Romance on the screen and on the page: Two Indicators

0:00This message comes from Bonterra. Your nonprofit's mission is big, but your team is small. With fundraising software from Bonterra's Network for Good, you can focus on changing lives. Big impact, less stress. Learn more at BonterraTech.com slash NFG. This is Planet Money from NPR. So there's this running joke that you can basically generate a holiday rom-com from a list of options. Yeah, so start with your main character. Maybe she is a hairy corporate lawyer from the big city. Or a beat-down interior designer. Ooh, or a baker. And she returns to her bucolic small town at Christmas time, of course.

0:43You know, she wants to, like, enter some kind of folksy contest or something. Or maybe she has to save the family Christmas tree farm from ruin. But then... Then she falls for an old flame. Or maybe the other baker in town. I don't know. Ooh, as long as he's wearing plaid. Or maybe he has a dog. He always has a dog. They meet at the dog park, actually. Oh my gosh. holding cups of coffee that obviously don't have any coffee in them. Maybe all of the above. All of the above, yes. I would 100 % watch that movie. I actually have watched that movie multiple times. I have too. It is a seasonal ritual with me.

1:18And it turns out it is a tradition for a lot of people. And this formula we talked about is actually part of what makes the industry so successful. Everywhere you look, from holiday movies to best-selling books, the romance genre is taken over. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erika Barris. And I'm Waylon Wong. Today we're bringing you two episodes from our daily show, The Indicator from Planet Money. All week we've been diving into the economics of love. Today, television executive Bill Abbott of Great American Family tells Adrienne Ma and me about how holiday rom-coms took over the seasonal airwaves.

1:55And then Darren Woods and I speak with media scholar Christine Larson about how romance novels went from a punchline to a booming genre.

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3:30Get time back to focus on your high-impact work. Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com slash podcast. That's grammarly.com slash podcast. It's become kind of a national pastime to grumble about how the holiday marketing blitz seems to start earlier and earlier every year. But believe it or not, there was a time when it seemed like there was not enough Christmas, at least not when it came to made-for-TV movies. Bill Abbott was CEO of Hallmark Channel's parent company for over a decade, and he remembers those barren days way back in the early 2000s. For the most part, the TV movie space was really only a few movies leading up to Christmas.

4:13You know, maybe you do five or six Christmas movies a year. Bill says he and others at Hallmark believed there was a big, untapped audience for Christmas content. People who wanted presents, snowflakes, sleigh rides, and most importantly, they wanted PG-rated romance. So in 2009, Hallmark launched Countdown to Christmas, a collection of movies that would air in the weeks leading up to December 25th. And Bill says things really got going a couple years later. That's when the network aired 12 original holiday films with titles like A Princess for Christmas and Mistletoe over Manhattan. Did you pick that because it was like the 12 days of Christmas?

4:54There was a little bit of that there, to be candid. You know, we kind of thought, what's a good number? And 12 kind of made sense for the business model anyway. A key part of this business model was frugality. Bill says they spent around$12 to$15 million on those dozen movies. To give you an idea of how thin that shoestring is, around that same time, Paramount released a romantic comedy in theaters called No Strings Attached, starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher. That single rom-com cost a reported$25 million to make. Yeah, Bill did not have that kind of Hollywood budget. So there were some trade-offs made.

5:33You look back, there are Christmas movies that had no snow, that were clearly in warm weather, things we would never do now because we didn't have the budget to create that overall setting and location that we've learned is so critical to making the viewer become immersed in Christmas. And so those were choices that we had to make just due to financial constraints. Even without Hollywood A-listers and elaborate sets, these movies have found both enthusiastic viewers and advertisers. Hallmark already kicked off Countdown to Christmas last week and will play holiday movies 24-7 through the season.

6:11And this year's lineup has over 30 new films. Streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have also aired their own original holiday rom-coms. As the genre's expanded, so have budgets. But a lot of the cost-saving measures from the early days have stuck around. For example, the movies tend to have simple, small-town settings, and they're shot quickly in just a few weeks. We have so many years in the business that we don't need more than two takes. You may recognize that voice as Danica McKellar. She played girl-next-door Weenie Cooper in the TV series The Wonder Years. She is also a Christmas movie mainstay.

