindle's singles and serials. We launched serials with the ^IT Pickwick Papers ^NO. And somebody said, wow, Jeff [inaudible] has done it again. He's created a new form of storytelling, completely missing the fact that it was originally published as a serial in the 19th Century. So I think -- I think that's one way that you're seeing. You're seeing traditional forms revitalized. I also know from talking -- and I'll try to stay away from the word transmedia, but the -- so much of digital transformation has been taking print books and making them into digital books. And whether you're a publisher or an author now, I almost think more with a publisher, you're now thinking about creating that book as any number of different things and number of different containers. And I -- that is having some influence over how things develop. >> I mean, I think the move towards serialization across all media forms right now are part of the way the digital makes those components all easily accessible. The rise in audiobooks is partially because of the audiovisual capacities of digital media. And I have a grad student and a very experimental PhD. Program who's a writer. I wouldn't -- her genre is not romance, but she has just published as an app one of the most amazing novels I've ever seen. It's a -- it's a video novel, right, and it's text and its image and they're seamlessly melded. So as you read the narrative, the words to start to shimmer and you fall into cinematics and it's not cheesy and it's gorgeous. And a good romance writer using that technique would blow the world open because you could see and hear certain things at the moment when the narrative needs it, right. So I think the digital has the capacity to bring many media forms together and we're only at the very beginning of figuring what those new hybrid genres might be. >> I would say, I'm going to -- I know Dominique has a lot to say about this because source books does -- >> All those enhancements -- >> -- a lot of stuff. But I think that what's interesting is what you do is probably not quite as much in the romance genre. >> None. >> So, to my point, is we've been going to tech conferences, publishing conferences where they talk about the tech and bringing multimedia into the romance novel. And this is my personal opinion only obviously, but what I have seen and I have working in digital publishing for 12 years, is that the romance reader was the early adapter of digital. The romance reader as Sarah said, we think that romance catapulted digital, not digital catapulted romance. >> Absolutely. >> But what the romance reader has not embraced is the multimedia because I think because we get so immersed in the story and how it plays out in our heads, that we often don't welcome the interference of the other technology coming into that, whether it's pictures of the hero, you know, that -- we could go on forever about covers where there's headless heroes. And it's a lot often because readers say they don't want to know. So, you know, the voice of the hero, the voice of the heroine, we don't want to stop and listen to a history lesson, you know, and tap on a word and -- and you suddenly get the back-story of -- of the history. Romance has, you know -- to your question, sir, it -- there's a lot of opportunity for what you're saying and somebody could blow the doors off of it. But as a genre, romance has not embraced that for whatever reason, however, I think that's also very societal because if you look at Japan, for instance, and what Japan does with technology and their romances, is very different, you know, and obviously you could speak to that. But so when we talk about romance, we -- we're like -- we're like baby steps into multimedia. >> And it may also be generational. How many people are here under 25? You know, I would say my students -- I would say my students are open to different kinds of experiences of the romance form than I am, right. So [inaudible]. >> You're absolutely right, because my 10 year old daughter, her entire life goal right now is to work for Google and do YouTube. >> Yeah. >> You know? >> Well, you know, I think also as an author, you know, stuff like that was actually presented to a group of us at London Book Fair last year. And -- and but as an author and a publisher and especially somebody that's self-publishing, you have to weigh the benefits of where your time is going to be spent. And it's always going to be spent writing books and not messing with crap like that. Because I cannot do it and I have, you know -- >> And you should definitely not do it if some company comes to you and says, I'm going to help you do this for your book, right. That's like the wrong way. >> Well, you also don't want it to be -- you don't, I mean, the problem I think, you saw this with the Voyager CD-ROM's which maybe nobody remembers. >> Bob Stein. Yeah, no I remember Bob. >> Everybody tries not to remember. >> Under 25. >> [Inaudible], right. >> And there was still -- I'm sorry, there was still, you know, there's a lot of -- oh, if we add visuals it's going to be better. Audible did audible kids for a very brief period of time and it flopped. It was gratuitous, not violently gratuitous or gratuitously violent, but just the pictures didn't really add anything. And I think that's key. One of the groups -- >> We know some things now about this, you know, we -- we've got data about this at this point. >> One of the groups that we -- that I love, it's a nonprofit based out of Wofford University and they have a summer camp every year. And one of the things I got to do is give grants to nonprofits and this to me was one of the coolest. And it goes to this point. It's called shared worlds and it's outside of the romance and -- and it may be in fact, reflected a little of your point. They don't write books. They bring these high school kids in and they have great authors, Jeff VanderMeer, et cetera, and they teach them how to create the world's that these stories will inhabit, whether it's in a book or in a drama or in a comic book, graphic novel, whatever you might like. And to me, it -- that's sort of incubation is made much more easier through technology. >> So this is such a huge question. I