A Billion-Dollar Romance Novel Industry, And Its Lonely Black Author

Between the kitty litter and the toothpaste, on a lonely aisle of your supermarket, they cry out for love. Highlander Untamed! Unleash the Night! To Pleasure a Prince! The Boss's Wife for a Week! Willingly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded! Carrying an average price of $7.42, these paperbacks are cheap and hardly literary, yet carefully crafted by an industry that annually produces some 6,000 titles.

With hairless pecs bulging from almost every cover, misty castles in the background, and unsheathed swords grasped by virile hands, there is a lingering musk of Fabio that causes snickers among the uninitiated, the cynics who pass the racks by in search of paper towels and TV dinners. Before heading home alone to watch Desperate Housewives or The Hills, these shoppers may smirk, wondering to themselves, "Why would anyone want to read these books?"

A better question is: Why would anyone want to write them?

With only four romance novels to her credit, Edwina Martin-Arnold is not yet a star in the romance firmament, which includes a striking cluster of successful writers here in the Northwest: Jayne Ann Krentz (aka Amanda Quick, aka Jayne Castle), Debbie Macomber, Julia Quinn, Christina Dodd, Kristin Hannah, and Susan Wiggs among them. Last month, several of these women attended the Emerald City Writers' Conference. And all of them, unlike Martin-Arnold, are white. Largely for that reason, Martin-Arnold didn't attend the event, which was organized by the Greater Seattle chapter of the Romance Writers of America.

Early in her writing career, before she was published, Martin-Arnold recalls, "I went to one [GSRWA] meeting, and it was extremely uncomfortable. It was a clique. Seattle's local chapter is distant—I guess that's a good word. I stay away."

Yet, writing in relative isolation, determined to crack the romance market—which accounts for 26.4 percent of all popular fiction sales—Martin-Arnold's underdog story shows how the industry is essentially split along racial lines, making her a solitary representative for black women romance writers in the area.

"As far as I know, I'm the only one in Seattle," she says, an imbalance that's reflected on the shelves of Wal-Mart, Costco, Fred Meyer, Safeway, Bartell, and other mass-market retailers, which sell around 40 percent of romance novels, according to the RWA. Study these in-store displays and you'll discern highly specific genres within romance: fantasy, paranormal, sci-fi, and especially historical—where swords, stallions, castles, hoopskirts, plantations, and domestic servants have strangely endured.

And among these coded book covers, where yearning maidens cling to strapping lads with gilded locks, it's nearly impossible to find an African-American face. Nor any Latina features, nor any Asian figures, nor any sign that love exists for nonwhite women.

"There's a big drama in my industry right now—where do you put the black romance?" says Martin-Arnold. "It's incredibly frustrating for me. It's a crapshoot as to where they go. I think they should go in both [areas of the store]," meaning general romance and black romance—if you can find that section at the Rainier Valley Safeway.

But the old color lines are starting to change. An RWA industry report warns of flat sales and "an aging readership whose demand for traditional mass-market format books will fall." Book readership is down generally, according to a 2002 study by the National Endowment for the Arts (TV, video games, and the Internet are blamed). Even mighty Harlequin—the industry leader, which produces more than 115 new titles a month and sold 131 million books in 2006—announced job cuts last year, after several lackluster quarters in a row. For that reason, there is money in multiculturalism, in expanding the reader base to new ethnic niches. But where are the new authors who can reach them?

Martin-Arnold recognized good fortune back in 1998, when her husband, John Arnold, sold his high-tech company, OutPost Network, to InfoSpace. They then moved their three kids—now ages 10, 15, and 16—from Federal Way to a waterfront home in Des Moines, and Martin-Arnold retired from her career as a city of Seattle prosecutor (previously, she worked for King County). Though she and her husband bought a couple of businesses, Martin-Arnold soon realized the limitations of a life of relative leisure.

"I was bored to be a housewife," she says. "I was driving my husband crazy, and I was going crazy."

Seated in her living room with the sun beaming in over Puget Sound, Martin-Arnold looks anything but. Her gated Italianate house has enough space out front to park a fleet of cars. Inside, there's plenty of room to grow for her children, the youngest of whom pads around silently in a soccer outfit. Meanwhile, the family's miniature Doberman pinscher, Morgan, is busily coughing up a hair ball on the rug.

Between ferrying the kids to sports practice, readying them for school, tending the restaurant and hair salon she owns with her husband, and—oh, yes—getting to that unfinished manuscript for Harlequin, Martin-Arnold pauses to chat. "I came home to be with the kids," she explains, "and I began writing after that. I was pretty much free to parent and write. I wrote every Monday for a year."