Dear Bitches, Smart Author Podcast, September 11, 2015

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 158 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is Ashleigh Gardner from Wattpad.  You may recall that Wattpad was the sponsor of the podcast transcript for a little while, and while we were emailing back and forth, one of the other folks at Wattpad, Zoe, said, you know, Ashleigh would be a really fun guest because she knows a lot about the trends of what people are writing in the romance section on Wattpad and what types of stories have been really popular.  And I thought, well, I’m always curious about all things fanfic related, so let’s have a look!  In this interview, we talk about what is being written on Wattpad, what’s popular, and what’s popular in other countries outside the U.S., which I always find very cool.

This podcast is brought to you by Berkley, publisher of New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Ashley’s The Scandalous Mackenzies, which features two Mackenzies novellas together for the first time in paperback, available September 1st wherever books are sold.

And we have a transcript sponsor this month as well!  The podcast transcript is compiled by hand with excellent skill by garlicknitter [blushing], and in this week, it is sponsored by Married Sex, a novel by Jesse Kornbluth.  When a husband tries to convince his wife to join him in a tryst with another woman, there are unintended consequences in this sharply observed, erotic tale about the challenges of modern marriage.  Now available in paperback and eBook formats wherever you buy books.

The music you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater, and I will have information at the end of the podcast.

And since this one focuses more on links to fanfic online than on books, we’ll have links to those too.  Just come find the show notes on smartbitchestrashybooks.com.

And now, on with the podcast.

[music]

Sarah:  Let’s start by having you introduce yourself and tell us what is Wattpad and what does it do?

Ashleigh Gardner:  Yes, so, my name is Ashleigh Gardner, and I’m head of publisher and writer partnerships here at Wattpad, and Wattpad is the world’s largest community for readers and writers.  We’re a social website and an app that lets anyone, you know, create a story.  They can start posting it, anyone can find them read them, and our community is currently over forty million people strong, so there’re lots of people that are out there all over the world, you know, sharing stories, commenting, reading on them, coming to us each month.

Sarah:  Do you deliberately try to avoid the term fanfic?  Is that something you try not to –

Ashleigh:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I’m, I’m not trying to be a schmuck.  I, I’m honestly asking, ‘cause I’m fascinated by sites that collect derivative works but don’t use the word fanfic.  Is that a deliberate decision?

Ashleigh:  I love fanfic so much.  No not at all!  I think it’s expected –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Ashleigh:  I’m, I’m a huge fanfic reader myself, particularly since I’ve joined Wattpad.  I think it’s really opened up that world to me, but I think that it’s also, there’s so much on Wattpad, and I think a lot of other sites that people tend to talk about when they’re talking about the fanfic space are focused only on fanfiction, so I think what’s really different about Wattpad is that it’s for any type of writing that you can post.  You know, we do have a lot of original romance.  We have a lot of, you know, sci-fi and teen fic as well.  Fanfic, though, you’re right, of course, it’s huge too onsite.

Sarah:  I’ve been trying to answer this question, so if you don’t have an answer to this one, it’s totally cool.  Like, I just don’t want you to be like, oh, my God, that’s a mean question!

Ashleigh:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  What do you think it is that people are looking for when they go to choose fanfiction over any other thing that they could be reading?  Like, there are moments where I’m like, no, it’s fanfic time.  And then I ask myself, okay, well, what is it that you’re looking for?  And I have absolutely no idea; I just know that it’s fanfic time.  Like, do you know what it is that you find in fanfic or what some of your users find in it?  And if you can’t answer, it’s totally okay, ‘cause I don’t my own answer.

Ashleigh:  Yeah, I think, you know, sometimes it’s, it’s just wanting more of something.  Like, where you just love an idea or a property so much.  Like, I know when I came out of seeing Magic Mike, it was like, I can’t wait for the fanfic to start about this.  There are just too many –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Ashleigh:  – you know, unanswered questions here.  Like, I want to know everyone’s backstory, and I just know that –

Sarah:  More pectorals.

Ashleigh:  – you know, in a few months, when everyone’s seen it, the internet will provide that to me.  So sometimes it’s just, yeah, those unanswered questions and wanting to know what other people thought and wanting to connect with people in that way.  And then I think the other side of it is, there’s something about fanfic writing that, it’s not being written for the same reasons.  Like, I think that most books that we read are being read by someone, you know, with professional aspirations, and I think there’s something so just, like, pure about fanfic being written, you know, just for fun, just to connect.  I think it’s a very social activity.

Sarah:  It is, it’s absolutely social, and I remember reading an, a, a transcript of an interview with John Mayer, the musician, at Berklee where he, I think he went to Berklee and then dropped out, and they brought him back for, like, a special spotlight for all of the music students, and one of the things he said was that it was really tempting and dangerous for him to create something little, like a piece of a song or, like, a handful of chords, and then bring it to social media and get instantaneous feedback, and he got hooked on that instant feedback, and I realized as a blogger how true that is for me.  Like, I am used to writing a thing, putting the thing up, and then having someone say, yes, I totally agree!  Or, no, you are completely wrong, and here is why.