mean, it really is, like amazing. So a couple things we know. First of all, basically people don't actually want enhancements. We've done -- a lot of us have done this. I mean, we've done, you know, people have done -- I've personally done probably 150 enhanced e-books of varying kinds, including the leading Shakespeare series called Shakespearian, okay. Tends not to work, it's actually not what people want. People seem to want their text more straight. The other thing that we know about though that is working that's kind of really cool is experiments in [inaudible] seem to be really doing well. And if you [inaudible] publishing and that's the serialization aspect. And for example, who knows what Wattpad here in this room? Wattpad - >> Wattpad. >> Wattpad. >> Wattpad -- 40 million users, okay, and they're doing in-line commenting, so kids are writing stories. And this really goes to the last session we just talked about, fan fiction. A lot of it is fan fiction. People are writing stories and they're serializing them, right. So I'll write a story, I'll write the little piece of a story and then I'll get in-line comments. So you might say something about, how I really love that sentence, really hated that one, you know, all of that working really, really well and things. Last point is about poptropica, so building worlds first and building worlds that people are really interested in. ^M05:10:02 ^IT Wimpy Kid ^NO came out of poptropica and -- and that really also working great. Where a world in which kids create stories and then authors take those stories out from that world into fiction, into book form. So really kind of interesting sets of developments. We are seeing a world in which books sort of intersect in so many different ways, interesting ways that we never imagined before. So, cool. >> And I would say to think about enhancements would just be stupid, right. Like because if you're looking for a book in text, you don't want enhancements. I'm talking about genres born of a new format for that format. And, you know, a story needs to find the genre and form it needs. The biggest selling media right now are video games, right. And we're desperately in need of video games that are not the video games we have right now, right. So, you know, please some of you who are a little more experimental, think about that, you know, as a possibility, right. Imagine your daughter. >> There's one other aspect to this that actually I'm going to turn around and ask the authors in the room. Cobo [assumed spelling] brought out this report last -- last December, but actually it's something that occurred to me 10 years ago when Kindle launched. When there's incredible amount of data about reader behavior while they're consuming the work, like oh, chapter 10, you lost 80% of your readers in chapter 10. >> Yup, and that was great Cobo data from [inaudible], yeah. >> And -- and the question is, what do you do with that data? Do you share it with authors? Do you incorporate -- >> Do you want to know? >> Do you want to know? >> Do you guys want to know? >> Yes. >> So, I mean, for example -- >> You want to know? >> I want to know. >> -- for example, Vine, which is a program that enabled readers to read books before they came out and post reviews, is sort of a -- an old school nondigital approach to that. But this is -- I'm going to publish this book, maybe I'm going to send it to 500 people upfront. And I'm going to get Amazon or Cobo or Nook to send me the data. How long did people take to read this page? How long -- how do you feel about that? You want that. >> I want -- >> She used the -- John -- >> And that -- interesting impact on storytelling. >> John, you know this from me, every time I meet with you, I'm always like, can you please give me some data? I want data for everything. >> We do actually have a question. >> I want it for everything. >> She wants -- >> Meghan -- >> [Inaudible] relates to the same thing about the effect oyster and other Netflix models and getting paid based on the amount that the person has read into the book. And where do you see that in terms of the future? >> Well, I'm not a fan. So, you know, because I like to get paid for my work and I'm not a fan of the subscription model. You know, other people get paid for that -- for that work. So just speaking as the author, you know, I'll never be a fan of the subscription model. >> I think it works for some authors, but maybe not for others. >> And publishers? >> I mean, it -- >> Are you asking me? How I feel about it? >> Yeah, I mean, how do the publishers feel about the subscription models because I know we're jumping all over them? >> So, you know, we're highly experimental and have tended to experiment in all areas including this one. The data is really interesting, I have to tell you. There are models that are working and there are models that are not. And you better know the difference because it makes a different in the way that she's talking about. There are models for which you will get paid and you will make money and there are models you will not. So, know the difference. >> Yeah, I do think, if you're a really successful author, I mean to me, the real benefit or one of the real benefits of the subscription program is the sampling. And -- and so, to me it doesn't necessarily serve -- and that would go for publishers as well. Publishers who are looking to build their audience and increase sort of the familiarity with their work. It can be useful. >> Well, in, you know, the -- those of you that have heard me speak before, you know, I pretty much say what I think and -- and have no filter. I know. But you know, just being honest, you know, as far as like script and -- and things like that. You know, that's a conversation that we had and there was -- there was, you know, piracy issues and I don't mess with piracy. Like in the last panel they talked about, I don't look at it, I don't, you know, you can't fight it, whatever. I leave it alone. But if somebody is blatantly pirating my books off a site and they have copies of my books and then -- and then, you know, they -- they say we'll take them off if you join our subscription service. Then I have issues with that, so -- >> So I have a lot