When we spoke with the founding partners of Ravenous Romance over the phone Monday afternoon, the electronic publishing house was in its first few hours of operations, and they’d already managed to sell “a couple hundred” erotica and romance e-books, from the genderswitching comedy Opposite Sex to The Glass Stiletto, a dominance-and-submission-themed variation on the Cinderella story. The company also planned to publish a new novel ($4.99) and a new short story (99 cents) every day, including a special “12 Days of Christmas” batch of short stories later this month that uses the carol’s list as a jump-off point. All of these stories will be available in PDF, PRC, and .epub formats; Ravenous will also sell audiobooks in MP3 format (for $12.99).
Ravenous is a cooperative venture that brings together veteran literary agent Lori Perkins with Allan Penn and Holly Schmidt, who had previously created the book packaging firm Hollan Publishing. “Allan and I had been talking about getting into the romance genre for a while,” Schmidt told us, “and Lori wanted to launch a line of erotica fiction.” But Schmidt didn’t want to start a publishing company and have to deal with physical inventory. As the discussions continued, electronic publishing arose as an increasingly viable option. “It took me a while to adjust to the economics of e-publishing,” Schmidt confessed, but “I really think this is the new mass market… We would love to be the e-book publisher that bridges the gap” between the sales figures for electronic and print editions of erotica and romance titles.
There’s certainly money to be made if they can do it—the Ravenous press release places the romance genre’s annual sales at $1.37 billion, accounting for more than a quarter of the book units sold. And the readers themselves are a desirable demographic: More than half of them under 44 years old, and nearly three-quarters of them college-educated. These women are computer-literate, eager to adopt new technologies, and as recently as 2006 they were buying, on average, nine romance novels a year. (We have no data handy to determine whether recent economic conditions have caused a dip in romance novel purchasing, although anecdotal evidence suggests the genre thrives in periods of widespread social and cultural anxiety.)
Perkins added that she had come to work with a number of talented erotica writers over the course of her career, and had become frustrated with the limits to what they could achieve in the traditional publishing world. “The problem with the print world,” Perkins explained, “was that [authors] wanted to write 10 books a year, and I could only sell two.” Now, she said, Ravenous not only provided an outlet for their work, it was also able to pay authors at a competitive royalty rate of 38 percent.
As Schmidt interjected that she was “thrilled and inspired by the quality of the work we’re receiving,” Perkins mentioned some of the writers involved: In addition to erotica fiction stars Rachel Kramer Bussel and Cecilia Tan, Ravenous has already published a supernatural romantic comedy from writer John Skipp (writing as Gina McQueen) and a forthcoming novel from Catherine Hiller that would feature a blurb from her literary mentor, John Updike. “At the end of the day,” Perkins observed, “everybody wants to write about love and sex.”