Ashleigh:  Yeah.

Sarah:  And so when I write something and I don’t have that interaction, I’m like, what, wait, wait?  What?

Ashleigh:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  This is way, I, this is unnatural.  I am not, I am not a fan of this.  I’m by myself!  What is this?  And that’s what writers do most of the time.  It can get really –

Ashleigh:  Yeah!

Sarah:  – it can be really encouraging to have that sort of feedback all the time.

Ashleigh:  Well, I think one of the things that I found so interesting at Wattpad is how many of our top writers on the site never thought of themselves as writers and had never written anything before they had joined the site, and I think that, you know, when you look at the stats, what is the most recent one, 91% of people say they would love to write a book one day, but it’s really hard – [laughs] – and especially if you’re doing it on your own, I think, to post it chapter by chapter and get that, you know, instant encouragement and instant feedback.  I think that’s really encouraging to continue and actually finish it when you know there’s an audience waiting for what’s next.

Sarah:  It is, it is absolutely extremely encouraging to merely be told, you know, you do not suck.  Keep going!

Ashleigh:  [Laughs] Absolutely!

Sarah:  When you are on Wattpad, if someone goes to Wattpad and they want to find something to read, how can they find things that they want to read?  Do you have a, a tagging system, do you have a table of contents system?  How’s the, how should romance readers who are curious try to navigate Wattpad?  Which is a weird thing to ask on a radio show, ‘cause you can’t show somebody?

Ashleigh:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  But it helps to have sort of a, okay, here’s what you look for.

Ashleigh:  Absolutely.  So, on Wattpad, there’re a lot of different ways you can search.  There’re a lot of, all the works are tagged, so you can make searches like you would anywhere else around a specific property.  If you’re looking for fanfic, you know, you can use the characters’ names or the ‘shipping names, you know, their portmanteau together as a couple.  If you’re looking for a very specific type of fanfiction, I think for more general types of works we have hot lists, you know, the equivalent of, like, a bestseller list, in every category that shows you what’s most popular that day or what’s trending across different categories on the site, and then we also have, you know, some editors’ picks, some curation that goes on, and I think a lot of your readers would really enjoy Wattpad.com/romance, which is where we regularly do different curated lists along different themes of things that we’re seeing trending and emerging in the community too.  I know for myself, once people get involved and are on the site, most of their recommendations end up coming socially.  I think the best thing to do is follow people, especially people that are writing and reading similar stories that you think sound interesting because as you see, you know, we are a social network, so as you see people posting and voting and commenting on other stories, you see all that activity in your news feed, and I think that’s how most of our users discover the next story they want to read.

Sarah:  So it’s a mix of social and knowing what you’re looking for, knowing the names of the things that you want, and then finding related things that are popular.

Ashleigh:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Do you get to, do you get to go through and recommend things?

Ashleigh:  Oh, we recommend things all the time.  The office is a very active channel, both of –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Ashleigh:  – you know, the stories that we’re really enjoying that we want everyone to read, because there is that sense, it’s, it is so social, you want to see your friends’ comments on it, and you want to enjoy it together, and what’s interesting about Wattpad is most stories are being serialized, so it might not be done yet, and, you know, some of my favorite moments working in the office are when we’re all reading a story that’s being serialized, and everyone will walk in and be, did you read the latest chapter yet?  It’s very much like that, you know, cultural moment of watching a TV show where everyone’s talking about what happened on Mad Men last night, but it’s around fiction and stories.

Sarah:  So, I do have a question that’s a little bit different before I, I want to follow up and ask you about trends and things that you see that are popping up as, as repeated themes in books.  But earlier today I was on Twitter, and I saw some, a writer complaining that her book was on Wattpad and that it was there, it was not her that placed it, and she was super mad about it, and I didn’t have a chance to engage with her, but what should a writer, what, what should a writer do if –

Ashleigh:  We take it very seriously.  We have a zero-tolerance policy for people that are posting works that aren’t their own.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Ashleigh:  So if this user reports it to Wattpad, it’s taken down immediately, and the user’s account is banned.  We do, you know, we have algorithms as well that can recognize works, so the more that we have reported, the easier it is to find it again from being uploaded.  But it is something that we do take very seriously and, and don’t approve of onsite.  And, you know, we do a lot to educate our users, too, and I think that, you know, people are smarter about that than they think.  I think most often what we see is people more on the other side of that.  Like, I think fanfiction writers are very aware of, of what the line is between writing down the exact same story and, you know, doing it in a creative way.

