Book: A Futurist's Manifesto

27

A Conversation That Can't Be Controlled (Sarah Wendell, Smart Bitches Trashy Books)

Sarah Wendell is the co-founder and current mastermind of Smart Bitches Trashy Books, one of the most prominent communities examining romance fiction online. The site specializes in reviewing romance novels, pondering the history and future of the genre in digital and print form, and bemoaning the enormous prevalence of bodacious pectorals adorning male cover models. Sarah is also the author of Everything I Know About Love, I Learned from Romance Novels and co-author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: the Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, which is used on syllabi at several universities including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and DePaul. 

Because I’m a blogger (and boy, is that ever a visually ugly word), I tend to locate things in a very immediate sense of time. Usually I’m focusing on what’s happening right now, what might happen in the future or taking a look at what’s changed in the romance genre and its readership over the past 30-odd years. It’s more difficult to write something that looks back over the past seven years I’ve been running Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, identify what I’ve learned, and where we’ve been.

I look at books, at readers, at trends, and cliches, and I honestly don’t spend a lot of time looking at myself or my own statistics. So beginning this chapter, I’m almost compelled to locate the words I’m writing now in the events that are happening now, in March 2012. I suppose ...