It’s Valentines season and I am not a romance person whatsoever. Still, I thought I should do something in the spirit of the season and to capitalize on the keywords, so I offer you this. I have been saying for years to anyone who asks that if you want to be a successful author, you should follow the romance author community because they have the business down. So here’s some takeaways I’ve gotten from following the community from afar.
Networking with other authors
Watching the majority of the community come together to lift up one another has been amazing over the years. This community was the one to introduce me to the idea of newsletter swaps, book boxes, and also inviting other people to Facebook launch parties in order to network and share audiences rather than compete over them. There’s a lot of this understanding that audiences are vast and there is no real competition—If someone gets one book, they are likely to get many books and you are not going to lose that reader if you showcase someone else once in a while.
The power of branding
Many of the authors in the community have such a solid, clear brand that it’s almost like they are able to step into being this completely different persona. I’ve seen successful authors exist on mostly a name and tagline without much social media presence, but their audience is still able to recognize their works at a glance. There’s a consistency that exists in some of these authors to be able to be their brand, whatever that brand is, and make that accessible to their audience in a way that still allows them to not have to share as much of their personal lives in order to promote themselves.
It’s totally okay to be repetitive if that’s what the audience wants
This is obviously not something that I am good at, but romance authors as a community understand that their audience wants to read those same, feel good stories over and over again. The way some of these authors have niched down so specifically and have made their whole career on what from the outside as someone who is not reading these books looks like the exact same story over and over again is fantastic. I have heard from other authors outside of the genre that they are worried about boring their audience, but romance authors know how to give their audience exactly what they are looking for.
Just a lot of legal and PR stuff
There is something about a community this large and public that brings to light some very interesting conflict, and I have learned a lot about things like what can and cannot be copywritten, how lawsuits around copyright work, and probably more than I needed to know about some of the darker sides of the community.
There’s also how to handle various PR issues, such as unclear marketing, or how to handle taking a leave from social media and the community.
Also, don’t write a character murdering their husband and then murder your husband.