Sarah:  I’ve gotten a few books, actually, I think, two or three, that were bought by publishers.  Is that something that happens often, or is that something that’s sort of once or twice a quarter, that a work on Wattpad will get picked up for publication?

Ashleigh:  That’s actually happening, I think, all the time now.  I think to, to various degrees, I think a lot of our users are choosing to self-publish, and in keeping control, I think they’ve done a lot by building up their huge audience, and I think that sometimes they, it’s because the fans are asking for it, that they might choose to, to publish a version of it.  And then we see lots of writers that are being approached by publishers.  I think that they’re definitely seeing success from a lot of these writers onsite, and they want to get involved with, with it.  I think one of the most popular ones that, that came from, from Wattpad is a story called After that started out as fanfiction about One Direction –

Sarah:  Yes.

Ashleigh:  – but is now being published in, I think, thirty countries?  So, and it’s been a bestseller in, in many of those so far, so I think that’s, that’s one that caught a lot of people’s attention that’s leading people to make lots of acquisitions, and I think it’s something that’s different in, in different countries and different territories because when we look at the Philippines, like, Wattpad is huge in the Philippines.  We’re a household name there; I think 10% of the population of the entire country is on Wattpad, and there –

Sarah:  Whoa!

Ashleigh:  – it’s, it’s more the norm now that publishers only want to acquire stories from Wattpad, because they can see what they look like.  They can see, you know, it’s like making sure that it is resonating with audiences.  It lets you do some focus groups before you acquire the work, and they can kind of make sure it’s resonating with the audience they hope to, that will later purchase the books.  In the Philippines, we have a TV show called Wattpad Presents.  It’s kind of like a, a pop version of Masterpiece Theatre where each week they pick a new Wattpad story, and they serialize it in five different episodes each night that week, so they’ve kind of kept the fun serialization aspect of Wattpad.  I know we’ve just gone into our, our second season with that, and I think the stat I heard is that we’re number two in the country behind The Amazing Race Philippines.

Sarah:  Holy cow!  So wait, are they, are they reading the story, or are they actually developing a script and acting it out?

Ashleigh:  No, it’s, like, full developing script and, and acting it out.  It’s almost like a different miniseries each week.

Sarah:  Whoa!

Ashleigh:  Yeah!

Sarah:  That’s so cool!

Ashleigh:  And we’ve also had two major motion pictures in the Philippines too, and one of my, my favorite stories about this is that there’s a celebrity couple in the Philippines called KathNeil, Kathryn and ‘Neil.  It’s like the Brangelina of the Philippines, and there was a very popular fanfiction that was being written about them that they ended up finding and loving and then decided to star in it themselves.

Sarah:  No!

Ashleigh:  Yes!

Sarah:  That’s –

[Laughter]

Sarah:  – that’s incredible!  Oh, my gosh!  That’s –

Ashleigh:  So we kind of see what’s happening in the Philippines, and it’s starting to happen in other countries, too.  I think Turkey’s another one where even two years ago, it wouldn’t have even been in our, you know, top twenty countries, and now it’s, it’s right up there.  We definitely have more users in the States, but it’s such a bigger country that I, I don’t think we’re at the same level of awareness yet.  But we look at the Philippines and think, you know, that’s where we want to be here in another year.

Sarah:  Well, saturation in the U.S. is a lot harder prospect, ‘cause there’s over, you know, 300 million of us, but – or maybe it’s 400 million now – people keep having these babies on Facebook, and then I sort of lose idea of how big the country is.  But in a country that’s smaller, that’s an enormous amount of, of awareness.

Ashleigh:  Absolutely, and you now, I think we’re growing everywhere.  Right now we’re seeing in the States, you know, a new person is joining Wattpad every second, so that’s 80,000 new people per day.  I think we’re growing really quickly, and, you know, we’re just seeing that change in, in every country we go into.

Sarah:  That is really cool.  So, can you talk about some of the trends that you’re seeing in romance, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.?  What are the things that are really popular that keep popping up?

Ashleigh:  Yeah, absolutely.  You know, we see a lot of the traditional trends that I think the, the industry has seen overall.  You know, CEOs, lots of mafia stories, billionaires and bad boys.  Lately, there’ve been a lot of stories about personal training.  That’s been something that I found particularly interesting.  Like, suddenly personal trainers are in every other story, and I think that also leads to the, you know, be-, becoming a swan type story too.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  So, like the hero is a personal trainer, and the heroine hires him?

Ashleigh:  Yes.

Sarah:  Oh, my goodness.

Ashleigh:  [Laughs] And then, you know, I think those have been really great stories.  I think we also see some really interesting things happen.  Like, one of the best parts about Wattpad is that, you know, there’re all these micro-communities, and you can really write for your peers.  Like, I know that we definitely have a lot of teen readers, and I think that’s something that, you know, most teen fiction is written by adults for teens, and when you get teens writing stories for each other, I think it looks very different, and that’s, you know, one of the first areas that Wattpad really emerged, but I think a lot of other communities that don’t often get a lot of space to tell their own stories, a lot of minority communities are really flourishing on Wattpad.  We have huge, you know, African-American fiction, lots of Hispanic fiction, and one of my biggest interests lately seen on the site is there’s a lot of really interesting contemporary Muslim romance that usually involves –

Sarah:  Really!

