Those stories, Bryant-Woolridge says, are finding an avid
audience. “Black women, in particular, are hungry to see them-
selves portrayed in a positive, loving light,” she explains. “Mul-
ticultural romances also allow the growing biracial population
representation and validation.”
To understand where the market for multicultural romance
novels is headed, it’s important to look at where it came from.
Talking About an Evolution
In the 1970s, self-publishers and micropresses began releasing
romance novels featuring African-Americans. But it wasn’t
until 1980, when Dell Candlelight published Rosalind Welles’s
Entwined Destinies, that a mainstream publisher issued an African-American romance by a black author. Harlequin published
its first African-American romance in 1984: Sandra Kitt’s Adam
and Eva. Such titles were relatively rare until the early 1990s,
when the success of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (Viking,
1992) woke up the publishing world.
Readers of all ethnicities
devour romance novels,
but the books on offer
haven’t always reflected
that reality. Here, we look
at how publishers and
authors are meeting the
growing demand for
multicultural romance.
BY JULIE NAUGHTON
Once a bastion of blonde, blue-eyed heroines and tall, dark (but not too dark) heroes, ro- mance novels are increasingly featuring peo- ple of color on their covers and in their pages. “I think the genre has evolved as society has
evolved,” says novelist Lori Bryant-Woolridge, who edited Can’t
Help the Way That I Feel: Sultry Stories of African American Love,
Lust and Fantasy (Cleis, 2010). “Once publishers;realized that
there was a market for it, the genre began to grow.”
Changes in the industry, too, have allowed more space for new
voices. Author Shelly Ellis, whose next release is Best She Ever
Had (Kensington/Dafina, Jan. 2015), credits the emergence of
e-books and self-publishing. “The number of multicultural
romances you could find on bookshelves was limited because
not all publishers were—or are—offering these types of ro-
mances,” she says. “But once authors could start uploading their
own stories onto Smashwords, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, it
blew the door wide open.”
IN LOVING COLOR