of issues with piracy period. And I think that we should, you know, we should be working actively to take them down. I mean, I -- you know, and that means you've got to have, you know, in our case, we have full-time people doing take down notices. Yeah, it looks like that. >> We -- we have a question over here. ^M05:15:07 [ Inaudible Speaker ] ^M05:15:29 >> Well, and I think it goes to how you write, why you write, who you're trying to reach, what your goal is. >> Who has a microphone? >> I have a microphone. >> Okay, Elizabeth. >> I have the power. >> Elizabeth has the microphone. >> I'm the author in that clip who said, I just want to write. So that clip was a little while ago, that was about three years ago. And as everybody has said very clearly, the landscape has changed. And the landscape has changed for all of us. And now I see things very differently because I see that the opportunities that exist out there are still about me creating this world. But it's about me bringing this world to my readers myself in a way that I can't if I don't do more of this engaging. So for me, being the person who says, I just want to write, and I do really, really just want to write because I know that the next thing you want out of me is the next book, like Liliana said. The next book is the most important thing, so always be writing that. But I don't think we need to separate out that there's only one job for an author and only one job for a publisher. I think that there is a lot of room for both collaboration and as publishing professionals, as you already pointed out, change their jobs and become more available to us, the product that we can give our readers remains the same. And that is key to us that this is still an engaged conversation between publishing professionals and editors and authors to create something that our readers get the best experience from. And I think that's the thing because it doesn't matter how you do this, as long as you respect the people that you're writing these books for. And that you do what you do to bring them the best experience. >> We have a microphone over there and then if we could get one to the women in red and then one to the woman in brown, please. >> Hi, I raised the issue of copyright and piracy at that last panel. This should not be a conversation about taking down, it has to be a conversation, it should not go up. And that's what I brought to Congress. This is our IP , but I also want to step back 40 years ago. Liliana, I was an entrepreneur with equal grader to what you're doing as an illustrator. And the times have changed. I got to dream what I hear now is something very clinical. They actually have robots that are writing books. People have nature. Gamblers gamble, readers will reader, but if you want to preserve the art, we have to pull back a little bit I believe from focusing in on the analytics and focus in on the creative process. That's what's been lost. We have schools [inaudible] that can't -- they're putting out students who have what they call, the mortgage before the -- the mortgage equivalent of a -- of a student debt. They can't provide for themselves, so our conversation has to shift. We have to not worry about the take down, it's to stop the put up. >> Well, I think first of all, I should, you know, quantify by saying that I wrote for 12 years making zero dollars and living on a teacher's salary with four kids before I ever made a dime publishing. And you know, and if I was broke tomorrow, I would still be writing because it's what I have to do. And I think every writer in the room and every writer that's ever written knows that and understands that. That saying, now that I'm making money, I want to make money doing what I love to do. And -- and you know, it's not -- it's not so analytical as you think. Yes, there is that business side of me that runs a business, but when I sit down to write a book, I'm writing a book just like I did -- I have for the past 12 -- 12 years. And none of that has changed. ^M05:20:01 I have two very different sides of myself, you know, and you know, I don't sit down at the computer and think, if I write this kind of book, this is how much money I can make. I write, if I write this book, my readers are going to freak out. And -- and I approach everything that way. And I try to end my books that way. And like I sit on release day and I can't wait until those first people that like download the book at midnight, you know, email me at 1:30 in the morning when they [laughter], you know, they finish the book. And you know, it's just like all caps in the email. You know, I live for that. I love it. And so -- so it think it's -- it's important for me to clarify that it is not -- what I do is not just this analytical -- I'm just creating this robotic stream of books. I'm not. I mean, I live and breathe my characters, they're real, you know? And you said something about the bathtub. I mean, I actually write in the bathtub and it's very dangerous, don't do it. But I do it [laughter]. So, because that's where I think the best. But so it's not, you know, it's not like that is all, you know, as far as piracy, you know, I mean, you know, on the -- on the script side, I had something like 72,000 copies of, you know, of different stuff that people had uploaded and -- I mean, gosh, you know, you could sit all day and do that stuff. But it's, you know, I don't know how you're going to -- to mess with not getting it uploaded, you know? It's -- it's not just people in the U.S., you know, you can't fight that stuff, you know, when they're in other countries and -- >> Did you want to say something? >> No. >> Oh, okay. >> I am absolutely ready to move on from piracy. >> Okay, yeah, let's -- let's -- piracy is not what we need to be talking about. Okay. >> Moving onto something that Dominique and John said about the meshed formats. Do you have any data, John, on how the -- yeah -- >> Does John have any data [laughter]? >> -- the immersion reading is -- is doing with Amazon? >> In terms of multimedia? >> Well, it's the sinking of professional narration and the -- >> Oh [inaudible]. >> Whisper sink >> Whisper sink. >> Yeah. >> So does everybody know what that is briefly? It's -- it's