Book packagers and "fiction factories"

[TheArsonist]

I thought this was an interesting story from The Telegraph (here via another source if you hit the paywall):

Reader demand for the world-conquering genre of “romantasy” (romance/fantasy) is so voracious that publishers are struggling to keep up the supply.

That’s the conclusion I drew recently when I stumbled on an advert asking for “unpublished Young-Adult fantasy romance authors to audition for the chance to write a YA novel”.

Book packaging companies vary in scale from conglomerate to cottage industry, but they usually comprise a permanent editorial staff and various freelance writers. The majority of them deal in fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults and they are collaborative affairs, with the writers fleshing out ideas given to them. There are generally two ways for a packaging company to become successful at placing books with publishers: produce, through the alchemy of collaboration, brilliant ideas; or get your staff to churn out books far more quickly than the publishers could do themselves in-house.

If it sounds like literature on the factory farm model, packagers seem reluctant to dispel such ideas by shedding light on themselves.

In the United States the romantasy community has been rocked by a lawsuit alleging plagiarism against Tracy Wolff, author of top-selling girl-meets-vampire yarns such as Crave.

In mounting her defence, Wolff ’s lawyer revealed that her publisher, Liz Pelletier, was heavily involved in the writing of Crave, “a collaborative project with Pelletier providing to Wolff … the main plot, location, characters, and scenes and actively participating in the editing and writing process.”

The article presents this as a new development, but book packagers have been around at least since the Stratemeyer Syndicate more than a hundred years ago, producing books like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series (and on an individual author level even longer; Alexandre Dumas worked with assistants who provided plot outlines that he then fleshed out). The interesting thing is perhaps that they are branching out from the traditional focus on YA and children's books to other genres, such as romance and romantasy:

However, the romantasy genre does perhaps seem more suited to the packager model than to authors who want to express themselves artistically or come up with original ideas. Romantasy novels repeat tropes ad infinitum – love across class (or species) divides, love triangles, enemies becoming lovers – and the sales figures suggest that the more formulaic the book, the better romantasy readers like it.

I wouldn't be surprised if that included erotica, which overlaps considerably with romance. Have you seen any similar ads looking for interchangeable writers or ghost writers to flesh out existing outlines? Would you be interested in doing that? (The pay is apparently not good.)

 

[mrs_mackenzie]

I think some of these romantasy books are 'spicy' in the sense that they contain relatively explicit sex scenes. I don't read a lot of them personally, but a lot of my friends are quite interested in them and it's partly because, in a way, they're 'mainstream' erotica. You can read a romantic book with a formulaic and easy-to-follow plot and two or three dirty scenes to get excited about. The characters etc. are interchangeable and, in the limited amount that I've read, the erotic parts are not very well-written, it's really more the idea of the thing.

They benefit from being marketed on social media because normal advertising channels have to be mindful of things which are 'sexy', whereas you can make YouTube videos or TikToks about whatever you want.

So if a publisher of some kind was looking to publish some erotica, they could do worse than to wrap it up in a 'romantasy' plot to give it mainstream appeal, which is basically what I think they're already doing.

It's also become more common more recently for 'editors' to be more heavily involved in the creative process from the start, so it doesn't surprise me that this is extending into ghost-writing or writing plot outlines or whatever.

 

[redsnowbunny]

Yes. I think the "Bridgerton Effect" have made this request even bigger. Romance and erotica meshed in a way to make it mainstream and accepted. To the point that Shonda Rhimes produced "Bridgerton" for Netflix.
I would imagine this a progression, or a different iteration, of what started with "50 shades of grey".

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Yeah, while Epic Fantasy is still the domain of mostly male readers, Romantic Fantasy is almost all about younger female readers. Judging by the number of books coming out each month, Romantasy is the new mainstream in Fantasy.

 

[TheArsonist]

The spicier end of romance is essentially synonymous with plot-heavy erotica, but tends to be targeted more to female readers. (Though I've also heard it said that "erotica" is just porn for women, so…)

And you have erotic fantasy written for both men and women. While female-oriented works tend to be classed as "romantasy," male-oriented ones get labeled "harem lit" or similar. Sturgeon's law applies very much to both.

But it was the way they are produced (or mass-produced) that interested me. It's a commoditization of writing, certainly, and the article is pretty snooty about it, but is it all bad? Films and TV shows have always generally been collaborative products, with multiple writers both credited and uncredited contributing to the final work.

 

[forgotmyantidepressants]

I'm not really surprised/bothered by this at all. I've heard a few of the big name mass market authors (James Patterson) use ghostwriters later in their careers.

