I like a good kinky romance and EL James writing was so terrible that I couldn’t even get past the first chapter.

“He also claims, “E. L. James is no better or worse a writer than most of her compeers,” which is news to me, as a prolific romance reader who couldn’t make it halfway through the first Fifty Shades book.”

She’s a marketer. She surveyed the self-publishing landscape, realized fanfic was a great way to build an audience, and repurposed some old 90s erotica as Twilight fanfic. Then she unleashed her real talent for marketing.

That quote about the orgy is from Venetia—at the very end of the novel.

He also claims, “E. L. James is no better or worse a writer than most of her compeers,” which is news to me, as a prolific romance reader who couldn’t make it halfway through the first Fifty Shades book.

Oh, he does mention it, but Daddy gets top billing:

“She’s funny, she’s sexy, and as the funny and sexy (at least on the page, and for all I know in real life) Eloisa James, author of WILDE IN LOVE (Avon/HarperCollins, paper, $7.99), puts it, “In the last half decade, he’d seen an enormous white whale, the Great Wall…

I had the same reaction when I read this review—it seemed like he asked someone to give him a list of some popular romances from last century, then made a bunch of assumptions based on a quick perusal of them. His EL James comment gave him away as someone who has not read much in the genre. His “two bucket” theory is…

So, why does he even bring up E.L. James at all? She didn’t have a book in the crop that he was reviewing. Since when does a review of specific books become a statement about the entire genre as a whole throughout history?

From the excerpts provided, I would expect that Gottlieb’s piece was written around about 1980. Cartland, Steele? Most contemporaries focus on marrying ‘the boss?’ It appears that he felt that he could authoritatively write about an entire genre based on assumptions from popular culture and reading a couple of books…

Sixty-two, balding for 40 of them, grew up on science fiction, and I’m really pissed that I only discovered Georgette Heyer et al last year and won’t have time to catch up with this whole new universe I’ve fallen into. Quiz for the experts: a close variant of the phrase ‘any orgy I give, my wife will send the…

If a woman writes an in-depth novel about human relationships, it’s romantic trash. If a man writes the same thing, it’s a searing study of the human condition; it’s Litrahture.

I’m SO glad you name checked damn Franzen at the end. I don’t currently read romance, but I’ve got nothing against it, and follow all your articles about how the genre is growing and reaching. I think it’s important and fulfills a very obvious audience! But my damn, if we’re going to dismiss something because it’s…

Thank you for always championing my industry, Kelly. I love how much you love romance. :)

The Gottlieb piece was so condescending. Even when he complimented one of our living greats, Eloisa James, it comes off backhanded. Of course she’s talented, her father was a poet! It couldn’t be that she’s brilliant (Which she…

Anyone in book publishing knows this about romance fiction. To answer the question in the article about why Robert Gottlieb would go on and on about Danielle Steel? She makes whichever publisher she’s with boatloads of money. She must sell hundreds of thousands of each of her titles. He probably spent years trying to…

A much more eloquent response that I managed, which pretty much amounted to “these fucking motherfuckers need to gtfo”. If you don’t wanna take romance seriously, fine. We get that all the time. But don’t pay lip service to a real critiquing of romance when Smart Bitches has been doing it for far longer and actually…

I’ve always loved romance novels. My mom and her mom started me out when I was 10 with Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades. It and she are still my favorites to this day.

Shut up and take my money!

Well if he thinks “nothing is at stake” now, wait till he reads my sub-genre of Menopausal Mystery Erotica, in which our heroine pursues a man with very, VERY, cold hands...No one is safe...until the A/C is fixed.

“... tinged with an arrogant sense of noblesse oblige.”

He clearly has no idea of which he speaks. It’s almost Trumpian by virtue of being aggressively wrong in several different directions at once.