On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [5]
City Girl: A variation of chick-lit, featuring a heroine who is a little closer to the heroines of traditional romance. The city girl is not likely to smoke, drink heavily, or sleep with more than one man during the story. Like the chick-lit heroine, she may not be looking for a lifetime love, but she's more apt to find her perfect mate than the chick-lit heroine is. City girl romances are sometimes published as mini-series within an established romance category.
Word count: varies, but usually shorter than chick-lit See also Chick-Lit, Hen-Lit, Mom-Lit
Continuity: A group of books in which each volume stands alone but also advances a larger, more complex story. The books are written by different authors, each free to develop her own set of characters so long as she follows a "bible" that establishes the larger story. Each author must cooperate with the group to avoid contradictions or inconsistencies. An example is a murder mystery set in a small town; each book follows a different pair of characters and their romance while dropping clues about the crime, which is solved in the last book of the series. A typical continuity includes five to twelve related books, usually published over as much as a year.
Continuities are most often originated by the publisher. An editor writes the "bible" and commissions authors to take on each piece of the story. An author who has sold two or three books to the publisher might be asked to take part in order to boost her career.
Word count: varies by project, but each book in the series will be a similar length
Erotic Romance: A story at the more erotic end of the romance spectrum, with detailed, explicit, and frequent sexual encounters between the main characters, but not usually involving anyone else. If a hero has a sexual encounter with another woman, it's typically brief, early in the story, and not emotionally meaningful; heroines are unlikely to share a sexual encounter with anyone but the hero. Also called romantica, this is a very sexy romance focused on the developing relationship between hero and heroine.
Word count: 25,000 to 35,000 for novella; 50,000 to 75,000 for novel
See also Erotica
Erotica: Stories emphasizing the details of sexual encounters between the main characters or between a main character and others. Though erotica is sometimes romantic in nature, erotica and romance are not equivalent. Romance emphasizes the growing emotional connection of one couple, while erotica emphasizes sex rather than love and may include characters outside the main relationship. Most publishers who say they're looking for erotica mean the romantic end of the spectrum, with lots of explicit sex between the two main characters.
Word count: 25,000 and up
See also Erotic Romance
Ethnic: Involves heroes and heroines of color. Africa American, Native American, and Latino/Latina are most common.
Publishers emphasize the need for authenticity—if the author is not of the same ethnic background as the character, she must be sufficiently informed to make the reader believe that the character is a person of color. Some publishers seeking African-American romance will consider a hero of a different race, but the heroine is always African-American (or a biracial woman who considers herself African-American).
Some ethnic romances play on ethnicity or a conflict of cultures as part of the plot, but in most, the issues and conflicts between the characters are those common in other romances. Most publishers prefer that ethnicity be a background issue rather than a major conflict point.
Both Latina and African-American romances are a growing market, including cross-genres such as ethnic/inspirational, ethnic/romantic suspense, and ethnic/paranormal.
Word count: varies from 50,000 to 100,000 or more
Futuristic: A science fiction offshoot of paranormal, involving romances taking place partially or entirely in the future, often including time travel. Word count: 75,000 to 100,000 See also