Lusty Tales and Hot Sales: Romance E-Books Thrive

[wvcherrybomb]

This story must have been on the news the other day. My husband jokingly told me that he heard women are hiding all sorts of smut behind their eReader covers.

I must have been an early bloomer in romance reading. I lost interest in it before I even hit the lower end of the target age range. By my mid twenties I had tired of reading the "bodice-ripping historical novels" that I had been hooked on since I was a teen. I didn't even know they had moved on to more comtemporary characters. Maybe I'll try a few since I have three more years as their target audience.

It is true that I will now read things in public that I never would have before. I read lots of true crime books that never left my bedroom before. I don't even like them hanging around the house. I'm always worried that someone will think I'm a psycho. When I came out of bookstore with "Helter Skelter" at the age of 12 (1975) my mother was horrified. All these years later I still hide it from people.

[Exer]

I remember when I had finally given my K2 to my lady. She had previously scoffed at the idea of eReaders -- said that she'd never give up her paper books! -- but she finally got curious enough to want one. I was in the market for a K3 anyway, so it worked out good.

She was shocked speechless when she saw I had a category called "Adult" which had 5 smut books in it. I've never shown the least bit of interest in stories like that, so she was wondering what else she didn't know about me lol. I had to explain to her that those books had come from Smashwords, and I had just plucked them from the top of the "Top 100" chart the day I was testing to see if SW actually worked on a Kindle -- and I hadn't actually ever read them.

She spent the next hour or so reading two of the short smut stories, then looks up at me ...

Her: ... and these were free?
Me: Yup, completely free.
Her: Show me how to get more.
Me: Oh boy ...

She has been a big fan of ebook smut ever since! The funny thing is, ever since she started reading on a Kindle she has been more open to reading new things. She has even been dabbling and enjoying Sci-Fi / Fantasy, which she NEVER would have given the time of day before. She wouldn't even walk through that isle in a bookstore. Now, she'll read anything if it sounds interesting to her.

I caught her crying a couple times yesterday as she read Enders Game for the first time in her life. I said, "Let it out honey, let it out", and she laughed and said, "Oh, shut up!". Hehe

[Avarwen]

Originally Posted by wvcherrybomb

This story must have been on the news the other day. My husband jokingly told me that he heard women are hiding all sorts of smut behind their eReader covers.

I must have been an early bloomer in romance reading. I lost interest in it before I even hit the lower end of the target age range. By my mid twenties I had tired of reading the "bodice-ripping historical novels" that I had been hooked on since I was a teen. I didn't even know they had moved on to more comtemporary characters. Maybe I'll try a few since I have three more years as their target audience.

It is true that I will now read things in public that I never would have before. I read lots of true crime books that never left my bedroom before. I don't even like them hanging around the house. I'm always worried that someone will think I'm a psycho. When I came out of bookstore with "Helter Skelter" at the age of 12 (1975) my mother was horrified. All these years later I still hide it from people.

LOL you sound like me I stopped reading romance novels once I hit high school. I enjoy horror, fantasy, mysteries and literary fiction. Now I can read without strange looks when I'm reading a book.

[wvcherrybomb]

Originally Posted by Avarwen

LOL you sound like me I stopped reading romance novels once I hit high school. I enjoy horror, fantasy, mysteries and literary fiction. Now I can read without strange looks when I'm reading a book.

Yep, except for the fantasy, we read about the same kind of thing.

I was surprised to read in this article that the target audience for romance is 31-49. Mostly from personal experience I had always assumed they were targeting younger women, perhaps 15-30. I shouldn't really be surprised to find out that, as usual, I am not the norm.

Now all of us women can be reading all kinds of craziness and smut without anyone the wiser. By looking at me, I am sure most people would assume I am reading some Martha Stewart cookbook or Good Housekeeping. If they only knew .....

[doreenjoy]

Originally Posted by Avarwen

LOL you sound like me I stopped reading romance novels once I hit high school. I enjoy horror, fantasy, mysteries and literary fiction. Now I can read without strange looks when I'm reading a book.

I was exactly the opposite. I "outgrew" sf/f young, and now read quite a bit of romance. It is a huge genre with something for every taste, IME.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by wvcherrybomb

I was surprised to read in this article that the target audience for romance is 31-49. Mostly from personal experience I had always assumed they were targeting younger women, perhaps 15-30. I shouldn't really be surprised to find out that, as usual, I am not the norm.

