RedHotRomance

On my blog day I want to share an article I saved from 2004 because it inspired me. All in all, I consider Nora Roberts the best writer of our time. I remember meeting her at National this year. She was in line for coffee right in front of me, just a regular old person, but in my eyes, she was larger than life. I said to her, "your hosting of the awards ceremony made my night. You redeemed RWA with a wonderful ceremony and made winning the Golden Heart a dream come true for me." She graciously thanked me and went on to get her coffee, but I was in awe she talked to me, little old me, just like a regular person. She's an inspiring lady, no matter now much she says she's not. She's someone all writers can learn from.

Forbes Magazine
Who Needs a Muse?
Friday October 29, 2004
By Thomas Kellner
Romance novelist Nora Roberts is the most prolific--and best-paid--writer in America.

Nora Roberts won't win the Nobel Prize in Literature--not unless they invent a new category for gross revenue. But for sheer output, few people can touch this 54-year-old novelist. In just over two decades she has written 157 books (7.9 million words added to the store of romance fiction), and 116 of them were bestsellers. Last year she sold 50 million copies, and stands to repeat that feat again this year. Jane Austen she isn't--and readily admits it. "I don't believe in inspiration," says Roberts in the husky voice of a chain smoker. "I was educated by the nuns. They are a lot tougher than any muse."

Such toughness has made her very rich. She grosses $60 million a year. That hardly puts her within broomstick-flying distance of J.K. Rowling ($147 million per annum). But it places Roberts, who owns the copyrights to all her books, well ahead of better-known scribes like John Grisham and Stephen King, who earn less than she does. "I've made a tremendous living," says Roberts, who has dwelled in the same house for 25 years. "I have the luxury to choose a simple life."

By the Numbers
Stripped Down
Astonishingly, sales of romance fiction declined 13% last year.
$1.4 billion was spent on romance novels last year.
2,093 new titles of romance fiction were published in 2003.
34% of all popular fiction sales were romance tales.
25- to 44- year-old women are the sweet spot, representing 46% of all romance readers.
Source: Romance Writers of America.

Life wasn't always so luxuriously simple. Born Eleanor Marie Robertson, Roberts grew up in an Irish-American family in Silver Springs, Md. with four older brothers. After graduating from a parochial high school, she skipped college, married at 17 and moved to the hills of western Maryland. She had a job as a legal secretary, which she hated, but soon got pregnant and stayed home. During a particularly bad blizzard in 1979, after an endless round of games with her two small sons, Roberts reached for the pen. What emerged was a romance yarn she called Melodies of Love. It was sufficiently close to rubbish that Roberts doesn't want to discuss it even now. No one considered publishing it or the half-dozen or so other manuscripts that followed.

Yet Roberts kept writing. Her streak of bad luck ended in 1981, when romance publisher Silhouette accepted Irish Thoroughbred, the story of a girl from the Emerald Isle who comes to Maryland and meets a studly American horse farm owner, whose eyes soften at the birth of a foal. After a few intimate escapades, they wed. And so was born a formula that has been successfully replicated and varied time and again: Girl meets manly but sensitive boy; they have explosive physical adventures together but find real fulfillment in marriage.

Roberts didn't. She and her husband split up in 1983. She started writing more or less every weekday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Two years later Roberts married Bruce Wilder, a carpenter who came to her house one day to build bookshelves. They've lived happily ever since. And why not? He's one of those muscular types with a softer side: Wilder keeps adding rooms to their 5,000-square-foot house but also runs Turn the Page, a bookstore in nearby Boonsboro.

The rest of the 1980s Roberts spent cranking out dozens of romances for Silhouette and, later, for Bantam (now part of Bertelsmann). Her literary life changed in 1992, when she caught the eye of Phyllis Grann, then publisher of G.P. Putnam's Sons, and Leslie Gelbman, an editor there. "Her books were much more complex and textured than paperback romance," recalls Grann. Her protagonists--ranging from Ukrainian exiles and half-Apache drifters to Kansas farm girls and superstar Italian chefs--occasionally rose above the cardboard high enough to cast a shadow. Still, "She was very linear," says Gelbman, who has been editing Roberts ever since and is now president and publisher of the Berkley Publishing Group, which, along with Putnam, is owned by Penguin. "I wanted her to go out of the box."

