Lurid Romance Titles

There’s been a lot of talk lately in the romance world about the current fashion of publishing romances with titles like “The Millionaire’s Pregnant Mistress” or “The Greek Tycoon’s Revenge,” or “Bought by the Sheik.” In fact, these titles are so distinctive yet repetitive that I may be quoting real ones here or fake ones. I can’t remember. They have a certain, very identifiable something to them that is memorable, yet they are all alike. Specifically, these titles mostly feature men who have big money or power: millionaires, billionaires, tycoons, sheiks, CEOs, princes, etc. And women who are in their power sexually: mistresses, pregnant mistresses, brides, pregnant brides, bartered brides, bought brides, and more. Some people think these titles are both silly and demeaning to women. We’re not mistresses anymore, not things to be bought or sold. Some people think these titles give very inaccurate suggestions about the stories inside, which often do not necessarily hinge on money and power, or on women’s sexual vulnerability. Pleasured in the Billionaire’s Bed, a real book by Miranda Lee, is about a woman who owns her own business, and is in no way under the thumb of the billionaire she meets. His money does not impress or control her. But there definitely is some pleasuring going on in the story, and it happens in his bed, so strictly speaking, the title is accurate. Still, the facts of the story are a far cry from the impression that the title gives of what the power dynamics are. Some people think that these titles set back any strides romances have made in gaining any respect from the rest of the world. And I think that’s because these titles in large part hark back to a power dynamic between men and women that is brutal and based on inequities. And that in America at least, we like to believe is no longer true. Mistresses? Come on. So why mention all these millionaires and mistresses? Because these are high-concept titles. They’re meant to grab attention, quickly introduce the major story elements (rich guy, poor girl, power issue, sex issue), and make a reader reach out and pick up the book. Marketing research proves that anyone who picks up an item for sale is likely to buy it. That’s why book store employees are trained to put a book directly into the customer’s hand. If there is no sales person around to do that, the cover has to push the customer into picking up the book. The battle has been won if the title of the romance is so silly, so over the top, that a reader grabs it just to read the back cover blurb and learn a little more about why some woman is “The Prince’s Virgin Sacrifice” or the like. At the same time, look at the milieu in which most paperback romances are sold, grocery and discount stores. There, their chief rivals are magazines, and only to a lesser degree other books. People Magazine, a very tame mainstream publication, has titles like “They Lost Half their Size!,” “Revenge of the Exes,” and “Baby Twins in Danger.” Not exactly sedate, are they? Yet, these titles are tasteful compared to some of the other shouting headlines on magazines at the supermarket checkout counter. And we haven’t gotten to the absolutely shameless tabloids yet, a category of publication that thinks nothing of airbrushing (faking) photos of giant babies, weeping statues of the Virgin Mary, and live dinosaurs. Not mention constantly running photos of murdered people. Ick. This new trend in romance titles represents an attempt to catch the eye of a customer who is already being bombarded with very strong, very lurid competitors. As for books that compete, one way of standing out in a large field of similar products is to be distinctive. These crazy titles achieve that, don’t they? People are constantly mocking them or complaining about them. But they remember them. That’s breaking out from the pack. That’s effective marketing. People often forget that for a very long time, romance titles have been rather bland and unmemorable. Here are some real titles from a decade and more ago, chosen at random from my reading list (Yes, this means that after I read them, I wrote their names down. So call me a nerd. I can take it.): Mad for the Dad, Groom on the Loose, The Loneliest Cowboy, The Tender Trap, Rugrats and Rawhide, Beauty and the Beast, The Sheik and the Vixen, The Other Laura, The Bride and the Bodyguard, The Texan and the Pregnant Cowgirl, Bachelor Mom, Occupation: Millionaire, The Temporary Groom, Desperately Seeking Daddy, Baby Fever, The Five-Minute Bride, Lucy and the Loner, Yesterday’s Bride, Cinderella Bride, Wind River Ranch, Taming the Tycoon, Shotgun Wedding, Nobody’s Princess, Blue Sky Guy. Are these old titles exciting? Are they any better or worse than the current crop of embarrassing titles with “mistress” and “pregnant” and “billionaire” in them? Nah. They’re about the same. In fact, some of them really are the same. What about that sheik and the vixen, or the Texan with his pregnant cowgirl, or that tycoon who needed taming? Or the guy whose occupation was millionaire? So this annoying new trend in titles is simply a ramping up of a trend that existed before. And guess what? It’s working. People are noticing. But are they buying more books because of the titles? I don’t know. A lot of women are embarrassed about buying books with embracing couples on the cover. But they buy them anyway. They might be embarrassed about buying a book about a “Greek Tycoon’s Bartered Bride.” And buy it anyway. Or maybe not. Titles have vogues. Although this vogue strikes some romance readers (and probably the rest of the entire world) as stupid, it will pass. So relax.