just -- >> No, tell us what it is. >> -- just brief -- well, it's a bunch of different things, but the easiest way to think about it and to me it is just amazing, is if you're reading -- if you have purchased and you can buy discounted audio if you buy the Kindle edition. If you're reading in Kindle and you have the audio, you can switch to the audio and it will put you where you left off. So if you read at home and then you get in your car, if you read at home on a tablet or a reader and then you get in your car and you hook up your phone or whatever. It will take you to where you left off. You know, I laughed as you asked about data, as did everybody else on the panel and anybody in the audience who knows that we're not really good at sharing data. And one of the best ways I avoid it -- one of the best ways I -- I avoid that is by not knowing the data. Particularly now that I've left. So -- ^M05:23:04 [ Inaudible Speaker ] ^M05:23:07 I think -- I'll let Dominique -- >> No, no, no. >> She was talking about something different. >> I'm talking about something very different than what John's talking about. And -- and -- >> Go ahead. >> -- John and I work together at -- on the BISG board, so yes, data. We know. But the data I was referring to is really about enhanced [inaudible] or more multi -- what is classic multimedia books, so -- >> Pictures. >> -- pictures with video and we've -- people have tried a lot of different versions of that. The way -- it's kind of interesting, I mean, because picture books, for example, have largely transformed via apps, right. So kids use apps and picture books have largely gone in that direction versus doing books plus less so. >> Graphic novels, huge, right. >> Right, huge. >> You know, so -- >> Right, exactly. >> -- if the form demands the use of multiple media, it's a good thing. If you're trying to hit a market by saying let's slap 12 pictures in here -- >> Right. >> -- that's not so good. >> Yeah, it's -- it's been really interesting, every -- you need to understand that the thing that's most important about this transformation is how many different kinds of books exist. And as a result, we as an industry are undergoing however many forms there are -- kinds of books there are, we're into undergoing all of those number at times x, a multiple transformation. So cookbooks, they've undergone a completely different transformation, right. Comic books, a completely different transformation, right. So it's kind of really a fascinating time. >> One of the other challenges and I'm sorry to bring up copyrights again though, it's really true, is if you decide to go ahead with a multimedia book, you've essentially precluded what was an unlikely opportunity to make a movie anyway, but still seen as sort of, oh my gosh, they might make a movie out of this book. One of the challenges is the way those rights work together or don't work together, and so, once you've launched a multimedia book, it can be hard to sort of navigate other opportunities that present themselves. ^M05:25:10 And many traditional publishers still view the opportunity to make a movie as absolutely the best thing that can happen, and so they tend to not be as focused on the multimedia side. I think that will change over time. >> Right. In the front and then -- >> I think one of the topics that this panel was talking about a little bit in the beginning and then kind of went on to other interesting things, was independent publishing. And somebody made the remark that romance writers and your organizations were early acceptors of Indie Books, and that now science fiction writers are finally getting it. So that led me to think about who are the people who are not accepting it, and is Indie Books -- are India Books linked to particular genres and not to others. And that led me to the question in my mind, do you find reviews of independently published books in the New York Review of Books, in the New York Times Book Review and all of the other -- I don't know if you want to call them -- >> Do you find reviews of romance in the New York Times [inaudible]? >> I don't know. I don't know. >> No, you don't [laughter]. >> So I'm just asking if there are -- the boundaries around romance literature are still very strong, whether it is in print or through one of the places like Harlequin or Indie, or if you're beginning because of your empower to bridge over that barrier. >> I think the digital success of romance reflects the reader base, and the [inaudible]. And the style of that reading that you see in science fiction, in mysteries, you can see the same growth in those genres. Because literally you're finishing a book and you're like, okay, I want to read the next book by this person. And we haven't seen, and there are lots of, I think, potential reasons for it, and I'm happy to hear them, you haven't seen quite the same uptake in literary fiction and nonfiction. It may be a reflection of the way people consume those books, the way they read those books. >> So published -- >> So published, that's I guess I was linking the two together. In fact, just to be clear, there are many independent publishers who chafe at the idea that a self-published author is an Indie author or is being Indie published, so I occasionally confuse the lexicon, I apologize if I misunderstood. But I do think the nature of the reader of those genre is why you see the growth independently in self-publishing, because the demand is there. >> And the hold outs are things like literary fiction and academic scholarship, because those genres depend on elitist gatekeepers at places like the New York Review of Books and on tenure and promotion boards. So self-publishing in those faces is still vanity publishing, right, and it's -- >> Oh, it'll change over time. >> It will have to for academics or they won't publish it. >> You know, and I can speak to -- >> Add one more word and the word would be bookstores. Okay? Because there's real value to bookstores and bookstores have not really taken up self-published books, so that community is very integrally linked to the review community. So the New York Times and Barnes and Noble, those are -- there are relationships there that are real. And I think I'd