More to the point, the Putnam pair cannily discerned that they could make a lot more money--as much, they thought, as client Tom Clancy--by marketing "bigger" books. Meaning: more fleshed-out plots, a deeper cast of supporting characters--even a push of Roberts' romance fiction into more unexpected genres like mystery and suspense. So they hired Roberts to write six books, three hardcovers and a paperback trilogy, for an undisclosed amount. Grann decided to keep the trilogy strictly romance to please core readers; the hardcover books, and their more intricate tales, were intended to expand that audience. Those retailed for $22 and up, compared with $7 for softbound sagas. The book covers underwent a metamorphosis, too. They dumped cheesy Fabio-like images in favor of more sedate jackets dominated by Roberts' name and a more discreet image (say, a cityscape or a close-up of jewelry). The idea was to appeal to college-educated urban women and make them more at ease when they took her books to the cash register or read them on the bus.

Not easy trying to repackage a romance writer. By the time her contract expired in 1995 the trilogy was a bestseller. But her hardbacks at first fell short of the necessary 100,000 copies to make the list. Grann stepped in again. "I told her, 'Don't leave us now,'" she remembers. "'The next hardcover is going to break.'" At the advice of her agent, Amy Berkower, Roberts set her next hardbound effort on a cattle ranch out West. Grann gave it a soaring title, Montana Sky, and launched a lavish promotion push in March 1996, including one of the first TV commercials plugging a book and an unusual full-court press by Putnam with booksellers. Within days the book, Roberts' 100th published volume, became a bestseller. It has sold 2 million copies.

Around the same time Roberts' handlers wrestled with a different problem--how to deal with the author's hypergraphic output. She was flooding her publisher with up to six book-length manuscripts a year. "We couldn't publish as fast as she could write," says Grann. Berkower suggested a brand-new category of romance novels under a nom de plume. At first Roberts resisted both suggestions. But Berkower explained that Grann would spin her into two brands, like Coke and diet Coke. "This lightbulb went off in my head, and I thought, 'Oh, it's marketing!'" says Roberts.

So was launched the In Death franchise, a series of 19 grisly murder mysteries (Naked in Death, Portrait in Death and so on) set in gritty New York City in the year 2059. The heroes are a cop, Eve Dallas, and Roarke, a self-made billionaire with a shady past, who team up to solve crimes and (of course) engage in steamy liaisons. With 17 million copies in print, In Death books are sold under the pseudonym J.D. Robb ("J" for Jason and "D" for Dan, Roberts' two sons).

Running a double game, Gelbman and Grann tried to create a little nonfictional intrigue, exploiting the public's ignorance that the two authors were really one. Posters went up in bookstore chains, asking, "J.D. Robb writes as what other bestselling romance novelist? Ask your bookseller." First released in paperback to snare the largest possible audience, In Death books shamelessly hooked readers on sequels by including an excerpt from the sequel in the back of the book--a rip-off of television's tried-and-true use of previews and coming attractions. Putnam hoped to tease the suspense as long as possible, "outing" J.D. Robb as Nora Roberts in 2001--with poster displays in bookstores--by which time the In Death books had become regular bestsellers. Mel Gibson's production company, Icon, has optioned the whole series for an undisclosed sum; no shooting has taken place yet.

That's fine by Roberts, who says she prefers to leave all the selling to her Manhattan spinmistresses. Roberts hates to fly and tours just once a year to promote her books. But when she's on the road, she's ubiquitous: Promoting her latest romance, Northern Lights, Roberts spent three weeks in October traveling to 16 cities in ten states.

The Internet is her preferred mode of transportation. While Roberts has never visited many of the places that serve as settings for her books--the Caribbean (The Reef), Mexico (Risky Business) and the wilds of Alaska (Northern Lights), for example--she gropes her way there by spending a lot of time online. It's through her PC that she stays in touch with fans. Every two months she e-mails a free newsletter to 50,000-plus subscribers. Her Web site, entirely self-financed, attracts 110,000 unique visitors a month and sells a modest number of books, blankets, T shirts and book bags.

Her output doesn't have the staying power of, say, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which has spent 82 weeks on the New York Times list. (Her works have spent a combined 79 weeks as queens of that heap.) So Roberts & Co. must devise new ways to keep goosing sales. One is to guide readers to her other books via The Official Nora Roberts Companion, a $16, 450-page guide to her oeuvre, updated annually. Another is to push overseas, where her novels have been translated into 25 languages, including Thai, Indonesian and Estonian. Then there are the reprints and reissues of titles already in print. To avoid confusion, this has necessitated putting stickers on new releases that designate them as such.

But mostly it depends on Nora Roberts herself, spinning her latest tales at the rate of three paperbacks and three hardbound books a year. That's 300,000 words, probably more than most Americans read.

# posted by Rae Monet : 9:27 PM