Who Is the Audience?
According to the RWA (their previous stats were more detailed, so I’m including them), the average age for a romance reader is around 45, tends to live in the South or the Mid-West, is married, has children, has at least an undergraduate degree, and is a white-collar worker. The stats aren’t broken down by ethnicity, but I’m certain that the majority, perhaps even all, of the readers surveyed were white. Despite my desire for their inclusion into the general romance audience, African-American romance readers have different expectations for their romance fiction, as I discussed earlier.
However, as I tuned into the new (unfortunately) BET web series, Buppies, I was suddenly struck by how unlike AA romance it was. Oh, sure, it did perpetuate some of the stereotypes and bogeymen that have been floating around the professional black community for the past ten years, and there’s drama, drama, drama galore, but it’s…well, smart. Couple this with shows like Girlfriends, The Game, or Half & Half (I miss that show!), and it leaves me confused about the typical audience for AA romance. For one thing, if you hang around online a bit, you’ll notice that there is a large, and growing segment of black men and women forming communities online (and these are hilarious, smart, pithy folks) AND watching the same TV shows. Yet, somehow, in its current incarnation, I cannot see these people rushing into the store to pick up the latest Kimani or Dafina. They might read some Zane, or some Eric Jerome Dickey, they’ll probably cop the upcoming Helena Andrews memoir/chick-lit Bitch Is the New Black, maybe some nonfiction written by a black sociologist or historian, but the romance genre is invisible to these people, who admit to being voracious readers.
To these people, the Essence Best-seller list is glanced at, but isn’t taken as the gospel truth as to what books they should buy. To these people, “Harlequin Romance” is just as much a punchline as it is to their white counterparts, but they have no clue Kimani Press even exists. To these people, if they did pick up a AA romance novel, it would seem staid and self-conscious, as well as not being conscious of its cultural heritage. And so on…
Time and time again I hear about the “niche”–but I posit this: perhaps the niche isn’t just holding black writers back from non-black readers, but from “those people” I mentioned above, as well.
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What automatically comes to mind as I read your post is that some of those people already do read romance. Also, the stigmas and stereotypes about romance that exist in the mainstream public sphere also exist in black publics. These black niches don’t exist in social/cultural bubbles. So just like there is a large group of the mainstream public that could care less about and/or looks down their nose on romance in general, there are some black people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a romance novel, African American or not. It’s not an either or situation. I know plenty of people that fit much of the profile you set out who also read African American romance and some who write African American romance who fit the profile as well. I think some of your audience questions might be better probed by adding the lens of age/generation. Adding the concept of generational shifts to the mix rather than focusing on race alone might open up the conversation in this instance. Because I do think there is a whole new generation of romance readers who fit much of your profile and probably won’t be included in that RWA count either. I don’t think it is as clear cut or black/white. We can ignore the gray areas and all the ways in which things are overlapping. Dichotomies some times prevent us from seeing things and I think they trip up a lot of discussions before they even get a chance to get started. I think Gwendolyn Osborne did an essay on Black romance readers a while back where she noted that they were black, college educated, professional women. She didn’t include an age bracket that I recall. But I’d love for a formal study to be conducted to find out who the audience is. I know the readers I have connected with and they are varied in terms of age and education. Some work. Some are stay at home moms. Some are in college. Some are in graduate school. Some are teachers. Some are in their late teen to early twenties. Some are old enough to be my elders. Some are in their thirties. Some are in their late thirties and looking forty in the face like me… And I totally lost where I’m going with this. But I think I said all this to say that audience perception is a great query to make, but we might want to consider a wider scope and lens instead of limiting it at the same time that we ask the question.
My audience skews younger, I would say considerably younger. If you check out the various IR forums the first thing you will notice is that the readership tends to be in their 20-30s. Again, I think this is indicative of the technology divide being not only race based, but also age based. My guess is that the typical Kimani reader is actually quite similar to category readers in general, they probably started out reading Harlequins and moved to Kimanis when they became available.
