The Rock-Bottom of Romance?

Happy Valentine's Day.

So there’s no confusion from the jump: I’m no fan of romance or romantasy. Not its modern BookTok iteration; not the purple-and-pink mass market paperback bodice-rippers that always seemed to be in the Walmart and grocery store aisles when I was a kid.

Is there a snotty pretension to that? Sure. (Why pretend otherwise?) But do I care deeply that it’s become the lifeblood of book sales due to its popularity? No, not really. I’m for anything that’s good for books. I’m not interested in yucking anyone’s yum.

Until now? Quite possibly.

In short, I hate this story with the heat of a million suns. (Not the piece of journalism; just what the reporter found out.)

It’s a confessional (without much remorse) of a pseudonymous romance writer saying “Normally I write 20 books a year, but now, with the help of AI, I’m writing 200 books a year.”

Which is insane, just statistically. But it makes the flippant, ruthless criticism of romance literature so much easier for those predisposed to do it. It makes the whole concept seem like a laughing stock. I mean the “writers,” yes, but also, I would argue, the readers.

What quality could there be in works that are churned out at even the pre-AI pace? Even James Patterson takes longer with his books, and nobody is under the illusion that he’s head-down writing much (or any) of those. But 20 books a year?! More than a book a month? Dashed off like they’re blog posts.

I’m sure many of them exist only as e-books, but still. Somehow, as judgmental as I am of that, that’s the highlight of this story. From there, it only goes downhill.

It’s not so much the number of books that offends me (though 200 books across various pen names is undeniably A LOT). It’s the adoption of the practice, not shamelessly, but shamefully.

The writer doesn’t reveal her actual name, preferring to stick with a discarded burner persona, because she said she was worried about the stigma. She still does writing workshops and some work under her actual name, and doesn’t want her good name sullied by the reality that she’s cobbling together a pretty decent living (six figures, they say in the story) from total sales of about 50,000 copies of some combination of those 200 titles.

The conversation is bleak. The doubled-edge sword of romance is apparently its predictability. That’s apparently what the readers want: Apply these same ingredients but rearrange it slightly. That very reality is what makes LLMs such a tempting pull for the creators: So many of them have been trained on so many of these books that it’s quite reasonable to assume it could do at least a passable job at writing them.

My annoyance only grew as the author tried to complicate that perception. No, no, no, she’d insist; they’re actually not very good at writing sex scenes, so that’s where I come in. Not only that, but she’s teaching courses (not exactly cheap ones, at that) to teach others how to do the exact same thing.

And her sales pitch is probably an appealing one: Look at me; I just made six figures from books that I merely conducted.

It just blows a hole in the notion that what they’re creating is art. It’s a commercial product, and there seems to be a market for it. Can’t deny the logic of trying to meet that need.

But I think I just find myself wanting more of ourselves as readers (or consumers of entertainment and culture more broadly). Why do we reward such things? Why doesn’t the market’s version of survival of the fittest make this practice a losing proposition?

The author predicts this is the future, not just for romance but all books. The story cites a statistic that, in a survey of 1,200 authors, at least a third were using AI. Some to outline and plot. Others for the actual writing. And almost all were keeping that fact to themselves.

Surely that fact is evidence of the fact that authors are at least worried that readers are living up to my higher ideal. They think there will be backlash to their product because it’s lost that which was historically simply assumed: Another living, breathing person created this; for all its faults or flaws, it’s an act of human connection through the page.

Authors sense that we don’t want to lose that. Sure enough, the story contains a section in which there was significant backlash to authors who did the unthinkable and simply fessed up to using it. Not sure why they did, if I’m being honest. What did they expect? “HaHA. I got you. You just got Turing-Tested by a book, and the book passed with flying colors. Sucks to suck, buddy, but you were taken in by a story that was created by an unthinking, unfeeling, unloving bot. Thank you for the $18.99 though.”

Yeah, I’d be pissed, too. Especially if, despite the genre’s predictability, I were a reader who went there to find some version of this basic human emotion rendered on the page. Yes, I want a happy ending, so sue me, but I would like to know that a person labored over this thing to arrive at the happy ending for my benefit.

I don’t even know what my greater point is; I’m rambling about this from a place of disappointment. I just find it depressing. Even if the genre doesn’t mean much to me personally, I want to believe in its humanity. I find it concerning that a genre could so readily lend itself to this practice, and I worry for the part when it comes for other genres and, god help us, literary fiction.

I think I just worry that readers won’t revolt. I worry that it will only become further normalized, and thereby collectively lower the bar for what we expect from our books and their authors. From the outside looking in, I feel justified declaring, from atop my high horse, that romance readers deserve more, deserve better; I just hope they prove me right.