6:47Maybe you watched Crown for Christmas or Coming Home for Christmas on Hallmark. You'll see a lot of, you know, 90s child stars like myself in these movies, in part because we know how to do this stuff. Danica is now at a network called Great American Family, which Bill Abbott launched after leaving Hallmark. Danica followed Bill when he switched jobs, and so did several other actors, along with the holiday movie playbook that Bill helped develop at Hallmark. One strategy in the playbook is shooting in Canada. The provincial government in Ontario offers a tax credit of 35 to 40 percent, as long as productions meet certain requirements around hiring local labor and services.

7:29One movie Danica shot in Ontario was Christmas at the Drive-In. In this film, her character is trying to save the town drive-in movie theater from getting torn down. Christmas is a beautiful tradition. And so is the drive-in. If that goes away, how could that possibly be a good thing for Brennington? Classic. Rescuing a troubled local business is, of course, a recurring theme of these movies. So, of course, we had to ask Danica about this economic angle. We don't like to have a lot of bad guys because we don't want to model bad behavior. So who's the bad guy? The bank. The rates have gone up. The bank is going to have to foreclose, right?

8:10you're not fighting against a person. You're fighting against the big economic structure that works pretty well most of the time in this country, but then there's some pitfalls, right? Yeah, capitalism. Are you allowed to say capitalism in a script? Are we allowed to say capitalism? It's never come up. But no, you don't want to get political in these scripts because our goal is to make people feel good. So if you bring up anything controversial at all, that might interrupt their feeling good. These stories present a pretty specific view of the world. One persistent critique of the genre is that it predominantly features straight white couples.

8:44Although you can now find more of a variety of stories at Hallmark and other streaming services. Hulu released a rom-com called Happiest Season in 2020, which starred Kristen Stewart. And Variety said it was the first queer Christmas rom-com. A lot of the movies, though, still tend to take place in small towns or the occasional fictional European monarchy that's untouched by current events or even pop culture. Yulene Kwong realized this in 2019 when she was hired to help write a Hallmark rom-com called Love on Iceland. And spoiler alert. It's part of my lore that I was fired by Hallmark. Oh, Yulene says she worked on the script with a partner and they kept getting notes that their writing was too hip for Hallmark.

9:29Like, for example, one draft had a reference to George Clooney and his wife Amal. Yulene said that had to go. So did a mention of a character working in politics. After maybe like three or four rounds of that back and forth, I'm sure some beleaguered executive at Hallmark was like, pull the plug. Yulene and her partner were let go via a polite conference call. But Yulene says they did get paid. She remembers her earnings being$30 ,000. And she and her partner are still credited as writers on the movie. That means they get residual payments whenever the film airs. Yulene has since moved on to rom-com projects with major studios.

10:06But she says she's still grateful for the Hallmark gig as a milestone in her early career. Before going into it, I thought they were very vanilla, kind of cookie-cutter romances. What I have learned is that there's a lot of work that goes into the making of a Hallmark movie. That said... I do hope that they continue to go more diverse and give more opportunities to other plucky young screenwriters and other plucky not so young screenwriters. As for Bill Abbott, he says a vanilla cookie cutter production was never his vision. There's a fine line, he says, between familiarity and repetition, between earnestness and something that's too sentimental.

10:50One thing, we have a, it's like the cheese alert. The minute we sniff it out, it's like, move on. Is there like a button you press to play a sound in like a screening room? I like that idea. It's the cheese alert. That's a great idea. I watched a movie today that I would have been pushing the button all day long.

11:13Coming up after the break, we dive into the romance genre and look at how novelists have found success in a challenging industry.

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12:49Taxes and fees extra. First three months only. See terms. If the last romance novel you looked at was a paperback at your local supermarket with a woman and a shirtless man embracing on the cover, well, fetch your smelling salts because things have really changed in the last couple of decades. Yeah, romance has gone mainstream. You'll find the books prominently displayed at Target and on the front tables at Barnes & Noble. Romance is one of the fastest growing and best-selling categories within publishing. And this growth comes with a lot of variety. There are modern day stories and historical stories.

13:24There's characters representing different facets of sexuality and gender. And settings from college campuses to fairy kingdoms to outer space. The romance genre is this vast and varied genre of books that feature a central love story and an emotionally satisfying ending. So that's the traditional definition of romance. Christine Larson is a journalism professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. I define romance a little bit differently because I'm interested in media economics. So I define romance as an almost entirely female-dominated industry of books mostly written about women, by women, and for women.