The target audience who *pays for new* romance books is 31-49. Teenagers & young-twenties who read them, often buy them secondhand. They don't have the disposable income to buy several new books a month.

[cfrizz]

I started out as a teenage historical romance reader, drifted to Star Trek, & mysteries. Now at 49, I'm back to reading romance albeit paranormal romance, but romance all the same. Love my Sony reader!

[Lemurion]

I know that when I ran a bookstore, it was more adult women than young adult women who bought romance books. If I remember correctly, it was the adult women (31-49) who bought most books, period. There were a couple of sections they didn't touch - mostly the Worldwide Library/Gold Eagle "Boy Meets Gun," books that Harlequin puts out, but otherwise, they were our main demographic.

[darknessangel]

"Romance" ebooks? Let's call it right... that's softcore porn for ladies! XD

[Logseman]

Originally Posted by darknessangel

"Romance" ebooks? Let's call it right... that's softcore porn

Fixed ^^

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by darknessangel

"Romance" ebooks? Let's call it right... that's softcore porn for ladies! XD

Depends on the book.

Romance has a number of sub-genres, going from chaste and modest, like Barbara Cartland*, to straight up porn, like the Ellora's Cave "erotic romance" ebook line. In between you have "Regency" romances like Georgette Heyer, romantic mysteries, romantic thillers like Harlequin's Silhouette imprint, fantasy romances like Harlequin's Luna imprint, and the enormously popular paranormal romance sub-genre.

You also get things like the Kushiel fantasy series, which is largely BDSM, and which became popular enough that Tor had an Assistant Editor looking for similar things.

Romance reminds me a bit of rock music. Rock has blended with the blues, classical, country music, folk, electronics, jazz and world music to form distinctive sub-genres. Romance seems able to blend with any literary genre and do likewise.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by doreenjoy

Ebooks have been dominated by female readers since day one.

Case in point, Fictionwise started out selling science fiction (which mainly appeals to men), but when they began to resell books by erotic romance publishers, that was when their sales skyrocketed.

E-reading on a dedicated device might have been male-dominated in the early days, but women have been purchasing ebooks in huge numbers since the beginning.

Ebooks have been around since well before dedicated devices.

The first dedicated ebook publisher I recall was Peanut Press. They targeted the then popular Palm PDA platform, with a reader program called Peanut Reader and a markup language called PML that allowed color, text attributes, embedded images, hyperlinks and (on Palm OS 5 devices) custom fonts. They actively negotiated the rights to produce electronic editions of current books with the respective publishers.

Palm bought them and made them the Palm Digital Media division, and renamed the reader program PalmReader. It was bundled free with most Palm OS devices. Palm sold the division to B2B mobile communications solution provider Motricity, who called it eReader. They let it languish, using it mostly as an example of the sort of solutions they could provide, and the ebook catalog grew increasingly stale.

Fictionwise bought it from Motricity, and Fictionwise was in turn acquired by B&N. The eReader.com site still exists, and there's a fair bit of content in PML format out there. The reader has been ported to Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, Android, Windows, Mac OS/X, Linux, OQO, and iPhone/iPad, and is supported as a legacy format by the nook reader.
______
Dennis

[Logseman]

And they say Borders could buy B&N, so there's still more to the chain

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Logseman

And they say Borders could buy B&N, so there's still more to the chain

That's being discussed elsewhere on MR. A hedge fund owns something like 41% of Borders, and has committed to helping raise the funds for a takeover attempt of B&N. This rumor has floated up before, with B&N as the acquirer, and foundered on the question "Where would B&N get the money?"

Neither company is healthy, and Borders is much sicker than B&N. The first question is "Can two sick companies make a healthy one? (The usual answer is no.) The second is the long term prospects if it happens. The hedge fund wants to combine the two, boost the stock price, and sell at a substantial profit. They are unlikely to be long-term investors, and once cashed out, are unlikely to care what happens to the merged entity.

If it happens, it will be "little fish eats bigger fish", with all concerned hoping a terminal case of indigestion isn't the result.
______
Dennis

[doreenjoy]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Ebooks have been around since well before dedicated devices.

Yes, that was my point. Women have always bought the vast majority of books. Women today buy 80% of all books -- ebooks and print books included.

Sony knew what they were doing when they co-branded the pink 300 with Harlequin last year.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The first dedicated ebook publisher I recall was Peanut Press. They targeted the then popular Palm PDA platform,

I believe New Concepts was the first e-publishers. They date from 1995, if not earlier. They sold books on floppy disks.