Ashleigh:  Yeah, like, really modern settings, you know, a lot of kind of young women in that New Adult era that are, you know, still very religious, very devout, but also are living in a modern world, and how do you navigate romance?  Like, what do you do when all of your friends on Tinder and, you know, you’re in a very different place.

Sarah:  So the areas that are not being represented by books being published are being addressed in fiction online by teen writers.

Ashleigh:  Yeah, and, you know, I, not just teen.  I mention teen as a, as what we’re seeing in the teen community too, but these are, are lots of, you know, young women, you know, in the age of twenty-five to thirty that are, are writing their own stories on site.

Sarah:  And the, the serialized format helps build momentum, in your experience?

Ashleigh:  Oh, absolutely.  I think it helps build momentum in your writing but also in, you know, that, you know, that attention that you receive.  When things are, are published kind of each week, one thing that’s really interesting about Wattpad the app is that every time a story’s updated that you’re following, you get a push notification right to your phone, so for readers it’s a great way to see immediately when there’s more, and you know, as a, as a mobile app, 90% of our traffic is coming, you know, from the app and the mobile site, so it’s something that’s very easy for people to access on the go, you know, during commutes, during other places like that, and they’re able to, you know, start reading right away.  And I think that serial nature also leads to more comments and more sharing because, you know, if you were just to read a novel front to back, you know, you got lost in it in the same way.  I, I’m sure you know that there are other e-reader apps that have, you know, launched things like in-line commenting, hoping to kind of prompt discussion, but I think serialization is the magic that really makes that come alive, because when I can’t read the next chapter yet, that’s where I’m going to say, oh, I can’t wait, and, like, I, I hope that you address this, or I think this is going to happen, and, and not only conversations between the reader and the writer but between other readers too.  You know, they’ll highlight their favorite quote and talk about what they think he means and was this foreshadowing?  And for the writer to be able to be an audience to that, I think, is, is really interesting for them to develop their story, and I think it also, you know, prompts a lot more excitement and activity that helps accelerate their reading too.

Sarah:  And in a technological universe where you can pretty much get anything that you want immediately, having to wait is like –

Ashleigh:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – really frustrating!

Ashleigh:  It is, it’s frustrating, but it’s also so fun.  Like, there’s a story that I –

Sarah:  It’s not an experience we have a lot lately.

Ashleigh:  Yeah, it’s not, but you also, you know that it’s happening in real time.  Like, I’m very conscious, one of my favorite stories being written on Wattpad right now is a fanfiction about Kim Kardashian, Trapped in Her Own Game –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Ashleigh:  – and I follow the writer on Twitter, and sometimes he’ll give, like, teasers of, like, the scene that he’s writing, and he doesn’t know, you know, what, what’s going to happen, and I just love that, you know, that anticipation that it causes.  Like, now I know what he’s going to be writing about next, and I don’t even know when it’s going to come.  So I think having that level of, I, I think that suspense makes you more excited about things.

Sarah:  Plus, when you have that suspense, it makes you go back and read over what you’ve already read to sort of capture that same feeling again before you get the next piece.

Ashleigh:  Of, for sure.  It makes you reread it; it makes you Google it to see if anyone else is talking about it.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Ashleigh:  Like, I found a lot of other people that I follow on Twitter now because I’ve noticed they’re reading the same story and, like, oh, I can ask them a question about it.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  So, in terms of numbers, and I don’t know if you can give away this sort of data, and if you can’t, forgive me for asking.  I’m sort of used to Kobo where they’re kind of like, here!  Here’s all of our data.

Ashleigh:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  We’re going to take all our clothes off; here you go!  The, the most popular stories on, on Wattpad, what kind of readership do they have?  Are, are they, is there, like, a, an individual readership in the hundreds of thousands or the millions?  Like, what are the, the most popular things on, on Wattpad versus the sort of things that are in the middle?  What’s the difference there?

Ashleigh:  Oh, well, you know, I think that there, there’s a huge difference between, you know, what’s most popular and kind of what’s in the middle.  I mean, you can look at our, our hot list today, and I think you’d find most of those top stories, as in, like, what’s most popular today, are probably in about fifty million reads?  Now, I can be pretty transparent about how we count reads, so because stories on Wattpad are serialized, each chapter counts as a new read, because that allows a writer to see the progression of how many, you know, reads does each chapter have?  That’s also, you know, different from a page view, because one chapter can be fifteen pages, right?  So, you know, this is a huge amount of activity that people are spending, you know, on these stories, reading these stories.  I think the unique readers that a lot of these stories have, it’s definitely in the millions.