argue, and I have argued, at Barnes and Noble as well as in other very public ways, that the ghettoization [sic] of genre is harming us. That we ghettoize independently of self-published or other published, I don't really care about the publishing source, but genre fiction is really limited in its scope by the fact that it exists in a particular part of the bookstore and doesn't exist in other parts of the store. And so, for example, if you happen to be a sci-fi reader, and I happen to be one, you know, there are extraordinary novelists writing and if they get put in the sci-fi section they have one outcome, and if they happen to be, you know, Emily, who's -- yeah, well, obviously, they get put in the fiction section and that has a different outcome, right? So we really -- >> Yeah, [inaudible]. >> Right. Right. So we really create a set of outcomes with those categories that I think we probably don't want and need to think about. >> Right. Yeah, I think, too, you know, just you were talking about self-publishing as far as like the genres that are successful. You know, I write two different -- I write two separate mystery series and I write romance series, too. And my mystery series are mysteries, they, you know, there's sometimes an overarching relationship and, you know, they don't -- the mystery is always solved but there's not a HEA, sometimes there is if I feel -- I have a good day [laughter]. But, you know, all of my series still hit the list, hit the New York Times list. ^M05:30:42 >> Your independently published books hit the New York Times list? >> Oh, yeah. >> But not the New York Times Review Books. >> They do all the time. >> Right. Right. >> They hit the list, but they -- that's completely separate from reviews. >> [Inaudible] they're not reviewed. >> I don't care, though. >> I mean, when did New York Times last review Nora Roberts? ^M05:30:58 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M05:31:02 >> That was a thing, you know, like, I met with a big like marketing company and they were like, we're going to buy you -- this is what we're going to do for you, we're going to put a full-time -- or full page ad in the New York Times, and I'm like, my readers do not read the New York Times, they read People magazine and, you know, Perez Hilton, you know, I know who my readers are. They don't care if I have an ad in the New York Times, and I don't particularly care if they review it, you know, because they're going to hate it, I know that, you know, they're going to hate it, because it's not what they read, they don't care either. So, you know, I think it's -- I think there's that division of -- >> What's great is it's a diverse environment. >> Yes. >> And so romance novels are successful, maybe not in that way where we measure success by critical reviews, but in terms of sales. And those novels are finding audiences. They're handicapped and they shouldn't be, but -- >> And this just goes back to, you know, who's your reader. >> I think we have one more question. >> One? >> Okay. I am Katherine I've been a reader for 35 years. >> Hi Katherine. >> And I do not write, don't publish, I just read. So I want to talk about is how you're going to get me more. Because I can read in three hours a book that it took you or any of you six months to write, so obviously I need more, more, more. >> Right. >> One of the things that you asked earlier is how many people under 25 were in this room. Not very many. I have girls in their 20s, so how are we going to get a new generation of readers to read romance when they've never entered a bookstore on a regular basis? So how are you reaching the newcomers? Because the more people that are reading, the more people that are writing, which means there's more for me [laughter]. >> I [inaudible] anybody complain about the lack of supply. >> Yeah, I am surprised since we have -- >> That's a new one. >> -- [inaudible] that 3500 books a day are published, and probably more. That's actually an interesting question and since I work for Harlequin, I will plug for Harlequin for a moment. And one of the reasons that Harlequin started the Teen Imprint was for exactly the reason that you're asking. And when you look at, you know, our imprint and our mission statement for the Teen Imprint, it is really to be that gateway drug into [laughter] romance and Harlequin and category and single title and whatever buzzwords you want to throw you there. It's to capture that young adult audience and to remind them that Harlequin is there, or that romance as a genre is there, and so that they do grow up to be romance readers. But I don't think that -- I have a 10-year-old daughter, you know, she's never stepped foot -- it's not that she's never stepped foot in a bookstore, she loves the bookstore, but she reads on her Kindle and she listens to audio books. And she is very capable of finding what she wants to read. And also, you know, she's just like every other savvy teenager, word of mouth, or like the rest of us, word of mouth, social media, I mentioned YouTube earlier. She's getting that from all those sources that are key to her right now. And so as publishers that's what we're doing, we're going where the readers are. Don't think we're not thinking about that, because that's, you know, that's part of running a business is looking into the future at the future reader not just the reader right now. >> Yeah, the data we've got now is really clear. We're living in the renaissance of the book. >> That's awesome. >> It's extraordinary and you should know that. That there's -- >> It's really amazing. Particularly given all those others choices. >> Right. That -- right, exactly. There has -- there is more conversation about books, there are more readers, and people are reading more. All of the data is unequivocal, it is all going in the direction, so that's kind of really -- and unexpected, too, I think. >> Well, it's not just the romance issue. I was a convening or whatever, a conference that the National Endowment did a couple of weeks ago on the future of literary publishing. And this same issue really was sort of the paramount issue, how do we [inaudible] a culture of reading in our youngest kids, what are the different ways we