14:12Christine is the author of the book Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success. Her research involves studying authors' incomes between 2009 and 2014. That window of time covers the early boom in e-books, which was fueled by Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad. Using data from author surveys, Christine found that during this period, romance writers saw their median income rise by 73 percent. Contrast that to a 42 percent drop in income for other authors. Christine lays out two big factors for the success. Number one, an early adopter mindset and a willingness to experiment with digital technology.

14:54Romance writers were actually the very first writers to start digitally self-publishing even long before the Kindle came out. They were selling PDFs of books online in the 90s. When Amazon introduced self-publishing in 2007, romance writers took to the platform right away. They were also really productive, often publishing multiple books a year. And these authors didn't need the approval or marketing muscle of traditional publishers. Many writers already had built relationships with readers online via early internet communities like Prodigy. Christine says they could mobilize their fandoms to buy books.

15:37Romance readers historically buy more books than the average American. And these readers flocked to e-books. I mean, OnePlus as a reader is that with an e-book, if you're maybe feeling a little sheepish about an explicit cover, I mean, no one knows what you're reading. And so by 2011, 60 % of romances sold were in digital form. And plus, the payment structure for e-books let self-published authors keep more of their sales revenue. If I am a traditionally published author, let's say my book sold for$10, I would get about a dollar in royalties. But if I'm self-published, I sell the same book for$10, I get seven books.

16:15I get around 70%. So I can sell fewer books and make a lot more money. So after e-books, the second big reason behind the commercial success of romance writers, Christine says, is that they formed something called Open Elite Networks. This is where more established or senior members of a group are willing to forge relationships with newcomers. Christine says Open Elite Networks are credited for the growth of the Silicon Valley biotech industry in the 80s. In the romance industry, she's found a long history of authors helping each other get published and sharing information on how much they make.

16:51Priscilla Olivares is an author who has published eight romance novels and four novellas. Her latest book, Kiss Me Catalina, is about two mariachi musicians who fall in love on tour. I write closed-door romance, so things can get hot and heavy, but then it fades to black. I figure we all know what's happening there, and I want to give my character some privacy. Give them the room. They're practicing their songs. Yeah, that's right. That's what they're doing. And when it came to networking with other romance writers, though, Priscilla had more of an open door approach. She's part of a group of Latina authors who get together periodically for writers retreats, and they share details about their careers.

17:33Priscilla says she believes helping other authors improves conditions for everyone. If I'm offered this opportunity or this contract at these numbers, why would I not think my friend who I know is working equally as hard as I am? And so I think they are equally as deserving. So for me, I think it's that idea of there is enough for all of us and even more. So who can we help? One of the newer authors in Priscilla's network is Natalie Kanya. She discovered the romance genre in college when she picked up a novel from the bargain bin at her university bookstore. I instantly fell in love with romance, and I decided that was what I was going to write.

18:17Natalie said that the beginning of her career was lonely, but then she learned about a conference for romance writers, and from there she started making connections. You know, I would meet somebody and somebody would be like, you have to meet Priscilla, you gotta meet Mia, you have to talk to Adriana. I really found having that network super helpful, especially having and building a network with other women of color, because we know that the system works differently for us than it works for other people. Traditional publishing has long been criticized for excluding authors from marginalized backgrounds.

18:50In romance, only about 10 % of books published in 2023 were by Black, Indigenous, or authors of color, according to one industry report. For Natalie, the Open Elite Network has helped her break through. Early on in her career, she went to a luncheon, and she ended up sitting next to a romance writer she admired named Kristen Higgins. It was like a very fangirl moment. Kristen asked Natalie, what kinds of things do you want to write about? At the time, I was worried about writing Latine characters because I wasn't sure if they would sell. And Kristen Higgins said, always tell the story that you want to tell because it will reach who it needs to reach.

19:32Natalie eventually signed a contract to write three books about a Puerto Rican family in Chicago. Next week, the third novel in the series comes out. It's called Sleeping with the Frenemy, and it's about a firefighter reuniting with an old flame. Pun intended, Darian. I get it. And I'm starting to maybe catch the flame of romance novels after this episode.

19:59Check out The Indicator from Planet Money this week for the rest of their series on love. Tomorrow, they talk to the CEO of Hinge about the dating app Backlash. And on Friday, they ask economists to put their economic wisdom to the test and offer advice on love and dating. These episodes of The Indicator were originally produced by Julia Ritchie and engineered by Kweisi Lee. They were fact-checked by C.O. Juarez. Kate Kincannon is The Indicator's editor. I'm Waylon Wong. I'm Erica Barris. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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