Sarah:  Do you notice that the readership – what about the middle?  What about, what about stories in the middle?

Ashleigh:  Yeah, I think, you know, just to give you a sense of how many stories there are –

Sarah:  Yeah, there’s a lot!

Ashleigh:  There’s over a hundred million stories on the site.  So it’s, it’s kind of hard to say kind of how we’d even define middle or what that would be, ‘cause it’d be so different by category and by country, and there’re a lot of stories, like, similar to YouTube, that are posted, and the writer never shares them with anyone or really does anything, so there’re a lot of those kind of, you know, four or five read stories that people might have just kind of stumbled upon in search.  So, it, it goes all the way up from things that have, you know, maybe one reader all the way to, you know, millions, and I think a lot of writers are just really happy when they’re starting out and they find a community of even, you know, thirty regular readers that are, you know, really strong, encouraging beta readers that are reading every chapter.  I think that’s a lot of the users we hear from all the time on our help channels just being like, I love Wattpad so much!  This has been so exciting for me to see, and I’ve found a lot of confidence in my writing.

Sarah:  That’s really cool.  But like I said, there’s, there’s a great deal of encouragement found in someone saying, no, no, no!  You don’t suck!  Keep going!

Ashleigh:  [Laughs] Yeah, I think even just knowing that someone’s reading it, I think, you know.  I don’t consider myself a writer by any means.   I’ve always loved working with writers and, you know, working in that space, but it’s something that I’ve always felt a bit insecure about myself, but when you’re reading lots of stories on Wattpad and you’re seeing all of the amazing comments and the, the wide variety of the place that people are at in their career, I think it makes it feel a lot more accessible?

Sarah:  Yes.

Ashleigh:  Like, I think that working and publishing and, and even though I’ve worked in places where, yes, you see manuscripts and you see things at different kind of times in their life cycle, for the most part, we see finished books all the time, and, you know, you have a sense of the work that goes into it, but I think it makes it feel like, oh, I couldn’t do that.  I, I think that when you start to see the first drafts of everything and you see things kind of like right after they’re written, like, yes, you might notice a few mistakes, but I also think that makes it feel like, more like something that you could also do.  You don’t have to come out with this finished, perfect, you know, done manuscript –

Sarah:  Yes.

Ashleigh:  – because I think the reality of that is that takes a lot of time and a lot of people and a lot of expertise to get it to there.  I think a lot of the stories on Wattpad might be there one day, but there’s also something that’s, you know, so organic and living about the stories that are being written on Wattpad.

Sarah:  Are the stories that are there usually read within their own country, or do some, do a lot of them have an international audience?

Ashleigh:  A lot of them have an international audience, which also is something that became interesting, you know, when they become published.  Like, Anna’s, Anna Todd’s After in particular, you know, being able to go to the publisher and saying, yeah, this is where my readership is coming from really led to a lot more international sales.

Sarah:  Because they already knew that there was a base of operation, a base audience there that they could potentially grow.

Ashleigh:  Absolutely, and every writer on the site gets those writer analytics so that you know where your audience is coming from.

Sarah:  That’s very cool.  What are some of the other trends that you see developing?  Are there things that you’re watching in addition to, say, you know, bodyguards that you think, oh, that, that could be the next big thing?

Ashleigh:  I’ve been into this, I, I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff in the medical area coming, you know, really high up again, but rather than, like, doctors or, you now, surgeons, more on the side of, like, EMTs, like, emergency response type people.  I think there’s been a lot of kind of romance stories around that type of career track too.

Sarah:  So, sort of like blending superheroes and cowboys.

Ashleigh:  Yeah!  I hadn’t thought about it that way – [laughs] – but I would agree, or I think it’s just kind of a more, grittier, more, like, urgent type of career that usually leads to those same type of, you know, psychological dramas that people enjoy too.

Sarah:  And the, and the intensity.

Ashleigh:  The tortured –

Together:  – yes.

Sarah:  High emotions, lots of intensity.  So, what are some of the most popular stories that are still in progress?  What are some of the things that you, that you like to tell people to read, in addition to the, the Kim Kardashian Trapped in Her Own Game –

Ashleigh:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – which is really very cool.

Ashleigh:  Absolutely.  I think there’s one chick lit story that a lot of people are really into in the office right now called Bon Bons to Yoga Pants that is one of those, you know, it’s a, it’s a really cute story about, you know, personal improvement, for one thing, but a woman trying to, you know, change her life and her health.  It’s been really interesting.  There’s one called Rookie in Love that actually won the Harlequin contest, So You Think You Can Write, last year on Wattpad that, it’s really good too.  There’s a really good kind of classic bad boy story that’s been really popular called Chasing Red, and you know, we’re happy to put together a bit of a, a list of stories for you too, if you’d like to, to post that.  What do you love to read?  And we’ll come up with some selections that we think you’ll like.