can do it. So it's not just romance, I think it's across the board. >> Okay. I think -- do we have -- >> Right. >> Okay. Do we want to wrap it up, do we want to leave it open-ended? >> If you serve us martinis, we'll stay here all night [laughter]. >> Did anybody have [inaudible]? >> We -- >> [Inaudible] tell us the name of that thing you were talking about [inaudible]. >> Okay, it's definitely not romance fiction, it's really weird, it's called PRY, it's on the app store. It was the number one -- >> Pried, P-R-I-E-D? >> PRY, P-R-Y. >> Oh, P-R-Y. It was the number one Apple thing, because it's not a book, it's not -- >> App. >> It's not even an app. >> Oh, it's not? >> It is an app, but it's like nothing you've ever seen before. But I would classify it as experimental [inaudible] fiction but it's a form that's really interesting. It was reviewed in the LA Review of Books, you could read about it there. >> Do we want the panel to predict the next two years in romance publishing? >> God no [laughter]. >> I will say, I do think -- people ask all the time -- >> What's the next big thing. >> -- and [inaudible] panel with me when we talked about, you know, what will self-publishing look like in -- well this was two years ago at Frankfort -- in five years or 10 years. And I do think it's going to be an archaic term. What really is impressive to me is the shift, and I did really think about it in terms of authors, but authors will maybe have poetry, maybe have serialized fiction, maybe have a big honking, fat novel, you know, infinite [inaudible], that should go to [inaudible] if they're so lucky. The poetry maybe goes into a very focused poetry [inaudible] maybe source books poetry website or Copper Canyon. And authors will be able to choose and decide what is the best path for their work, which is wonderfully empowering and also creates all sorts of obligations, and so it's a double-edge sword. But I do think you're going to see this sort of -- these boundaries sort of start to, even more than they have already, fray. >> And in the beginning in your opening comments you talked about the role of the curator, and I think that's also a really important space right now that more and more people will come to occupy. >> Huge opportunity. >> I think something like Smart Bitches very much there as a kind of aggregator, curator, referral service, right? And there's room for a lot more of that given the 3500 books a day. So if you're not a writer, but you're looking for a way to kind of interact with communities and build community, that curatorial role is key right now. >> And it's only going to get more important. >> Yeah, I think the thing I'm really excited about right now is the interface between you and content. And we haven't -- we've talked about it from the point of view of fan fiction, right, where you take somebody else's world and you put yourself or your writing within that world and you use the rules of that world. But there's other experiments going on in the sort of customization, personalization development, we're really engaged in that. And I think there's just going to be some mind-blowing stuff coming out of that. It's going to change a lot of what we think about probably two or three years out, so kind of excited about that. >> And [inaudible]. >> You know, I said earlier that I've been working in digital publishing for 12 years and that was at the time when everybody said there was no money in digital publishing. And, you know, it was a fad, and you were trading down or selling out if you wrote in digital. So I kind of feel pretty smug right now [laughter] because I bought in early. So I think that we're only going to keep going up from here. One of the things that's been a, you know, a struggle for us as publishers, am I'm speaking for Dominique, and I'm sorry, you can disagree with me, but I think just finding a new path and learning to be more open, but also teaching people that we're not like evil overlords sitting in a office somewhere plotting to kill an authors career [laughter]. You know, like, publishers are actually people and we actually have many of the same aspirations as the author, we want to make your career, we want to sell good books, we want to really good books because we know we're readers at heart. So I think we're just coming to this like the climax of the moment. God I got to work climax into the romance panel [laughter]. Where we find that, you know, everybody has gone to -- you know, self-publishing is the best thing and now coming back and realizing that there is actually a balance and that we can work together. And I point to Liliana, actually, because one of the things that she said several times when she was talking at the beginning in her introductory statements was, "I did it like a traditional publisher did it," And that says to me that there's still a lot of value in the traditional publisher role and that we are learning from self-publishing or Indie Publishing and they are learning from us and so that we're actually going to work together in this new ecosystem. >> So I just want to be really clear. I got nothing to do with traditional publishing. I mean, just like I really don't like that language at all [laughter]. And what really kind of excites me is the opportunity to work with all of you, you know, all of you, including other publishers, including self-publishers, to really create things we've never seen, that we haven't tried that we should try, that we're going to fail at. And by the way, I probably have failed more than anybody else in the room, and that's cool, you know. But that's where you get your biggest results is like really creating that future and man it's a hell of a ride, let's just do it. ^M05:41:01 [ Applause ] ^M05:41:02 >> Liliana. >> You know, and I think that's part of -- I'll come back to the business, you know, because it is a business, you know, where I see the future going. And, you know, when I spoke at London Book Fair last year and at BAA, you know, the big thing that I talked about with self-publishing was that everybody needs to look to the foreign market and to translations and that's still very true. I'm really excited to see what's going to happen in the next couple