Over the last year RWA (Romance Writers of America) came under scrutiny for some of the - let’s just say it - dumbass choices the Board made concerning book covers and the definition of romance. Stuff the organization should not have touched, in my view, because it’s an organization designed to serve and support it’s members, not to look for ways to alienate them. Most people blamed the then-President of RWA - something that was easy to do since she tended to make rather strange comments in what seemed (I hope) to be a unilateral fashion.

The Year Of Acting And Talking Without Thinking ended with controversial Saturday night award festivities at the yearly conference in Reno. I attended the conference but can’t comment on the ceremony because, well, I was off gambling with my hubby. Figured this was my one and only time in Reno, so I may as well lose some money there as a sort of donation to the good people of Nevada.

The 2005 mess offended many long-time members, including the Queen Mother member, Nora Roberts. Some talked about not renewing memberships. Others wrote nasty grams on blogs and elsewhere. Seems to me people are free to take whatever they want from the 2005 RWA debacle. Leave if you want, Stay if you want. For me RWA has been a source of inspiration in the sense that while trying to get published, each year I would lose steam, then the conference would roll around and I’d get a much-needed kick in the butt and push forward again. And, of course, when the conference ventured to cool places like Chicago (my first conference) and NYC, it served as a handy excuse for writing-related trips.

RWA throws around a lot of statistics. This one from Publishers Weekly is the most telling:

While Romance Writers of America boasts 9,500 members, only about 1,600 of them have published books.

I don’t know if that’s how other writing groups (mystery, science fiction, etc.) work or not. RWA may be alone in catering - mostly - to unpublished writers. But, it does offer some hope for those wanting to break in:

The conference offers editors and agents a chance to showcase themselves and to check out the talent. But it’s no free-for-all. “The casual writer probably doesn’t get to talk to me,” says Harlequin/ HQN executive editor Tracy Farrell. Still, there are occasional Hollywood-and-Vine type discoveries at the conference. Pam Spengler-Jaffee, director of publicity for paperbacks at Avon/Morrow, recalls that two years ago at the RWA conference during a panel on ethnic chick lit “an author raised her hand and said, ‘I’ve got this romance and I’ve been hearing it’s too Latino or not Latino enough. Do you have any advice?’ The Avon editor on the panel said, ‘Yes, send it to me.’ That author was Mary Castillo, who’s now one of our rising stars.”

Shauna Summers, now a senior editor at Bantam, first met author Tina St. John in a group appointment at an RWA conference before acquiring her historical romances for Ballantine/Ivy, but Summers cautions, “It’s not about meeting me. It’s about the quality of the material.” She didn’t recall having met St. John until after the writer was under contract. And agent Steven Axelrod at the Axelrod Agency met his current client LaVyrle Spencer at an RWA conference. The organization promotes professionalism, he says, and “creates an orderly playing field” among the writers.

Bet Tina St. John and Mary Castillo think RWA has something to offer. My guess is those cases prove the exception, not the rule. But, really, who the hell cares. A chance is a chance. When you’re looking to get published, you reach for whatever reasonable opportunity is out there.

[UPDATE: Lee Goldberg has a take on this story today, too.]

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 6:00 am and is filed under About Contests & Associations, About Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.