Sarah:  Oh, if you hang on just a moment, my dog is going to tell you that he –

Dog:  Bark!

Sarah:  – does not like that the UPS man is here right now.

Ashleigh:  Oh – [laughs] – well, it’s always exciting to get packages.

Sarah:  Yes, and it’s just completely unacceptable to my dog that someone comes near the front porch.  Excuse me!  Relax, dude, he’s gone!  He’s even pointing at the door.  Like, there’s a person!  I’m going to kill him!

Ashleigh:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I, I really, I, I notice that my personal reading tastes, they fluctuate.  Sometimes I’m really into sort of slice-of-life worldbuilding where there’s a couple other things going on, but mostly you just get to experience all the different people operating in a given world –

Ashleigh:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – and I look for a lot of that when I’m looking at fanfic, mostly because I miss the world; I want to go visit.

Ashleigh:  Yes.  

Sarah:  Which I imagine is a very, very common thing.

Ashleigh:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  But with other stories, I’m honestly sort of in a bit of a rut.  I’ve tried about four or five books this past weekend, and none of them worked for me, so I’m just, like, grumpy, ‘cause I can’t find a thing that I’m excited to read.  I will accept any and all recommendations.

Ashleigh:  Yeah, well, we’ll have to send you the Kim Kardashian fanfic.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yeah, I, I think that sounds pretty amazing.

Ashleigh:  Yeah, I think –

Sarah:  So, do you, do you write on Wattpad as well?

Ashleigh:  Well, everyone that works for Wattpad has to write.  That’s, you know, once a year –

Sarah:  Wait, really?

Ashleigh:  – we have a, a write-a-thon – [laughs] – where, well, I think it really helps us understand the product and our users.  You know, a lot of our users are writing, and to understand both from a technical perspective of what is frustrating about this process, and from emotional perspective of what does it feel like to put yourself out there like this and to get your first comment and your first readers and votes?  So there are some stories that, you know, I’ve written on Wattpad publicly, and then there’re ones that, you know, a lot of us in the office will get this great idea of, like, why is there no fanfic about this yet?  Then it’s like, okay, we’re all going to write it, and we’ll, we can create a fake account and just kind of start that and see what happens.

Sarah:  That’s very cool.

Ashleigh:  Yeah, it’s great to be in such a creative office with so many, you know, smart people that are, are working in this space.

Sarah:  That is extremely cool.  Outside of Wattpad or on Wattpad, ‘cause I’ve asked you this question about Wattpad, but I always ask guests what are, what are you reading that you want to tell people about?  I know that you’ve talked about that in the world of Wattpad.  Are there any books off of Wattpad, or both on Wattpad that have been published later, that you recommend?

Ashleigh:  Yeah, well, I definitely recommend, you know, After.  I think that’s one that, that I was really excited about.  I, I love fanfiction right now in general.  In addition to, you know, the Kim Kardashian story I mentioned, there’s a really fantastic story right now that’s being written about Kaylor, which is Taylor Swift and her supermodel best friend, Karlie Kloss, that is –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Ashleigh:  – it’s a really well-written story about, you know, what it must be like to be falling in love with your best friend and also be under, you know, the international scrutiny of the press and, and what that must be like while you’re still figuring out, you know, who you are and what you feel –

Sarah:  Wow.

Ashleigh:  – and it’s being really well written, and that one’s called Kaylor: The Timeline.  Yeah, and I think in my, oh, I feel like my, like – I, I just came back from holiday, so my off-Wattpad reading is, is pretty pretentious right now.  Well, it sounds pretentious, but I’m totally in love with it.  But have you been hearing anything about the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan series?  It’s so, so good.

Sarah:  No!

Ashleigh:  It’s this woman who is writing this, you know, four-volume, you know, epic story about, it’s about a friendship.  It’s about her relationship with her best friend through her life and how they’ve, you know, encouraged each other and competed with each other and hated each other, but, like, it’s always been kind of the center relationship to her life.

Sarah:  And that’s a, a series?

Ashleigh:  Yes, that is a series.  The fourth one’s about to come out in September, and I cannot wait.

Sarah:  So you read that on vacation?

Ashleigh:  I read that on vacation, and I immediately came back and was like, we all need to write fanfiction about –

[Laughter]

Ashleigh:  – about this series, so I have a few of my coworkers reading it now too, and we talk about it all the time.

Sarah:  This world needs to be visited again.

[music]

Sarah:  Before we go, I wanted to share an email that I received recently that I think I can answer, but if you have ideas of how you would answer this question or your opinion, we’d like to hear about it.  So let’s start with this email from Sam:

Dear Sarah,

My friends and I are fans of your website, most especially your podcasts, ‘cause they’re a fun way to find new material for our book club and learn about the romance genre and the people working in it.  It might interest you and the other ladies to know that our club, your fans, are a mixed bunch who meet over Twitter from all over the place, like Argentina, the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, Canada, and the U.S.

