The So-Called "Dead" Historical Romance Market

I keep coming back to this question because I keeping getting conflicting information about it.  On the one hand, the in-take side of the market — editors, agents, distributors — say that the historical romance market is pretty much stone cold dead, and trying to sell an historical romance manuscript is like trying to sell a month-old donkey carcass.  You can’t even begin to sell the story on its merits.  Just the genre alone is enough to make people wave their hands in front of their noses and pass.

The reaction was so severe that I gave up trying to complete an eight book historical series and settled for selling the two books I had already completed as stand alone titles.  I was advised I would never sell a whole series altogether.

Yet when I talk to readers, the reaction is the reverse.  They can’t get enough of historicals and are grubbing around in the ground looking for them.  At the merest hint of a new title popping up, they’ll track down the rumour with all the enthusiasm of a blood hound on the scent.  There’s never enough new titles to suit them…and I suspect there’s not even close to enough erotic historical titles to suit their tastes.  The selection at Ellora’s Cave is miniscule compared to, say, the Paranormal category.

So why the big difference between the two?

Why do the market suppliers think there is no demand and the market consumers think there is no resources?

I have to point out that I have sampled a very small selection of readers.  I’ve spoken to many readers, but given that the romance genre is about 54% of the popular fiction market these days, that’s probably about 0.003% of all readers out there, if not less.  So my samples could be wildly biased.  And maybe that’s the key.  Maybe there is not enough demand to suit the larger markets in New York, who prefer to print 100,000 copies or more at a time, and sell all of them in a month.  I certainly couldn’t get any of them to look at my stories.  I ended up placing my historicals with Cerridwen Press, where print runs are not an issue, and where the book remains on the shelf forever.

So New York may have such myopic vision that it can’t see a market smaller than 10,000 people and says that the historical romance market is officially dead.

But imprints such as Cerridwen Press, and the e-book publishers and POD and other on-line markets can.  Small press publishers can see such a market.  They thrive on such markets.  They call them niche markets, and that’s where they make their livings.

You as a reader, if you love historicals, will have to become savvy at sniffing out where the historicals are being published, because New York will continue to publish less and less of them, and the small press and e-press publishers will release them instead.

Historical romances aren’t dead at all.  They’ve just moved to the country estate for the off-season.

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