There's an article in the USA Today on erotic romance, or actually on the hotter "women's erotica" lines such as Spice and Aphrodisia. This is the second article I've read in two days on the topic. Both of them talk about how Avon, Kensington, and Harlequin are expanding into hotter erotic romance, and both of them seem to suggest the major publishers invented the concept out of whole cloth.
The other article I read was in the Toronto Star-- since Harlequin is based in Toronto, it's probably not surprising it was a little Harlequincentric. This article, though, says, "Since Borders began carrying women's erotica in summer 2004, growth has been in the double digits, spokeswoman Beth Bingham says." And yet there's no mention of the books they've carried since 2004, or the publisher(s) that produced those books. It's as if they're saying, "Even though erotic romance has been selling fabulously, it's not important until a major publisher starts producing it."
But the fact is, those new lines at major publishers probably wouldn't exist without the success of Ellora's Cave and other epubs. Even many of the authors writing for these new lines hail from e-publishing. It'd be nice if that fact got mentioned in an article one day...
Ack, I know. There's still the perception that epublishing is insignificant. Although that perception IS changing!
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