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Still, female would-be authors flock to the genre. The RWA boasts over 8,000 members -- although only 1,500 of those have actually seen their work published. That means there are a lot of massively muscled arms that have yet to crush milky white breasts in a published format.

It's of little surprise that many of these frustrated love-struck authors are looking online at the myriad of startup e-publishers producing books that can be read on electronic readers like the Rocket eBook or the Softbook, as well as in HTML and Acrobat formats. Some are even delving into print-on-demand technologies, signing up for Amazon.com's Advantage program for independent authors and selling their books in small print batches.

NuvoMedia, creators of the Rocket eBook -- at $329, one of the bestselling electronic readers on the market -- estimates that around 8 percent of all books in electronic format are romances. It seems that not only are there a lot of romance fans and novelists around, but the romance novel is also appropriate for electronic books. "Romance books are a different kind of read, they are a quick fun read, so the form of an e-book is compatible with that. You can print out the book, since it's only 120 pages, or put it on an electronic reader and read it in two hours," says M.J. Rose, author of the erotic thriller Lip Service and one of the e-book industry's success stories. "The e-format really lends itself to books that are easier to read."

The e-publishing industry in turn, is seen as friendly to romance novelists. Take, for example, Kate Saundby, another member of the e-authors list and the scribe behind 12 "futurist romance" novels, such as "Dark Angel" ("When crime lord Felix de Morel falls in love and decides to go straight, the object of his affections is not exactly a girl and her favorite snack is a bucket of cockroaches"). Although she's never published a traditionally printed book, she dismisses the traditional publishing industry as being unfriendly to writers. "E-publishers are author-friendly; the author has enormous control, while in print publishing they get treated like dogs," she sniffs; she says she turned to e-books at the suggestion of no less than famed sci-fi author Piers Anthony. (Her books are also available in print, via the print-on-demand fulfillment house Xlibris.)

Others point out that e-publishers are more accepting of books that don't fit into a specific genre -- books that cross from romance to paranormal to mystery and suspense, and aren't easy to fit into a tight marketing budget. They talk about the "personal attention" they get from the e-publishers, the marketing support and the high royalty rates that they can command -- royalties for e-authors waver around 35 to 50 percent of sales, as compared to the 6 to 15 percent that print authors receive. Most of all, they talk about the excitement of pioneering a whole way of publishing -- as Childers puts it, "There has to be some sort of outlet for us who wanted to look toward the millennium and the future."

And there are success stories for them to aspire to -- such as that of Rose, who turned to electronic publishing after her book was rejected by the New York publishing industry. Using both an e-publisher and a print-on-demand service, and signing up for the Amazon.com Advantage program, Rose ceaselessly promoted her book in online zines and erotic Web sites, building such a fan base that her book was eventually picked up by Pocketbooks. Her success has done wonders for the morale of the electronic publishing industry and garnered feature stories in newspapers across the country -- although it does seem that the moral of her story is that promotion is worth more than the format, and that the ultimate validation and money is not in e-publishing, but with print and the traditional publishers. As she points out, "for every electronic order I got, I got 10 print orders."

Next page | Why don't e-authors command respect?