Happy endings are a narrative structure. It all depends on where you stop the story. Once the largest authors association in the world, the Romance Writers of America (RWA) filed for bankruptcy in May 2024 to restructure their debts. I learned about RWA’s bankruptcy filing from a public-facing piece by Christine Larson, who recently published Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success: a book about how romance writers in the US formed communities from the 1980s to the present, and the strengths and failures of those communities. When I read Larson’s piece on RWA, I was nearing the end of my two-year position with an academic-adjacent nonprofit and—as I often am these days—thinking about success, failure, and endings. Thinking about the boxes in my basement and electronic file folders gathering electronic dust from my own research on romance writers, likely never to be published now that I had what the academic world calls a “diverse career.”

Romance writers and academic researchers are not often paired together. Romance writers typically work outside of institutions, publishing fiction for a mass audience, paid, if successful, for that writing. Academic researchers, meanwhile, typically work within institutions, publishing for a specialist audience, paid, if successful, by that institution. Still, for me, the social world of romance writing and the world of research will always be tied together. Have they both been a failure?

From 2008 to 2009, when I did ethnographic research with a local RWA chapter for my PhD, the author association was near its peak membership of 10,000 writers. Ten years later—in late 2019, as I was on parental leave from my temporary job as a research associate—I followed (now largely defunct) romance Twitter’s discussion of how RWA mismanaged racism within the organization. This mismanagement, alongside the effects of Covid-19 on annual conferences and hotel contracts, was a key factor in the association’s bankruptcy.

Reading Larson’s book, I thought about how our narratives of success shape how we value an activity, whether it is writing a novel or analyzing records of a writer’s association. Is it the ending that gives an activity or a social network its value? While labor analyses of creative activity have given us essential insights, in the context of a precarious system, work is not enough and never will be. Our imaginations need to stretch farther. I needed to think about the value of creative work beyond the happy ending of career success or the tragedy of career failure that is used to indict the system and, through this indictment, intentionally or not, negates the value of everything that came before.

Making Precarious Labor Work Through Creative Communities

Romance takes as its central narrative a love story with a happy ending. This book, however, is not an analysis of the narratives, or even the formation of genre (see this recent piece for some insight into how readers categorize the romance genre). Larson conducted 80 interviews with writers, editors, agents, and others associated with the industry from 2015 to 2023; a 2015 survey of 4,270 romance authors who were members of RWA at the time; social network analysis; and archival research, and participated in some central events of the romance world, such as RWA national conferences and the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention. The book’s histories of RWA and RT are engaging and should be read by anyone interested in the social history of writing and publishing.

In Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, romance writers are, first and foremost, workers. Larson argues that thinking about romance writers can show us how to survive as workers in a system that looks, for more and more people, the way the creative labor market has looked for many years, whether you call it “gig work” or precarious labor. In 2022, “36 percent of respondents in a nationally representative survey identified themselves as independent contractors, up from 27 percent in 2016” and “some 60 percent of Americans feel increasingly insecure and isolated in their jobs.” The book, Larson states, is “about how informal labor networks, self-organization, and mutual aid can improve the nature of work.”

Larson argues that the US romance writing community, as it has developed as a (semi)-organized community since the 1980s, has had as its strength its openness to new writers and information sharing across levels of experience, what Larson terms an “open-elite network.” In concert, the network also was based on an “ethics of care,” one that in part came out of romance writing’s existence as feminized labor. This, she argues, strengthened romance writers and set them up for success, particularly during the moment of change of digital publishing. Romance authors, she shows, “nearly doubled their median income in the five years after the rise of e-books, while authors overall saw a whopping 42 percent decline. The income gap between Black and white [romance] authors closed.”

Yet, as she threads through the entire book, many organizations within the community, dominated by white heterosexual women as was RWA, often did not provide “identity-aware care” that acknowledged that, for instance, African American romance writers needed different kinds of advice to find success in a largely white publishing industry that felt readers were largely interested in reading about white protagonists. Black writers, as Larson shows, worked to found their own networks within networks to meet these needs.

the social world of romance writing and the world of research will always be tied together. Have they both been a failure?

Thus, Larson’s portrait of the community of romance writers is not a solely rosy picture. It is also “a cautionary tale, warning how informal networks can, however unwittingly, absorb and reproduce broader social patterns of exclusion and marginalization—which, in turn, can spur new forms of self-organizing.”