 

[JGittes]

James Michener was the first big-name author I read about having a staff of 'researchers' to provide the details from his outline. He then wrote a 'veneer' of a consistent style to tie it all together.

A few years ago, I got sick of the violence in thrillers and started reading romance novels. My eReader says I've read nearly 300. Their formulaic nature is comforting. If the back cover blurb mentions a buzzword like 'tragic, ' I know what to expect. Otherwise, I can confidently read the story, knowing that the only deaths would be in the first two pages of the heroine's backstory when her husband or fiancee dies in a car crash or some such thing. It's the same with the ultimate romantic outcome. I can enjoy the ups and downs without concern of being crushed along with the heroine.

The spicy scenes are also very formulaic. I've read nearly 50 books by one of my favorite authors, Robyn Carr (of Virgin River fame). She has three to five sex scenes in every novel. They are explicit but not graphic. By that, I mean she uses soft language to describe the action, but you know exactly what they're doing. Things like, 'When he kissed me, I felt his hardness through our clothes.' The progression is always the same: a warm, passionate embrace, stripping off, he goes down on her and she comes, then he enters her and they come together. You know, realism.

The occasional wild variation would be when they're so overcome they can't wait until the bedroom and do it standing against a wall in the hall or something like that. Among the approximately 200 sex scenes of Carr's I've read, there was only one blowjob. I suspect that's not accidental.

 

[redsnowbunny]

The progression is always the same: a warm, passionate embrace, stripping off, he goes down on her and she comes, then he enters her and they come together. You know, realism.

yes realism

The occasional wild variation would be when they're so overcome they can't wait until the bedroom and do it standing against a wall in the hall or something like that. Among the approximately 200 sex scenes of Carr's I've read, there was only one blowjob. I suspect that's not accidental.

you crack me up!

 

[Belegon]

The spicy scenes are also very formulaic. I've read nearly 50 books by one of my favorite authors, Robyn Carr (of Virgin River fame). She has three to five sex scenes in every novel. They are explicit but not graphic. By that, I mean she uses soft language to describe the action, but you know exactly what they're doing. Things like, 'When he kissed me, I felt his hardness through our clothes.' The progression is always the same: a warm, passionate embrace, stripping off, he goes down on her and she comes, then he enters her and they come together. You know, realism.

The occasional wild variation would be when they're so overcome they can't wait until the bedroom and do it standing against a wall in the hall or something like that. Among the approximately 200 sex scenes of Carr's I've read, there was only one blowjob. I suspect that's not accidental.

I love Robyn! I met her at Romantic Times, I think it was in Orlando... like maybe 2008 or 2009. She was on a panel with my partner at the time, Alessia Brio, who used to write at Literotica under the name "Impressive" before we both moved on to the e-publishing world. Robyn and I had lunch together at that RT and I found her to be a very fun person to talk to and hang with. When the Epic E-Book Awards were held at Lake Las Vegas either later that year or the next year, she accepted an invite to attend and it was a blast. She's also the most famous person to ever spill a glass of champagne on me. *grin* She's not only a good writer but a good person.

 

[JGittes]

I love Robyn! I met her at Romantic Times, I think it was in Orlando... like maybe 2008 or 2009. She was on a panel with my partner at the time, Alessia Brio, who used to write at Literotica under the name "Impressive" before we both moved on to the e-publishing world. Robyn and I had lunch together at that RT and I found her to be a very fun person to talk to and hang with. When the Epic E-Book Awards were held at Lake Las Vegas either later that year or the next year, she accepted an invite to attend and it was a blast. She's also the most famous person to ever spill a glass of champagne on me. *grin* She's not only a good writer but a good person.

I believe she lives in Henderson, so she would have had a short walk to Lake Las Vegas.

I purchased her books through Kobo; she hasn't published much there in the past few years. I guess her plate is full with two Netflix series based on Virgin River and Sullivan's Crossing.

I learned more about story construction from her novels than anyone else I've read. Their formulaic nature disguises some advanced techniques. I'd taken an online workshop on deep POV, and it just wasn't clicking. A few months later, I was reading one of the later Virgin River books and got confused. I backed up and reread the confusing section several times and realized she'd made a mistake with her deep POV. She skillfully goes in and out of deep POV to make her 3rd person narrative seem more like 1st, but in this case, she kept the deep POV of a male drug addict while 'technically' switching to the heroine's POV but with the deep POV of the male character. It was a small, but for me, jarring mistake. It only lasted two paragraphs, but that tiny mistake revealed how subtlely and seamlessly she usually makes those transitions.