Two of them were schooled by the successful science fiction author David Farland and they praise him all the time as a great teacher. So I signed up for his "Kick in the Pants" email.
The June 14th email said this:
What fields would I choose to go Indie for? Well, romance for one. A couple of years ago, I met a woman at a convention who told me that she had a romance novel that had won some writing contests, but the publishers felt that it couldn’t sell because it was set in the “wrong era.” I suggested that she self-publish, and she took it to heart. A year later she came and thanked me, saying, “I’ve made $5000 a month on that novel ever since it came out, and I’m getting ready to publish three more this year.”
Now, not everyone will have that experience, but advances for romance novels are often so low that she has probably made more money on that one book than she ever would have if she had gone with a traditional publisher. Over and over again, I see these kinds of results from self-published romance writers.
Here's the thing. For awhile now I've been getting the impression that the genre where writers are most taken advantage of, given the lowest advances and so forth, is romance. Which is largely written by women. And Farland's email kinda confirms that.
We know that in most professions where women dominate (service, teaching, nursing) the pay is crap. But how did this happen to us in fiction?! Did we get screwed again?
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* Don't get me wrong, I learned a lot from listening to the entire back catalog of Storywonk. But man... prologs are not the biggest problem in literature.
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