Romance Writers of America
According to the RWA, the main plot of a romance novel must revolve around the two people as they develop romantic love for each other and work to build a relationship together.
[9] The annual conference features a literacy signing, where the public is invited to meet close to 500 authors and gain autographs.
[citation needed] Named for the RWA's first president, Rita Clay Estrada, the award signifies excellence in one of 12 categories of romantic fiction.
Previously, authors were forced to leave their pseudonym behind if they switched publishing houses, making it more difficult for their fans to follow.
[7] Some romance novel authors and readers believe the genre has additional restrictions, from plot considerations such as the protagonists meeting early on in the story, to avoiding themes such as adultery.
Disagreements have centered on the firm requirement for a happy ending, or the place of same-sex relationships within the genre.
Therefore, the general definition, as embraced by the RWA and publishers, includes only the focus on a developing romantic relationship and an optimistic ending.
[16] As the industry changed, there was resistance to including authors of romance novels which featured homosexual love stories.
Nora Roberts, one of the most prolific and famous romance authors, wrote a letter of protest that the question had been included.
The hero of her novel, For Such a Time, was a Nazi concentration camp commandant, and the heroine was an imprisoned Jew who later converted to Christianity.
[7] The Board began to focus more on diversity and inclusion efforts, leading to a backlash from some of its white members.
In summer 2017, founding RWA member Linda Howard posted on an internal forum that "'Diversity for the sake of diversity is discrimination'".
[16] Jennifer Prokop, the romance reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, analyzed 60 books that were finalists for the 2019 RITAs and discovered that white authors overwhelmingly created worlds that were populated with white, cisgender, heterosexual characters, regardless of the time frame or setting of their novels.
[16] Some authors of color, including RWA Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Beverly Jenkins and popular novelist Helen Hoang, refused to enter their books at all.
[17] At the annual conference that year, Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Suzanne Brockmann gave a speech denouncing white supremacy within the organization and the industry.
[16] In an effort to address the controversy, the Board changed some of the contest rules, including by tracking scores by individual judges to attempt to detect bias.
The finalist list excluded author Alyssa Cole, whose submission had been named one of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books of the Year, an honor that is exceedingly rare for a romance.
The Board released a statement "“apologiz[ing] to our members of color and LGBTQ+ members for putting them in a position where they feel unwanted and unheard.” [7] At the conference in July 2019, two of the RITA winners, M. Malone and Kennedy Ryan, were black women, and one woman, Nisha Sharma, was the first winner of South Asian descent.
Courtney Milan, a Chinese-American author, joined the discussion and critiqued a book written by a current acquiring editor, Kathryn Lynn Davis.
The annual RITA awards were cancelled after many judges resigned and hundreds of authors withdrew their books from consideration.
[21] In May 2024, the RWA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stating that it owed millions of dollars in contracts to convention centers for hotel rooms.
An 80% decline in membership since 2019, described by the RWA as "predominantly due to disputes concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion issues between some members of a prior RWA board and others in the larger romance writing community",[22] and a corresponding decline in membership revenue were contributing factors to the bankruptcy.
