“Part of the problem is some publishers say, O.K., we need more diversity, we’ll just have our white authors write more diversely.” Cole, who has published romances set during the Civil War with African-American protagonists. “Some publishers are showing more interest in acquiring books from marginalized groups, but there are still barriers,” said Ms. One of Avon’s authors, Stacey Abrams, who has published romance novels with African-American characters under the pen name Selena Montgomery, recently became the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia. Industry leaders will attend an invitation-only “diversity summit” at the conference to discuss ways to make the genre more inclusive, and the African-American romance novelist Brenda Jackson will co-teach a workshop on writing characters from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, age groups, abilities and body types.Īn Avon representative noted that the company publishes books by Alyssa Cole, Tracey Livesay, Mia Sosa, Nisha Sharma, Cat Sebastian and Laura Brown, all authors who write about diverse couples. The issue will likely be widely debated at the group’s upcoming annual meeting in Denver this month, where some 2,000 romance writers will gather. “It was eye-opening,” Dee Davis, R.W.A.’s president, said of the survey results. Black authors have accounted for less than 1 percent of finalists. The group has also faced growing scrutiny over its Rita Award, which has never gone to an African-American writer in the 36-year history of the prize. The genre’s largest organization, the Romance Writers of America, which has around 10,000 members, recently conducted a survey and found that nearly 86 percent of its members are white. Romance publishers say that they want to publish books with more diverse characters and settings, but argue that it’s a challenge in part because the majority of submissions still come from white authors. Even as the genre has evolved to reflect readers’ varied tastes and fetishes - popular subcategories include vampire and werewolf romance, military romance, cowboy romance, time travel romance, pirate and Viking romance - the lead characters are often confined to a fairly narrow set of ethnic, cultural and aesthetic types. Romance novels released by big publishing houses tend to center on white characters, and rarely feature gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people in leading roles, or heroines with disabilities. The novel’s unexpected success is all the more astonishing given the striking lack of diversity within the romance genre. Readers have flooded the website Goodreads with more than 7,000 positive ratings, and the book, which was published in June, is already in its fourth printing. Hoang’s debut novel, “The Kiss Quotient,” a multicultural love story centered on an autistic woman who has trouble navigating the nuances of dating and courtship. So far, romance fans have swooned over Ms.
But this time, she wrote the story herself. Hoang began researching autism and realized that she’s on the spectrum, a condition that makes it difficult for her to hold casual conversations, read emotional cues, have an office job and meet new people. Many years later, as a mother of two in her 30s, Ms. “It was like I found a pure, undiluted drug,” she said. She found refuge in romance novels, frothy stories that allowed her to experience intense feelings that were clearly spelled out on the page, always with the promise of a happy ending. Growing up in Minnesota, Helen Hoang suffered from crippling social anxiety and struggled to make friends.