This analysis of the intertwining of work, community, and emotion is one of the book’s great strengths. Yet while it is critical and clearheaded, this fascinating book is also anchored by a narrative structure of success that values activities and networks primarily for the career (and financial) outcomes of those who participate in them. Scholars and artist advocates have worked hard to create space for the analysis of artistic activity as work and as labor enmeshed in systems of capital. This was the approach I too, in tune with academic trends of the time, took toward romance writers. For artist advocates, this has been partly strategic, as economic worth is highly valued in US culture.

Taking Larson’s prompt seriously, however, and turning the insights of her book toward my own working life, I found myself stuck. As an academic, my research was my creative work. But if I wanted to understand my relationship with that research, considering it as work within a system of labor could only be viewed as failure. My research was generating neither economic value nor professional success.

This is not a problem purely for me. Many of those with academic training in research have had to reconfigure their relationship with research as work, given the labor market.

But it’s a problem for understanding romance writers as well. Most writers, after all, will not make a living from their writing (or even publish it). And that means that the focus on labor is also one of the book’s biggest challenges as an analysis of the social meaning of romance writing.

How can we tell stories about activities we value, like writing, that acknowledge the realities of capitalism without judging value and meaning only through financial lenses? How can we tell stories of time spent that don’t fit into teleological narratives of success—or even failure?

Happy Endings and Aspirational Labor

Even given her inquiry into the bumpy road of romance writing and community formation, rhetorically, Larson has structured the book around the happy endings that romances structure themselves around. Larson begins the book by saying “I’m a sucker for a happy ending. Especially when my own prospects have felt a bit precarious.” She entered graduate school after a career in journalism, another profession marked by precarious labor. During graduate school—when her marriage suddenly ended and she became a single mother—“it was romance writers themselves, rather than their books, who gave me hope.”

Most chapters begin with the story of an individual writer who finds publishing success. Chapter 1 opens with the story of writer Brenna Aubrey who, in 2013, got a great offer from a publisher for her first book, sought advice from the romance writer network, and decided instead to self-publish. As an “indie author,” she was making enough by 2016 to support herself and her husband, who became her publishing assistant. Aubrey’s story, then, is the very definition of career success, although Larson does acknowledge that some writers are more able to take that risk than others and it doesn’t always work out.

Also in 2016, media scholar Brooke Erin Duffy, whose work Larson builds on throughout the book, argued that amateur producers of digital culture valued their creative projects through the lens of “aspirational labor,” “creative activities that hold the promise of social and economic capital” but that in practice offered highly uneven social and economic rewards. Duffy tells us that “aspirational labour has succeeded in one important way; it has romanticized work in a moment when its conditions and affordances are ever more precarious, unstable, flexible—and unromantic.”

When I was finishing my PhD, a critical analysis of hope and aspiration was in vogue, as evidenced by books like Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America (2009). I worked on a genre with happy endings, which I loved. I was also critical, like Duffy, of the “do what you love” discourse, which at the time was enabling exploitative internships and more. I also loved research and writing and hoped that I could make it the center of my future employment.

It is possible that, as Berlant puts it, “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. … These kinds of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.” I have been almost continuously employed since my PhD, albeit always on short-term contracts, at reasonable wages. But it has seldom been to work on my romance research. That has been a side project, now largely abandoned in part because it became beyond my emotional and practical resources to spend my time on something that would not lead to successful employment.

Love in the Time of Self-Publishing is about success, even when it’s addressing RWA’s failure to do “identity-aware care,” that is, to acknowledge the ways in which racism structured writers’ experience with writing and ability to publish their stories. Larson’s story is limited by the core of her research being with those writers who stayed in romance, a limit she acknowledges. Most prominent are the stories of people like Beverly Jenkins, a very successful historical romance author who faced racism in the industry (and lack of support within RWA) but formed communities herself.

Jenkins’s story emerges from an unexpected source. Chapter 3 of Love in the Time of Self-Publishing begins with the story of a different woman: Vivian Stephens, a college-educated Black woman from Houston who had worked in textiles, airlines, education, and magazines and then in her late 40s, through skill, gumption, and good timing, got a job at Dell and helped revitalize Candlelight romances. She, with authors Barbara Stephens (her sister), Rita Clay Estrada, and Rita Gallagher (Estrada’s mother) founded RWA to, from Stephens’s viewpoint, help writers become better writers and succeed. (A colleague warned her she had helped found a union).

Stephens left Dell to work at Harlequin for a number of years, encountering obstructive racism there, and was let go when Harlequin acquired Silhouette in 1984. In the early 1990s she ran “a New York–based romance writing class specifically for Black women,” and soon “ten of the twelve group members had been published.” Stephens “went on to become a literary agent, launching the careers of many Black authors, including Beverly Jenkins, the revered pioneer of Black historical romance.” Happy endings depend on where you stop the story.

