Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

The decision to change Cohen’s title makes little sense to me. As a rule I think American audiences are sophisticated enough to appreciate cultural differences. I don’t think Harry Potter needed to be Americanized because we Yankees are too dim and navel gazingly xenophobic to appreciate the differences between a philosopher’s stone and a sorcerer’s stone, let alone what “troll boogies” are. Bend it Like Beckham was nearly released in the US as “Move it like Mia” and that was just ridiculous. I’m sure Beckham himself appreciated the slight boost in his American credibility anyway, seeing as he and Posh are all over the US right now. (Aside: a note to Victoria Beckham - we Americans are on the whole a happy, boisterous lot. It would probably help you a bit if you smiled, you know, every now and again.)

But I can’t place the change from “Driving Him Wild” to “His for the Taking” on cultural differences, unless there’s a huge community of Dominatrixes that buy Mills & Boon in the UK, whereas female subs comprise more of the Harlequin buying audience in the US.

Cohen’s title change really befuddles me, about as much as the whole titles question for the Presents line does as well: I ask again, what the hell is UP with the TITLES?

I realize the simple answer is that it’s all about marketing, but I am long past the “yeah yeah it sells yadda yadda” argument. I want to know WHY these titles with hookwords like “billionaire,” “tycoon,” “cowboy,” “boardroom,” “viking,” “Roman,” and, for crap’s sake, “Mistress,” sell, even if there’s a vocal group of readers, including myself, who find them insulting, demeaning or at the very least irritating.

Kimberly Van Meter left a comment in the entry about our RN.tv discussion about categories that read: “Don’t let the titles scare you. We don’t have any control over that stuff.” I am well aware that authors don’t have much control over titles, much less cover art, so believe me, I know it’s not up to the authors.

Kate Hewitt commented in that same thread, “Authors have *nothing* to do with the titles, and I don’t know a single author who likes them. That’s just marketing. They also come way after the book has been plotted, written, and accepted for publication.”

So who is it that likes them? Or is the question really how consumers of the categories thus titled use those titles in their buying decisions? Do consumers of the categories look past the titles because they know not to pay attention in the first place, or do they perhaps use the keyworded titles as indication for a specific type of story? Thus the “Tycoon” title is one word shorthand for a specific type of romance, where as “mediterranean” is shorthand for another?

From my perspective, I don’t see how it isn’t counterintuitive to closely word all the titles in the first place. Wouldn’t it be self-defeating if someone’s looking for a book they heard was good and they conflate (2 pts!) the title words and go home with a horrible “Billionaire Sheikh’s Mistress” when they were looking for the excellently written “Mistress of the Billionaire Sheikh?”

It’s almost like a secret society - the readers who love categories know to look past the titles. But that’s not much of an allure to someone like me who looks at the covers and the titles and says “What the crap are the publishers thinking?!”

Bottom line? eBooks from Harlequin rock my world because I really want to read category, and some of the category romances I’ve read have been exceptionally skilled pieces of writing, but let’s me be blunt: being seen with an Asus or a Bookeen is a LOT more reassuring to my pride and my professional identity than being seen with “The Billionaire CEO’s Virgin Boardroom Mistress.”

I’m not saying that because I give a shit what people think of my reading material (I so do not) but because I think titles like that in the wrong circumstance could get the reader into some hot water.

So, what is with the titles? Do you buy them? Do you like them? Honestly, please speak up. I’m not looking to pound on you for your taste - if anything, we here at Smart Bitches are enthusiastic defenders of your right to enjoy whatever you want even if other folks think it’s in poor taste. If some of the authors don’t like the titles, and I and other consumers don’t like them either, who are the people that do, and why do you like them?

Oh. Holy. Shit. I started to giggle at the pegnoir but by the time I got to “extra points for the heart shaped bed” I had tears running down my face. Oh holy crap in a crap-shaped bed. Scottish tartan! Cowgirl funky! Oh, sweet holy shit.

First, in case this reporter is looking for what a Smart Bitch bedroom looks like: picture a large room with a bed and the following items: 1.4 metric tons of cat (because somehow they become the size and weight of ponies when they snuggle into the foot of the bed and take up ALL THE ROOM WTF), 8 spit up rags for baby with reflux, tv, clicker, and laundry. Lots of laundry. Oh, how romantic. Especially the spit up rags.

Second, what the crapping crap is this? Right after assumption #1, that we romance readers are all dim and enjoy icing-frosted masturbatory fantasies so long as they’re sheikh-y or Lordly, here comes #2: the romance writers all live in a frilly, fantastically tartan-lace wonderland, and don’t buy beds that are comfortable. They buy beds that are heart shaped.

Question for the Sci-Fi writers: do people assume you have bathrooms outfitted to mimic a transporter platform, complete with silver toilet? And you Women’s Fiction writers, do you have boxes of tissues on every flat surface? And Fantasy writers wear tights and wings, right? Wait, as long as I’m riding the Magic Assumption Train into The Land of Overused Metaphor, let’s go for the subgenres! Paranormal romance writers - you get kinky with the vamp teeth and the furry suits, right? And you sleep in coffins or caves? Harlequin writers have bedrooms made up like harems or Roman temples or boardrooms (that cannot be comfortable) or obstetrics offices (there are a lot of babies after all) right? And historical writers, how’s that corset?

Hello? Bueller?

Either way, I absolutely cannot wait to see that article about the bedrooms of romance writers. Srsly.

