What are the Fiction Genres?
Romance Romance is a huge field earning nearly $1 billion a year and accounting for 50% at least of all mass market paperback books sold. Romance fiction has a strict form, usually a variation on girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl finds boy again. The variations on this are many, however. There are gothic romances, traditional Harlequin romances (published by the Canadian publisher Harlequin who once dominated this genre), Native American romances, western romances, historical romances, time travel romances, futuristic romances, fantasy romances, even vampire and paranormal romances. The biggest evolution in romances since the 1960s has been the expansion of a genre that exclusively featured “virginal” heroines such as those of Barbara Cartland, to include the raunchy, sexy (sometimes promiscuous) heroines of Rosemarie Rogers and others that developed in the 1990s. If you write to the publishers of romance fiction they’ll send you guidelines that will tell you how they like their boo