Sarah:  That is so cool!

Anyway, a topic that comes up quite regularly in our club is book covers, particularly those of historical romances.  My question is, could you possibly discuss a little about book covers for historical romances in terms of the process that goes into it.  Particular points of interest are how some models end up on different covers for different authors and how it works for self-published books versus those under a different publishing house.  I remember that in one of the older podcasts you shared that you have an oil painting which was once used for a book cover made by a man whose current job is to draw realistic clouds for Pixar.

Sarah:  It’s DreamWorks, but yes, that’s totally true.

You and your guest – Erin Galloway, I think – also mentioned stock photos, coloring photography, and all those other terms that make sense individually, but my brain can’t connect them in a clear way so that I can see how these become the book covers that we browse.  My friends and I have giggled over behind-the-scenes photos and videos of cover models in breeches and gowns, so we do know that photography is involved, but that’s about the extent of our knowledge.  I think this might be a topic that other romance fans are interested, since even though we’re not supposed to judge books by their covers, we all do it.  For example, if a book has a red-headed woman or man on the cover, I am there.  Goodbye, money; hello, sexy ginger.  The plot is basically secondary in these scenarios.  I have a feeling that people who have biases similar to mine, which is another reason why these covers are so important.

Anyway, thank you very much for taking the time to read this, and I hope to hear from you.

Kind regards,

Sam

Sarah:  Okay, I do actually know a little bit about this, because I am totally nosy about the cover art, because I find it fascinating.  In sort of the broad scale, there was a time when there were covers that had oil pictures or oil portraits or paintings, or what looked like a painting, of a couple, and the hair got bigger, and the boobs got bigger, and the, and the dresses got bigger, and those were a particular style for historicals way back in the day.  Then we moved on to flowers and pearls and closeups of, you know, feminine things like flowers and pearls.  There were landscapes, there were closeups of castles, there were single, single color – there was a bunch of these – a single pastel color with, like, a belt, and I’m sure that has a more proper name in graphic design, but there’d be, like, a little band across the middle, and in the middle would be, like, a little cameo or a castle or some, some fields of wheat and somebody looking away.  Now, the way that books signal to the consumer has changed so much, there’s a number of different styles for historical covers.  Like, for example, I’ve noticed, I think a bunch of the Mary Jo Putney books are being released where there’s a landscape, and there’s a woman in the foreground who is looking away, so you don’t see her face, but you see her from the back, head to toe.  And then, of course, there’s the trend where you have people who are facing the reader, but they’re all cut off from, like, the nose down or from the chest down, and as I’ve said before, I have this sort of ridiculous fantasy of all the heads of these models meeting.  I looked so good!  You looked great, man, but all you get is your chest and your kilt.  Sorry!

As far as photography and stock photos and oil paintings, it used to be that the process was an artist would be commissioned to create a portrait or a painting for the cover, and they would get photographs, or they would, themselves would do a photo shoot, and they would create, you know, create the scene with models, couple of costumes, or maybe just a dress that had the, the volume of fabric that was needed.  They would do a photo shoot, they’d take the photos, and then they would paint the portrait based on those photos.  It was photorealistic painting.  And I have the interview with the cover artist who now works for DreamWorks, and I can link to that in the podcast show notes, so you can see his account of what his job used to be like.  He says that he remembers getting on the subway to go to a publishing house with the card on which the, the art board on which the portrait was painted, and it was still wet, and he was afraid to bump into anybody or smear it.  Like, I can think of a lot of things that would flip me out, but riding the subway with a wet oil painting that ultimately I might get paid for is, like, totally in the top three, right?  

So it used to be that you would have these commissioned paintings for books.  That’s not really economically feasible anymore.  Now you have some photo shoots that a publisher will do for an entire line of books or just to develop their own private collection of stock photography.  I remember in 2009, I went to Canada to promote the first book that I co-authored, Beyond Heaving Bosoms, and I got to tour the Harlequin offices, which, seriously, they should, like, sell tickets for this tour; it was really fun.  They had just done a photo shoot for their own cover art collection, and you know that sometimes you’ll see – and I make fun of it, because it’s awesome – they’ll take the same photograph and flip it around or change the colors, because they use their own portfolio of stock images.  At the time, the super popular look among fashion models, particularly in Toronto, was extremely thin, and they needed a different kind of model, so Harlequin ended up hiring firefighters, EMTs, bodybuilders, and personal trainers, and people who were in peak physical condition with a lot of muscles, and those were their, their models for a lot of their covers, which I think is kind of funny and very cool.  [Laughs] And, you know, you’d have these firefighters, like, oh, all right, toga time, and next up, you’re going to wear some breeches and your shirt’s going to be unbuttoned but still tucked in, ‘cause that’s how romance heroes roll.  Other publishers definitely do stock photograph shootings.  You’ll see the pictures on Twitter sometimes.  There’ll be a picture, and then that picture is taken and adjusted on a computer to make it look like oil, to try to refer back to the photorealistic paintings from, you know, twenty years ago.