I myself have been doing this success narrative work in my job, telling the stories of humanities PhDs who have moved into work outside of the professoriate. I wonder, though, if I could tell myself a narrative of that time devoted to academic research that is neither “quit-lit” anger nor couched in the optimism of a career coach? What if that time, that activity, was worth it (or not), even if it didn’t get me the kind of job I hoped it would? Was the value of Stephens’s course only in those 10 writers who were published? What about the two who weren’t?

Of course, labor activism is another way to approach the problem. Not for nothing did I do my PhD as a member of a union that had struck before I joined to make sure that my PhD was funded. And yet. …

What is writing a romance for? What is this essay for? Is work all there is?

Time Well Spent

In Bird by Bird (1995), Anne Lamott argues that the point of writing is the work itself and the community you do it in. Most writers will not be published. In fact, even when you are published, publication cannot, by itself, make you happy.

One of the unanswered questions of Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, then, is what the relational work of romance writers does for those who are not “successful” (by the measure of publication, or financial success). This is one of the challenges of making an argument that’s essentially about commerce and the value of relational communities to commerce, based on a community where many were not “successful” in that way. At the height of RWA, unpublished writers were as much as 70 percent of its membership. What is writing a romance novel and joining a group of people who talk about writing novels about, then, for those who are not full-time romance writers?

Most romance writers “started writing because they love it,” points out Larson, “in fact, romance scholars Jennifer Lois and Joanna Gregson argue that this sense of calling helps authors persevere through long periods of rejection. They suggest that such ‘aspirational emotional work’ is common among people pursuing creative work where ‘the potential for self-actualization is high, but opportunity for secure employment is low.’”

What is writing a romance for? What is this essay for? Is work all there is?

Yet Larson does not answer what it is about writing in community (rather than, for instance, just hanging out with friends) that many romance writers love. To be fair to Larson, I never answered it myself.

“If amateurs are not paid—and defined as such they are not remunerated for work—what do they get at the end of their efforts? What, indeed, defines the end of amateurs’ labors?” asks Carolyn Dinshaw in her influential 2012 book on queerness, time, and the medieval, How Soon Is Now? “Operating on a different time scheme from professional activities, amateurs’ activities do not require punching a time clock and do not follow a predestined career path.” Love, without a career path, offers a possibility to transform an activity from precarious labor to enjoyable hobby. Yet, as she also states, amateurism “may indeed be a kind of ruse of late capitalism.”

The time to do these activities, after all, is not endless. And academic research is difficult to do from outside the communities and conversations that structure its formation and publication. Publications are paywalled, discussions are happening without you. I must carve out the time between my job (which at times has been one where I’ve been lucky enough to do some personal research work during work hours); day care pickup, and watching TV at night with my wife.

The challenge, for women especially, is that professionalism, in work, is a form of respect. In the 1980s, the discourse of professionalism was part of RWA’s efforts to advocate. Many Black authors of the 1980s and 1990s, as Larson points out, entered writing with existing professional careers and knew about professionalism’s rhetorical force. Given romance’s status, professionalism was a way to be taken seriously, and “for many, earning money, even very small amounts, is what defines them as ‘real’ writers.”

For academics, institutional affiliation is, in part, a way to be taken seriously. The names of the universities that employ them (or not) are credentials for their work, in a way that goes beyond the very real way in which university employment provides (or hopefully provides) the resources, in time, colleagues, and libraries, that aid research.

People are forming spaces to support academic research outside of academic employment (e.g., Contingent Magazine). Of course, the large (and small) disciplinary associations do essential work. Yet they do not have the local chapter structure that I saw made the communities of RWA possible. That work of education, connection, and sharing is done by departments (when they work), while those outside departments are left to form their own relational networks.

While Love in the Time of Self-Publishing’s final chapter follows the breakdown of RWA, it ends on a hopeful note. Today’s romance writers, many of them Black, are working to try to rebuild RWA with more equitable care at its heart. Others are sustaining more local networks, while still others build new networks and follow new pathways. Larson wonders: “Will Romancelandia get its optimistic, emotionally satisfying ending? Will other workers in a precarious economy?”

I am trying to look less toward work for my hope these days. But I am trying to tell myself a story about how time spent in relation with others, or time spent by myself—reworking my understanding of how communication, for instance, shows up in archival materials—could be neither success nor failure, but just time.