Plagiarism to Make You Laugh

Usually it is not amusing when someone steals your writing. It’s a matter for heated phone calls, for cease and desist letters, and for expensive lawsuits. But the plagiarism scandal du jour is actually funny. Seems a sex advice column had a new writer, and the writer, not having received any letters with questions yet, decided to steal the questions from previously published sex advice columns by someone else. (For the seamy details, see Jezebel, or just check out our link on the right to Smart Bitches and look for January 24.) What is wrong with this picture? The columnist needs to make up questions, which is a time-honored practice. I’ve done it myself when there was a letters page to fill and there were no letters. The standard, perfectly acceptable thing to do in this circumstance is to ask one’s friends and coworkers for some questions. At this point, we pause, and try to imagine any random dozen people who cannot think of a single sex question. Nah. Impossible. I can think of a half dozen questions myself, of the milder sort, in thirty seconds: Will I go blind if I masturbate? If I have sex unprotected just once, will I get pregnant? Does wearing a condom make any difference in the sexual pleasure experienced by either partner? Why doesn’t my girlfriend want to give me oral sex? Is there really a G spot? Do men and women have different sexual appetites? And that was just thirty seconds. And tame stuff, admittedly, some of it more suitable to a general advice column than a sex advice column. Sex columns don’t usually talk about pregnancy, for instance. They might talk about threesomes instead. But let’s say you don’t want to think up the questions. Then you could find a sex survey online, and create questions about its topics. Actual surveys are copyrighted, so the copyrighted news story you’d find online, such as this one from ABC News, doesn’t give the questions themselves. It merely lists the topic and the percentage responses in basic gender breakdown. Yet this is plenty of information from which to create some questions for a sex advice column, because all you need is a topic. For instance, having sex outdoors. You would not need to cite the ABC News Sex Poll if you made up a question about someone who engages in sex outdoors. The idea of having sex outdoors cannot be copyrighted. So now I’m thinking of any number of questions about having sex outdoors, ranging from the straightforward (dirt in delicate places) to the humorous (poison ivy accidentally encountered). From the “Is my boyfriend weird?” to the “Why can’t my girlfriend have an orgasm if we do it in a bed?” From the straight to the kinky. And so on. And so can you. I’ll leave the rest up to your own vivid imagination. Which leads me back to the silly part of this entire plagiarism episode. Just how lame is it not to be able to think up some sex questions for a sex advice column? Very, very lame. Laughably lame. Writing about sex is not hard. (Sorry.) Most people have an opinion about sex, and most people also have at least a passing familiarity with it. Most people also are familiar with basic journalistic ethics. This person acted as if she didn’t know that it is ethically wrong and potentially a lawsuit if you take someone else’s copyrighted words and pretend they are your own. That’s both plagiarism (the stealing part) and copyright infringement (the stealing from a copyrighted work). A person who isn’t comfortable asking for help, who doesn’t have much background in creative writing, and who fears that she’s not a very talented writer might feel pressured enough to dispense with ethics. But it wasn’t necessary at all. I’m trying to feel sorry for her, since her resignation was immediately accepted (yeah, she got fired). But I have to say: lame.