From what I’ve seen, most of the people you described would probably not be interested in reading a romance, period. There is a certain stigma attached for some people that’s pretty much impossible to overcome. I’ve heard from people who’ve said that they’ve wanted to recommend one of my books to their book club, but they’ve been told NO ROMANCES.
Also, there is that segment of the population who have black romances and street lit confused. I’ve come across that more than once.
Yep, I see it as the general stigma against romance, period. That’s not a race thing, but cuts across many lines.
It stills stands to reason that there is a fairly large romance reading segment in black, just as there is in white. It’s recently that the vocal white (or Asian) smart romance readers started speaking up online.
The black romance readers are a quieter bunch, buying up books and reading them, but not talking about it much.
I agree with Gwyneth. I think the audience question is fascinating and probably much more complicated than at first glance. First of all, that the cool black kids who will watch Buppies and read Zane (which, to be sure, is not near as well written as any given Kimani release) but not genre AA romance has little to do with the quality or content of romance (note the previous parenthetical)and almost everything to do with prejudices that the public at large has about romance. AA romance needs better marketing, to be sure, and a larger multiracial audience, certainly. But I don’t think there’s anything that AA romance is doing wrong that accounts for some black readers avoiding it like the plague.
Also, I wouldn’t point to the lack of vibrant online communities dedicated to AA romance (though, of course, these communities do indeed exist) as evidence of anything other than maybe the people who are reading romance are not the same people who are hanging out online.
A more interesting question, at least to me is why are there so many black romance readers who won’t read a black romance? I was just over at Paperback Swap, looking through books posted by black members. (Yeah, I know, but I’m supposed to be writing a synopsis, I’m sure you understand.) Anyway, she posted 150 romances and not one of them was by a black author. Obviously, there’s all manner of reasons for this, but to me that’s an untapped audience that’s probably more accessible (or not) than even trying to recruit people who don’t read romance. I’d be fascinated to discover why they don’t read black romances, and how we could recruit them, so to speak.
I do agree that there is a stigma against the romance genre, but at the same time, it is all about packaging. Zane, Eric Jerome Dickey, etc would fit nicely in the RWA, yet they are published in hardcover and/or trade paperback, which, across the board, is a more respected format than MMPB (hence why the biggie names in romance are eventually published in hard cover with tasteful, non-romance cover art). But I do think it would be interesting to conduct a study of black romance readers, AND what they desire from the “genre.”
As for why black romance readers don’t read romance? I can say, based on my experience, that when I discovered the genre in the library, I didn’t see any black romance novels. I joined the online romance community fairly early on in my reading experience and it, as it still does, skews white. I admit to having a prejudice against AA romance when I discovered that it existed because of societal concepts of “talent”–if AA romance novels were as good as white romances, why weren’t they placed in the same place as Lisa Kleypas, Nora Roberts, et al, why weren’t they gushed over, why didn’t they win any awards, etc? I also, being quite young, didn’t want to stand out as “that black chick” in the midst of a bunch of ostensibly white readers. All valid, but an extremely short-sighted and narrow-minded view of the plight of AA romance, hence why I began to read them and picked up the gauntlet.
But as I’ve mentioned many times, when it comes to buying romances, when you’re in the mood for a gritty romantic suspense, there are only so many books by Maureen Smith or Katherine D Jones to choose from; when you’re in the mood for a romantic comedy, it’s difficult to discern if the AA romance is comedic since the blurbs are rather sober/dramatic; when you want to read a historical romance, as with Smith and Jones, Beverly Jenkins titles are quite finite; and for paranormal, L.A. Banks and Marcia Colette are pretty much it.
The way I see it, AA romance is in a catch-22 situation: writers have to cater to the small, but consistent niche, and stepping out of what the niche desires mostly results in disappointment. And for those black writers who do step out of the niche from day 1 (Beverly Jenkins with her historicals, L.A. Banks with her paranormals), are likely to be the only one because either their fellow writers feel there is room for just one, or the market feels it can only sustain/afford one non-niche AA writer at a time. As a result, black readers stumbling upon AA romance (like me, once again), find it quite easy to go long stretches without reading AA romance, or not reading it at all, because it’s difficult to find what they like to read in such a small pool of writers and subject matter.