TITLES AND TROPES, TAKE TWO

Titles and tropes. Romance and science fiction. Commerce and art. The same, but different. And a cover that sells. Sometimes it seems trying to balance all these things in a single manuscript is just impossible. It’s enough to send a writer off screaming into the wilderness.

I was fascinated by the same questions Greta encountered in the SciFi Romance Group Facebook discussion and those raised earlier in Sharon’s post this week. As it happens, I’d just come up against the age-old prejudice against the romance genre in an article I was reading in a national magazine about a curmudgeonly used-bookstore owner. Seems he just loved books. Everything except romance novels, which he called “trash.”

Right. So this half-naked guy is not acceptable.

I saw red. J.R. Ward does not write trash. Eloisa James does not write trash. Neither does Linda Howard, Nalini Singh, Linnea Sinclair or Susan Grant, to name just a few of the keepers on my shelves. These women write eloquent, complex, entertaining novels. And I haven’t even mentioned the mega-sellers like Danielle Steele or Nora Roberts, who do all that and sell millions of copies, too.

Part of this bias is due to the fact that women write and read romance. Period. Nothing to be done about that except call it out for what it is. Sorry, boys, we girls wanna play, too. And we are perfectly capable of kicking your butts.

But snobs like that bookstore owner will complain that romance writes to a “formula.” We all know that. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, happy ever after. Within that formula are well-known tropes, like the ones mentioned in the Facebook discussion—secret babies, poor little rich girl/boy, poor boy/girl makes good, friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, and so on.

But, hey, guess what? Every genre has a formula and its well-worn tropes. Thrillers have the aging spy brought back for one last mission and/or the race against the clock to stop whatever world-ending disaster. Mysteries have the world-weary detective and the classy blonde or the sprightly older nosy neighbor. Westerns have the square-jawed cowboy. Even the beloved dysfunctional family of the serious “literary” novel is itself a trope.

But this one is. Nice undies, dude.

We lovers of science fiction have a shipload of tropes ourselves, many of them dating from the Golden Age of SF: lone wolf space traders, maverick starship captains, pirates with a heart of gold, sexy aliens, lonely cyborgs, bad-guy slavers, tormented captive gladiators, evil alien races, teenagers with newly-awakened “powers.”

The problem is not the tropes themselves so much—because, really, who doesn’t love a maverick starship captain?—but how they’re used in a story, and whether you can put a twist on that trope to make it fresh. This challenge is what separates a mundane story from an exceptional one. Turning that trope on its head, and fleshing it out with real characters that draw your reader in, make for an unforgettable book.

Once you have story gold, why would you plaster it over with a trashy title? Search “science fiction romance” on Amazon nowadays and you get a disheartening mix of both worlds that sounds like one of those games where you discover what your title will be by taking one trope from the Romance column and one from the SF column and put “My” in front of it: MY ALIEN, MY LOVER or MY SECRET ALIEN BABY: SUPERMAN RETOLD, by Martha Kent.

From looking at the titles, it’s difficult to know how many of these books represent actual  trashy reads and how many are hoping to cash in on the familiar tropes their titles represent. The argument is made that some readers will jump on anything with sexy, cyborg, alien, slave, mate, or any combination of such titillating words in the title, especially if the book is illustrated with a naked male torso on the cover.

It’s hard to make yourself heard above all the circus sideshow clamor of this kind of marketing, particularly if your brand of SFR is, um, less given to excess. (Notice I didn’t say less sexy or less romantic. My books, for example, have plenty of explicit sex and a clear romantic arc, but I’ve gone another way with my titles and my covers. By choice.) 

But this is nothing new. Back in the early days of SFR, when sales were largely through digital publishing websites, it was almost impossible to find the plot-based SFR among the stacks of pure SF erotica (what I called “alien sandwich” stories, since so many of them were about two alien males abducting a human female mate).

I still think it’s a matter of visibility, of matching readers with authors. Science fiction romance, in fact, is a victim of its own success, attracting more and more authors and more readers who are still learning what the subgenre is all about. Many of those readers may be “coming over” from the romance side, rather than from the more “serious” SF side. That means they’re more familiar with the romance tropes that are reflected in those titles that make some of us cringe.

But if we’re lucky they’ll rapidly become more familiar with the SF side of things and begin to widen their search patterns. They’ll be looking for new twists on the tropes they know, bigger and better stories, deeper, broader characters. And that can only be good for SFR in the long run.

