To be perfectly honest, I don't read much in the romance/erotica genre PERIOD - het, slash or otherwise - so I'm not very literate with the writers therein. (Doesn't mean I won't paint the pretty pictures, though! I totally champion the genre.) But there is an obvious unbalance and unfairness that can't be denied. I actually feel it in the cover industry too; romance/erotica cover artists get paid a fraction of what other genres do. It's starting to catch up a tad, but not to a career-building degree. You have to ‘make it’ on quantity, not quality, and that’s sad.
I certainly do know what you mean. Best we can do is keep slogging forward. It will only take ONE success, one JK Rowling (YA fantasy) or Stephen King (horror), to put the genre on the map. (Hell, I thought Brokeback Mountain almost did it!) And that success could be anyone. I'm firmly of the belief that it takes more than talent to hit it big; it takes that intangible, unpredictable quality of being the Right-Thing-At-The-Right-Time, and that's nothing you, as the writer, can control or predict.
I do think it'll happen, and that it'll happen any day now. The m/m genre is impossible to ignore in the industry. Problem is, there's SO much crap out there in the digital publishing arena, you really have to filter through a lot of chaff to get to the wheat. That's gotta change too, if romance/erotica is going to be given its due.
I certainly do know what you mean. Best we can do is keep slogging forward. It will only take ONE success, one JK Rowling (YA fantasy) or Stephen King (horror), to put the genre on the map. (Hell, I thought Brokeback Mountain almost did it!) And that success could be anyone. I'm firmly of the belief that it takes more than talent to hit it big; it takes that intangible, unpredictable quality of being the Right-Thing-At-The-Right-Time, and that's nothing you, as the writer, can control or predict.
I do think it'll happen, and that it'll happen any day now. The m/m genre is impossible to ignore in the industry. Problem is, there's SO much crap out there in the digital publishing arena, you really have to filter through a lot of chaff to get to the wheat. That's gotta change too, if romance/erotica is going to be given its due.
Boy, you can get me started like none other! ;)
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