Plagiarism in the Internet Age

Usually I try to keep to a light tone to these entries, even if I have something serious to say. But the flap over Cassie Edwards, a longtime writer of florid historical romances featuring Native Americans, is not something to ignore or just joke about. Internet search engines have allowed some alert readers to discover many passages in her books that they believe have been copied nearly word for word from books written by other authors (see Smart Bitches Trashy Books for the full story). Whether this can be proven in a court of law—or even will ever get to a court—is a matter of legal property rights, not morality. (It’s also a matter of libel law, but since truth is a preeminent legal defense in American libel law, that’s kind of a non-issue.) Meanwhile, the truth is obtainable on the Internet for anyone who cares to run a comparison between an Edwards text and anyone else’s. This is an amazing leveling of the playing field that is ultimately to the advantage of all of us. In this Internet age, access to original material is dead easy. This is fine as long as writers and readers both maintain some moral compass. Unfortunately, the world has plenty of chiselers. There are readers who shoplift books. And there are writers who lift the words written by other authors. High school and college teachers marvel that their students keep trying to palm off stolen or purchased essays when it’s so easy for the original texts to be found via simple Internet searches. Now, the sloppy habits of published writers who don’t bother to write their own words and don’t think they have any moral obligation to credit their historical sources are easy to detect and pillory. But passing off someone else’s writing as one’s own isn’t just a nasty habit of kids and fiction writers. Many previously well-respected authors of serious history have been discovered to be shameless lifters of other people’s material. They’ve sometimes gotten away with the claim that the copying was unintentional. And maybe they’ve had the money or the clout to win a legal battle or hush up a public hue and cry. But that was mostly pre-Internet, and their reputations have been tarnished permanently regardless. Sadly, plenty of students get away with their purchased essays and then go on as adults to pollute our world with more thievery and lies: They steal the research of others, and claim it as their own. They falsify reports on the true results of medical tests. They suppress scientific evidence that doesn’t suit their political or religious leanings. And more. Remember the Piltdown man? A fake invented to inflate somebody’s reputation. We don’t need a world this dishonest. We need to have consequences for bad behavior, or we’ll have chaos. And now we do: Public outing on the Internet. As much as the Internet facilitates thievery—consider the current chaotic, wild west situation with music and movies—it also exists as a vigorous policer. Oh, not in a legal sense, not yet, anyway. Having discovered they’ve been plagiarized doesn’t do most writers any good, because most writers can’t afford to sue anyone. Publishers have the financial resources to engage in a legal battle, but they won’t bother to do it for just any writer. And as for a book that is out of copyright protection, written by an author who is now dead, well, it’s likely to be fair game for anyone to lift unless a powerful corporation has a vested interest (don’t mess with Disney or Tarzan!). Still, the Internet facilitates the truth coming out. We will discover more plagiarists. There will always be untalented and dishonest writers who steal from other people, and who find credulous publishers to publish the stolen material. And it’s likely to get worse. But luckily for all of us, plagiarism can’t be obscure anymore if we don’t want it to be. The Internet is an opportunity for thieves, but it’s also an opportunity for the rest of us to find these people out and show the world what they are. All we have to do is put it out there. I applaud Smart Bitches Trashy Books for having the courage to tell the world.

Dieting Daze

Here it is, early January, and everybody is dieting. Or maybe everybody has already fallen off their diets, which were sworn to on New Year’s Day while nursing a holiday hangover. Too much partying. Too much buying of gifts. Too much decking the halls. The period after New Year’s Eve has become a traditional trough during which Americans go on food diets, spending diets, and all sorts of other diets. In effect, it’s the new Lent, which traditionally is a period when the religiously observant give up some luxury for 40 days. Like Lent, it starts with a big party that mimics Mardi Gras (New Year’s Eve) and ends with another big party that has absolutely zip to do with Easter (the Super Bowl). New Year’s Day kicks off a period of remorse that is completely nonreligious but every bit as sincerely meant as Lent. But, alas, it doesn’t last long enough to undo the damage done in the holiday season. Plus, this is not the right season to diet, since scientists have discovered a natural craving for carbohydrates that increases in the winter. Whether this is due to colder temperatures or less sunshine, I don’t recall. But basically this means that the deck is stacked against us; our own bodies are fighting our new resolutions. Meanwhile, romance heroines are not dieting. They aren’t trying to get a year’s worth of exercise into the one month between party season and the next big party. In the idealized America where romance characters live, January is the time for being snowed in at a vacation cabin with a hunky backwoodsman or an embittered loner who needs the love of a good woman. It’s the time for snow angels and snowball fights that end in make-out sessions. It’s days of healthy skiing and then romantic evenings having hot chocolate and flirting in front of a resort lounge’s roaring fire. In between, there might be some blizzards and some rescuing of lost skiers and wandering hikers. Why are romance heroines having such a good time, while the rest of us are looking at the scale with dismay or shuddering over our credit card bills? It’s not that they’re smarter than the rest of us. In fact, lots of heroines first lose all they own in bad divorces, and then drive their cars into ditches in the snow while looking for the rundown cottage that’s their last possible shelter. They have bad days and even bad life turns like the rest of us. But then they meet the handsome sheriff outside that small Montana town, and he’s going to make it all better. The worst day for a romance heroine probably happens on the first page or in the first chapter of the story, and from then on, things start looking up. And in January, I am very glad that someone is having a good time. And isn’t on a diet, either. Because curling up in front of my television and watching the National Weight Loss Challenge or the Biggest Loser and drinking my nonfat hot cocoa sweetened with sugar substitute isn’t as much fun as reading about a woman who finds her soul mate. Curling up with a good romance is very fulfilling. And there are no calories involved.