years with all the translation and with how the foreign market is going to grow with e-publishing and just the huge amount of e-readers. I'm also, and John's left Amazon now, I can really say this, I'm also super excited to see what's going to happen with iBooks and Amazon just as far as the percentage of the market growth. I'm really, really excited to see that because, you know, I do love the data and I chart it. And my iBook sales are three to one on Amazon right now. And -- >> For the last few months I think. >> Yes, since probably September and that's huge because my Amazon sales are pretty damn good. They're really good, like six figure a month good. And so iBooks has exploded. And I think -- so I think it's going to be really, really interesting next couple years to see what's happening. And, you know, I think that's part of the thing that I really like about self-publishing is I have ready access to that data and that's really important data for authors to see, which is why I'm happy to share with you, those of you that are not doing it. But I think foreign is going just -- it's going to be really exciting. There's going to be some money to be made in the foreign market and translation. So I've got about 100 translations coming out in the next year or so, so we're going to see how that goes, it's going to fun. >> I'd like to thank our panelists and thank you all. ^M05:43:05 [ Applause ] ^M05:43:12 >> Thank you. >> Do we have closing remarks? >> I don't think so. Do we have closing remarks? >> No, we don't. [Inaudible] stay for five more minutes. >> Five more minutes. >> Thank you. ^M05:43:23 [ Inaudible Conversations ] ^M05:43:32 >> Well, thank you everybody. This has really been a wonderful experience for all us. Let's give all of our panelists and our organizers -- ^M05:43:41 [ Applause ] ^M05:43:44 -- and our volunteers who are able to join us -- ^M05:43:48 [ Applause ] ^M05:43:50 -- for the last session a round of applause. ^M05:43:52 [ Applause ] ^M05:43:55 I promise we'll be out of here in five minutes, but I feel obligated to say just a couple of things. One is, this has been a wonderful thing for the Library of Congress to be able to host. And part of this I think will have consequences, I hope. The Center for the Book was created many, many years ago in 1977. Our very first symposium was 1978, I edited this, Television of the Book in the Classroom, the first crack at relating to the new technology at the time [laughter] and everybody was afraid of television. All we book people, you know, had to find a way to work with television. And our first two speakers, and this wasn't -- I was quite young at the time, so the person who got them was Dan Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, who created the Center for the Book. Our first two speakers representing the book and the classroom to try to get them together in education, because we had the Secretary of Education there, were Mortimer Adler, the book, and Frank Stanton, television, and they talked right by each other [laughter]. But the networks all came and the result was the first major Center for the Book project called Read More About It that some of you younger people may remember. It was on CBS television for 15 years. I did reading lists but the stars of the TV programs spoke about those lists at the end of the program. If you enjoyed the show, the first one was Richard Thomas, the movie, ^IT All Quiet on the Western Front ^NO. The premier was at the Kennedy Center with Richard Thomas. We showed the movie. Richard himself came out and gave us a live presentation of, if you enjoyed the show, the Library of Congress recommends, and we had three books about World War I. 1986, and I'm so reminded of this with this wonderful discussion we've just had, we came up, and this was the first directory called The Community of the Book. And basically it was a plea for publishers, book sellers, librarians, people involved with television, then the new technology, to work together in The Community of the Book. And I've just looked back and remembered my essay was, you know, Is there a Community of the Book. The Center for the Book, established in 1977 on the assumption that there was such a Community of the Book, and it can be mobilized to keep books and reading central in our lives and in the life of our democracy. So we listed 89 organizations that we would like to work with was the beginning of our Partners in Literacy nonprofit organization that still exists. BISG was part of it, and, you know, has stayed part of that partnership program, along with a center to promote books, reading, literacy and libraries and the book -- and the culture connecting it with new technologies now in every state through our network. So you have helped stimulate this, put new life into it. Our newest project is the Library of Congress Literacy Awards which are funded by David Rubenstein who is a benefactor and is the chair of the Kennedy Center and feels that we should be doing more about literacy, which has tied romance fiction in my mind and other genres tie very effectively into literacy and reaching brand new audiences which we need desperately. And one of the direct consequences of [inaudible] Laurie and Pam moving the end of this conference for the Library of Congress is the connection with the National Book Festival, which for which I have been the author/coordinator since the beginning, when Laura Busch brought it to us. And Mary has been at the book festival. I think we must have put you in the fiction pavilion. This year we're making the first stab towards the romance fiction pavilion, it's a mini -- ^M05:48:07 [ Applause ] ^M05:48:13 I have to say, since the park service kicked us off the mall [laughter], we are now actually quite happily in the Washington Convention Center. And you cannot -- we use the word pavilion very easily there because we have huge rooms. But what we're talking about is for the first time having a group of romance fiction writers, and we will, in what was is basically a expanded book festival, because indoors, unlike on the mall, you can add new space and you can have all the electricity. You can graphic novels, you have nice bathrooms, you have air