Things that stick in my memory and won’t. go. away. ... well, I remember one book where the heroine was the only daughter in a family of boys, and her family was feuding with the family next door, so she basically spent her time running around disguised as a boy, so that nobody would know that she was actually a girl (and thus kidnappable, weddable, beddable, etc.)… except that the hero, who was the oldest son of the family her family was feuding with, sees her in the woods during a skirmish, and immediately knows she’s a girl (and, as I recall, is baffled that the rest of his family is too dumb to have figured this out). So, of course, she gets carried off and married off, and is understandably not happy about any of it. Except that then she falls in love with her husband, and decides to go to the standard crazy old witch-type to get a love potion so that he’ll fall in love with her.  And she gets dressed up for the Special Dinner of Potion-Giving… in a cloth-of-gold dress, the theme of which is MY CLEAVAGE LET ME SHOW YOU IT… which… just… no.  I think hero-boy dumps the “potion” out, but she thinks he’s taken it (because he starts rhapsodizing about the aforementioned cleavage.. the word “melons” is used… it’s all very unfortunate), and then freaks out due to her guilt at forcing him to love her. Cue explanation that he didn’t take the potion, and then they.. um.... get on with the naked, I think. I just remember the dress and the fake potion.

Another scene that will not die is from Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux.. umm. Modern woman gets dumped by horrible boyfriend; her crying calls Elizabethan knight who is about to be executed for treason into the present; he runs around and tries to deal with modern life for a bit, then goes back into the past; she figures out a way to follow him back to before he was arrested, etc.,.. except of course he doesn’t remember her. So she tries to prevent the things that lead to his being executed the first time around (that part was actually interesting). Except that she’s also the sort of modern woman whose reaction to being dumped in the past is “I am modern, enlightened woman and can thus rip my _own_ bodice! *rip!*”… so she gets the stableboys to rig up a primitive shower. In the garden. And she uses it. Every. Single. Morning. And _does not care_ that her object of affection AND THE ENTIRE MALE POPULATION OF THE CASTLE all know. And most of them find reasons to be wandering about the garden in the morning.  And the hero doesn’t care that she’s getting naked in public either.

The most recent brain-searing experience was actually last spring; I was teaching Renaissance Europe, and decided (silly me) to use the film Dangerous Beauty in class—a friend of mine had used it (and she warned me; yes, she did...), and I had good historical documents to pair with it.  Veronica Franco—the real Veronica Franco—was a Venetian courtesan, very famous; wrote wicked poetry and arguments in favor of a women’s right to have an education, was actually tried for witchcraft at one point… so, really, very cool person, historically.  The film Veronica Franco… yeah… so… ok, Veronica Franco became a courtesan after having been married, had two kids, got divorced.  And they turned her into the Gawky Smart Well-Read Virgin who was hopelessly in love with her best friend’s brother, who she of course couldn’t marry due to finances/social politics.  Cue her mother dramatically saying that Veronica can still have him.. she can become.. a Courtesan!!!  So the whole thing is framed around this Hollywood-style star-crossed romance. Including the witch trial, which involves her defending herself by arguing that she’s a lovestruck woman who sleeps around due to being in love with love, and it is her mad sexxoring skillz that bring the boys to the yard, rather than evil witchery.. which is.. umm.. so much better?  (medieval romances love to inflict witch trials on the spunky heroines… or have witches who are crazy old potion-making bats… or witches who are misunderstood proto-feminist wise women… and yet, do the medieval romance witches ever run around stealing men’s penises and hiding them in nests in the woods? No, they do not.. which just proves that romance novel authors have never read the “Malleus Maleficarum”. Heh.)

Now, all of this would have been _fine_ if I’d been watching it at home with friends. Well, possibly not “fine,” because, dear Lord, they had every upper-class man in Venice stand up to admit that he’d slept with Veronica and _everybody was ok with this_, and the Inquisition folks just said, “Dang, you Venetians are way oversexed, but whatever, we do not care and will go back to Rome, la, la, la...”

I, however, was showing this to my class.  Of which I was the teacher. And thus responsible for order, decorum, and not snarking the hell out of something I wanted them to write a paper about.  EVEN the part where Veronica’s mother, after announcing that Veronica shall become a courtesan just as (dramatic pause) she herself had been before, subjects her daughter to a compilation of every bad sports movie/Ugly Duckling story training/prettification montage as Veronica gets her hair done, learns to dress in an elegantly slutty fashion, works on her posture, and endures lectures from her mother on sensual eating (neeeeeehver eating a banana again, ever).

...Although it was almost all worth it for tbe bit where Veronica’s mother brings her into a room with a naked man and proceeds to demonstrate the, err, functioning of the male anatomy.  To which Veronica reacts with an expression of, “Wow! Can it do any other tricks?”

As I said to JaneDrew, I have to confess that I love Dangerous Beauty because it’s so visually beautiful, even if it’s historically nutty.

It fascinates me the way that romance readers can easily - myself included! - participate in selective amnesia about some things, like the disease free hero who has sexed half of London, or the medieval heroine who dresses like a boy and frolics in the woods, and enjoy the historical romance escape.

Meanwhile, there are other historical anachronisms, like the Viscount who marries the courtesan and lives happily ever after (except what about the social ostracizing of their children who are deemed unacceptable because their mama’s a ho?) that some readers - again myself included - can’t overlook long enough to suspend reality and enjoy the drama. We all have different historical inaccuracy buttons, probably based on the areas we know the least about. It never occurred to me to find the shower in Knight in Shining Armor completely over the top, though the giving-his-mama Benadryl scene made me wonder why mama didn’t freak out at the witch’s pills and have her burned alive immediately.

I’m so curious why some authorial liberties with historical accuracy don’t bug some folks in the least while it makes others want to pull their hair straight. But either way, I LOVE hearing what drives some folks bananas about historical liberties, because, well, it’s freaking hilarious.