How to Write Romantic Novels

Writing Romance Novels - A Path to Success

Several reasons advocate for the writing of Romance Novels. Among them you can find the publishers' favorite: a large market; the agents' favorite: fewer producers (less competition); the writers' favorite: a greater freedom of writing.

When there is such a harmony between people whose interests are not exactly the same, you can be sure that there is a large amount of money to cement it. The demand is high, the amount of money rises at the same level.

The market is big, though divided in multiple streams. For example, all readers want the lovers to be united at the end of the book and most of them do not care about the wedding date while Christian readers prefer that the wedding night takes place after the wedding.
From the writer's point of view, each stream is a niche.

The genre is multiform. It allows the writer to play with the borders more than any other.

If you do not write Romance because you despise the genre, you should ask yourself why you despise it. Is it because of the genre or because of an author you associate to the genre? The romance is no longer your mother's romantic stories.

No writer has to publish repetitive stories in which the most adventurous change from the standard is the heroine's name. (By the way, no law forces an heroine's name to end in “a”. From “Amanda” to “Zelda”, the whole alphabet has been visited several times. The readers are voting a massive E to sounding-a names.)

The Romance genre does not prevent you from writing a masterpiece. Trust your readers: there are best-seller novels in the Romance publishing world.

The main rules for writing a Romance

One of the main pleasure the romance novel offers is the variety of backgrounds it allows. Past, present and future, the next village or the farthest planet, each and all times and places are at your disposal.

The genre is multiform also because of its capacities at absorbing features that pertain to other genres.
The love story is often a secondary plot in historical, detective, or political novels. But in a romance, the historical, social, or economical aspects are no more than settings.

Though your heroes may meet aboard a space-ship, for example, take care not to mix up several genres. You would disappoint the romance readers as well as the amateurs of science-fiction. As a rule, since your readers are likely to be connoisseurs interested in various domains of knowledge, do not make your heroes live in a world or in a society you know nothing about.

On the contrary, even if you know a lot about how people lived in the 16th, refrain from teaching: readers do not crave for painful explanations about the lack of heating, but for cosy visions of fireplaces; and be sure that nobody wishes to read a single word about your heroine's over-populated hair! A love story has to be realistic only as long as the reality interferes with the plot.

The times are gone when romance novels ended with the langourous kiss the lovers exchanged when they met after having overcome two hundred pages of obstacles. Nowadays, heroes and heroines live in flesh, so to speak. The love scene is almost inevitable. Avoid the danger of crossing the invisible border between love scene and erotica. If your readers wanted to read erotica, they would not have bought a romance novel. Though the following rule is not 100% secure you should be out of danger if your description never mentions any fluid.
Avoid the anatomical descriptions as well, except for funny purposes.

Never forget the main character of your novel: your reader. Respect her. If the title and the cover of your book promise her a romance, tell her a romance.

And bear in mind that a quarter of the women who read romantic novels actually are men!