conditioning [laughter]. And our crowds are just as big, we estimate 60 to 70,000. We can do it one day and romance fiction will be part of the September 2015 book festival. ^M05:49:03 [ Applause ] ^M05:49:09 That part is done. Now I hope that Laurie and Pam will join me on the stage for a wind up. And Jill, are you here? ^M05:49:19 [ Applause ] ^M05:49:21 Jill, Jill Davis, come on up. ^M05:49:23 [ Applause ] ^M05:49:26 And also I'm hoping that Cindy -- Candy, I'm sorry, Candy [inaudible] and Kathy Sidell, who is on the panel, will come over here for a moment and I have some things just to present to you as thank you's for being part of this and thank you's -- thank you's, I'll say that again, for pushing us into the this wonderful day. I must say that in my long experience with symposia that the panels themselves, you know, were more substantive, more interesting, had more spirit and I'm so happy we have recorded all of this and can use it for all of us, I think, to move ahead and not to move behind. ^M05:50:10 And I think some of the great ideas that have come really from each panel are fodder for us to keep going. And the final thing I forgot to mention was, in that partnership program that started way back here, Romance Writers of America became part of it about 10 years ago. And when I was first approached by Laurie about taking this on at the Library of Congress, I said, "Hey, it's the basis of our partnership program, it will help me justify bringing in," which I had already done, the Mystery Writers of America, the [laughter] Western Writers of America, and so what can we do with that. Now, what I really have are packages, and we're not going to spend time looking inside the packages, except we can see that each one has the -- this is the deluxe Center for the Book book bag, [laughter] this is -- this is burlap. These have wooden handles. These are things you would expect book lovers to have, and they are book lovers as well as people that are authors and writers and really represent the Community of the Book. And when I'm finished I think Laurie has another little something to say, but first I'm going to just hand out the packages. And I want to make sure I get them right because they are all a little big different. And this one is for Laurie. Sorry. Here's my other [inaudible]. This one is for Pam. >> Thank you [inaudible]. >> And [inaudible] this panel. Let's give -- ^M05:51:56 [ Applause ] ^M05:52:05 You wouldn't believe how many emails we've had back and forth working on the conference and those darn questions, which are wonderful. >> Thank you. >> And the ones that kind of [inaudible] to conversation and they truly stayed on track and we [inaudible] included the history but also looked ahead. Laurie -- >> Thank you [inaudible]. >> -- you just have done a wonderful job. ^M05:52:26 [ Applause ] ^M05:52:32 -- I try to be [inaudible] and my friends at the Library of Congress said, there's no way you're going to fill that Coolidge Auditorium [laughter]. And I was kept being reassured that I was wrong, and I was. And one of the reasons I took all the pictures today was I can show my friends there were not too many of Library of Congress people here, we filled [inaudible] all day. ^M05:52:55 [ Applause ] ^M05:53:04 Jill, step forward [laughter]. You heard Laurie last night mention Jill Davis, and I think most of you have run into Jill. Jill works for the Center for the Book, but she actually is my Literacy Awards assistant. But when this came along and Jill -- I talked to Jill about it and I saw her interest, and I was having a lot of trouble getting my other employees interested in one more symposium conference, I said, that's it, Jill is going to take that on and we'll let it -- Jill is going to take that on and the two of us will really represent the Center for the Book and the Library of Congress. And it happened and Jill did a terrific job. And we go back to the Literacy Awards next week because they will be given this year, but in the meantime, Jill gets -- Jill could also get a bag from me, but I wanted to present on. But you're not to open this yet. >> [Inaudible] wonderful. ^M05:54:05 [ Applause ] ^M05:54:08 And the other two -- I will tell you what these are, one for Kathy and one for Candy. This is really the thank you for organizing the volunteers and for the volunteers, many of whom are still here. I was told from the beginning, when I started fussing about staff, and said, well, there are really just going to be two of us working on this, that the Romance Writers of America, our partner, would come through, and you really have. And we could not have done this without the help of the volunteers and the knowledge that you were going to be here for these two days. And so what you have in your bag is my book on the ^IT Art and Architecture of the Library of Congress ^NO. It so happens other people have this book among their various things and it's just a souvenir and a thank you, not just for the two of you, but I hope symbolic of the help of the volunteers who did such a wonderful job. ^M05:55:07 [ Applause ] ^M05:55:12 Thank you. ^M05:55:13 [ Applause ] ^M05:55:17 -- the other gift? >> Well, I would just like to say thank you to everybody for coming. Thank you for -- to John for saying yes to my crazy idea. Thanks to the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, and Pam's hard work and Sara and Eric who started it, who have been like helping me along the way. Thanks to all of my advisors in this room. And when the film is broadcast we're hoping to roll out under John's gracious wings a library program across the country, a popular romance library program. And I just wanted to give a special something to Pam who has put in a whole lot of work just because she has a really big heart and she loves romance. >> And she's crazy. >> And she's crazy [laughter]. Anyway, it's an early edition of ^IT Emma ^NO by Jane Austin which is on its way from London. ^M05:56:15 [ Applause ] ^M05:56:28 Thanks for everybody. Everybody attached to this project. You've got lots of signatures in there. >> Thank you. >> That's it everyone. Thanks so much. We'll see you again. Bye. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E05:56:46