The other option, as you mentioned, is self-publishing, and self-published authors usually search through portfolios of stock photography that are available to everyone, which is why you’ll see that same guy with those same pants and those same massive pectoral muscles over and over and over.  There are – [laughs] – there are many, many photos that have appeared on, like, eight or nine different books.  And you’ll sometimes see that with publishers.  For example, there’s a Julie James book that has the same photo image as a book from Loveswept.  There are images of couple embracing that you can find in different pieces.  I’ve noticed one, Sarah Mayberry’s Her Best Worst Mistake has a guy who is facing the reader, and the woman is facing him, and he is pulling up the strap of her dress, and she has a very curvy physique, so it looks like she has an extremely pronounced hourglass figure.  I’ve seen those two models on about three or four different covers, with the dress, without the dress, with the strap, the strap is down, the strap is up.  The, the same photo shoot can produce images that work as a romance cover, and so authors who are looking for covers, or cover designers who are looking for cover art to design for authors as, as a service, will pick up those same images, so you’ll see the repetition.  Because it’s no longer economically feasible to do individual oil portraits – although it would be so cool if it was – that doesn’t happen as much anymore.  There are photo shoots for specific books, there are photo shoots for an entire line or an entire publishing house.  Some publishers are developing stock photography portfolios that are just for their own use.  

But then there’s the problem of the lack of representation of diverse people in stock port-, portfolios like iStockphoto, Bigstock, Getty, that sort of thing.  Courtney Milan has written about this.  A lot of authors of color have written about this.  There are not very many images of women in color in particular that would work for romance covers.  So I know of two projects that I think are still in development to have a photo shoot done by a professional photographer of lots of different models of color in different historical periods and poses so that a new portfolio of stock images featuring couples that are more diverse would be available to writers, and I know that there are at least two that are in progress, or they’re, they’re going to happen, or they are happening now, which I think is so cool.

One of the interesting things about historical romance in particular is how the images on the covers have changed, and they change more and more rapidly.  I still – and I’ve said this before – I’m still a little jarred and confused when I see a historical romance and the image on the cover is clearly a photograph in color, because my brain, being a stickler for weird things like this, instead of, say, where I put my keys, my brain will say, uh, there was no color photography then.  That doesn’t make any sense.  So as a reader, for my own personal tastes, I like it when a photograph is manipulated in such a way that it doesn’t so much look like a photograph anymore.  If it’s very, very obviously a photograph, then my brain goes wait, what?  That, that’s not, wait, what?  That’s not right.  Totally my own tastes.  My tastes are weird:  I own this.

So that is a brief sketch to answer your question about the cover images for historical romances.

Now if you are a historical romance author or photographer or model, or you know about cover art, or you have things to say, I would really welcome your input this topic.  ‘Cause you know, I happen to really like talking about romance covers.  Like, a lot.  It’s, like, one of my favorite things to talk about.  So email me at sbjpodcast@gmail.com if you have suggestions or if you have some fun, funky fresh, insider knowledge, because, you know, I think that covers and the development of what romances look like is fascinating.  So if you have ideas or knowledge about this topic, I would love to hear from you.

And if you have ideas or suggestions for another topic or you want to ask questions, email us!  sbjpodcast@gmail.com

And if you would like some information about Wattpad or would like to see some of their most popular romance stories, they have set up a link specifically for you.  Like, you personally.  It is w.tt/smartbitches, so that’s Watt without the a, w.tt/smartbitches, and you can see all of the romance stories that are super popular that they think you might like.

This podcast was brought to you by Berkley, publisher of New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Ashley’s The Scandalous Mackenzies, which features two Mackenzies novellas together for the first time in paperback, on sale September 1st.

The podcast transcript this week was sponsored by Married Sex, a novel by Jesse Kornbluth.  When a husband tries to convince his wife to join him in a tryst with another woman, there are unintended consequences in this sharply observed, erotic tale about the challenges –

The music you are listening to is brought to you by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is the Peatbog Faeries.  This track is called “The Dragon’s Apprentice,” and if you didn’t know, I love dragons, and I totally dig this song.  Even if it weren’t called “The Dragon’s Apprentice,” I would still dig it.  This is from their new album Blackhouse, which I love, and you can find it online at Amazon or iTunes or wherever you buy your music.

I will have links in the show notes to all of the articles and pieces of news and stories that we talked about, and the books that we mentioned as well, so if you’re curious or you have recommendations of stories that you think we should read, definitely email me.

But on behalf of Ashleigh and Jane and myself, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

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