Nora Roberts' defense of category romance

 

What is the first thing category romance authors usually do after successfully establishing themselves with a mainstream publishing house? Well, after making their obligatory trip to Disney World, they drop their affiliations with category publications.

Publishers of category romances, like Silhouette, require their authors to write in accordance with stringent and often limiting guidelines. Writers generally have more artistic freedom when writing for mainstream publishers. They also benefit from the increased prestige associated with mainstream publications. These two factors often combine to lure authors away from their category publishers.

Nora Roberts proved to be an exception to this practice. As the fact sheets on her Silhouette series, standalones, and short fiction and on her mainstream trilogies and  standalones indicate, she continued writing novels for Silhouette, the publishers of her first novel, Irish Thoroughbred (1981), until 2002, ten years after her first Putnam mainstream publication, Honest Illusions (1992), debuted. 

When Roberts did separate from Silhouette in 2002, Lea Goldman, writing in Forbes magazine, claimed Roberts had "ditched" Silhouette, by then a part of  Harlequin Enterprises. Her allegiance to her former publishers still strong, Roberts responded to this accusation in a November 25, 2002 letter to the editor.

"While it's true Harlequin and I ended our active professional partnership of more than 20 years in 2002, the term "ditched" is not only inaccurate but also insulting to both the publisher and myself," Roberts wrote. "I continued to write for both Harlequin and Putnam for a decade before making the decision to focus solely on mainstream fiction."

Roberts has offered a further defense of her continued involvement with category romances, an artistic one. The Internet Book List quotes her as saying,"Category has offered me a wonderful canvas on which to paint — they might be quick, charcoal sketches rather than the more detailed or sweeping oils I do outside of category. But art is still art."