Cheers, Donna

The Alien Admiral's Cyborg

I really enjoyed reading Sharon's post the other day about Romance (the genre) and how it got its 'trashy' reputation. My first reaction was embarrassment – because I'll admit I was a bit that way in the past. Then I thought about it a bit more, and realised what I was thinking about is the Barbara Cartland, Mills & Boon style of Romance. The stories are formulaic, as far as I could tell contemporary, and there was NO SEX. This was a good many years ago, you understand. In that respect, at least (sex), Romance has grown up. In my teens I glanced through a number of these novels, rolled my eyes and went back to fantasy and science fiction. However, I had a relative who devoured them. She had a hard life and I think for her, Romance novels were an escape, a place she could run off to and hide, and maybe vicariously live the life of the heroine who got the happily-ever-after she never had. For other women, maybe it's a way of going back to the time when they were young and beautiful, and reliving (or rewriting) the past. I don't know.

Not that I never ever read Romance books – I just didn't know that's what they were. For example, the Angelique series. And then I was introduced to SFR with Games of Command. These stories have world-building, and a plot other than the romance to keep me enthralled. I have also learned that writing any book isn't easy, and writing 'series' romance novels has its own challenges. More power to those who can do it. I can't.

And that brings me to titles. We had a fascinating discussion in the Facebook SciFi Romance group, talking about titles in SFR. (If you're not a member, go and join – it's a great group for readers.) Meredith Gurr, a great supporter of our sub-genre, posed this question.

I've been pondering for a while, but Winter's post prompted me to pose a question about SFR titles specifically. [Winter's post said 'Ugh… the secret baby trope has infiltrated both my beloved SFR and PNR']

There is a profusion of titles containing the word Alien. And added to that, Lover, Mate, Bride, Abduction, Slave, Heart, Taken by the Alien, Bonded to the Alien, etc., all with obvious romantic and/or sexy times content.

No doubt many of us already have our go-to favourite authors and SFR tropes, irrespective of the book titles, but I was just wondering how authors and readers feel about the identical or similar titles out there. Whether it's becoming confusing, overwhelming? Negative market saturation, for example, some readers may be dissuaded from checking out books, perhaps due to "you've read one, you've read them all"? (this could equally apply to PNR and YA dystopias, PNR and SFF). Any other thoughts?

The responses were truly fascinating. Do have a read on Facebook – the thread is easy enough to find. For me, the question resonated. Back in the day I would curl my lip at the Romance titles starting with 'Millionaire' (now, of course, inflation has caught up with us, and it's Billionaire), 'Sheikh', 'Duke' etc etc. where somebody takes a job as the [insert title here]'s secretary or something, and then this despicable tyrant type falls madly in love.

SFR encompasses any level of sexual behaviour, from no sex, through to BDSM, erotica, menage, LGBTI etc. That's absolutely fine. To each her/his own. But it seems certain formulaic titles sell better than others, often depending on the level of sex expected. Eg Meredith's example of 'Bonded to the Alien'. It will have a ripped torso on its cover and there will probably be lots of sex. Please understand that this is strictly my opinion, and that I'm not singling out any title, any author, any book. These are just examples which may or may not be real.

I have an aversion to anything with 'alien' in an SFR title. I just cannot get my head around the notion that somewhere out there in the endless darkness a species has evolved that is close enough to us in DNA for us to have sex. Anything's possible, of course, but to me it comes across as monkeys writing a book. Let's face it, we share 98.8% of our DNA structure with chimpanzees, but mating with one? Yes, I have 'aliens' in my Morgan Selwood books, but these people are genetically engineered humans who have lost their history. Perhaps some of the authors who write 'alien' books do the same thing. I don't know. Sure, it may be possible for two different species to fall in love, but even in Beauty and the Beast, it turns out the beast isn't quite what he seems.

I don't have the same issue with 'cyborg' titles. I think it will happen that humans will incorporate intelligent tech into their bodies. We already have bionic limbs that can be controlled by the mind.
However, I steer clear of dubious consent titles using words like 'slave', 'abduction', 'breeder' and the like, whatever else is in the title.

And yet the 'alien' titles, and 'breeder' titles seem to be immensely popular. Perhaps that's because such titles tell the browsing reader immediately what they're going to get and that's what they want.
Perhaps I should rename my book Morgan's Choice to The Alien Admiral's Cyborg. (See fun cover above) Ravindra is an alien admiral, and Morgan is most definitely a female cyborg. But then, if readers were to expect a series of steamy sexual encounters they would be sorely disappointed. Yes, there's some sex, but the story is about a developing relationship between two people from two very different cultures – and an external threat, and how that brings them together. That tattoo is important, too.

It's a difficult task, giving a book a title. Please share your views. What leads you to take a look, what puts you off, and what would you find disappointing?