Romance fiction sales are booming internationally, and a Kiwi author is among those cashing in. By Sally Blundell.
Soraya Lane is living the dream. More specifically, she is living her dream. As an only child growing up in Christchurch, she loved animals – she talked her parents into buying a horse and aspired to be a vet. She loved reading, most memorably Bantam Books’ Saddle Club series, and writing her own stories.
Now, she lives with her husband, Hamish, and two young sons on a 4.8ha farm on the edge of Christchurch with two cats, two dogs, four horses, two rescue sheep and a back catalogue of 26 historical and contemporary women’s fiction titles which have topped Amazon charts and Kindle bestseller lists.
Late last year, Hachette, through its digital stablemate Bookouture, brokered a “high-six-figure” deal in Germany for her new Lost Daughter series and signed off sales in 14 other countries.
“I still can’t believe it,” says Lane, surrounded by a sea of Lego and an attentive Jack Russell called Oscar. “I’ve had this dream since I was so young.”
Lane graduated with a law degree from the University of Canterbury but, instead of entering the legal profession, she worked as a freelance journalist and copywriter while developing her writing career. In 2011, after seven rejected novels, Soldier on Her Doorstep was accepted by Harlequin Mills and Boon.
She was also doing a master’s degree in creative writing and for her thesis began her first historical novel. Voyage of the Heart, released in 2014 by Amazon Publishing, sold more than 150,000 copies.
She wrote a further 13 contemporary titles for Mills and Boon; a young-adult series called Starlight Stables, published under her maiden name, Soraya Nicholas; and a further nine World War II historical novels for Amazon. During the first lockdown, in 2021, she pitched her Lost Daughter series to Bookouture over a Zoom call. She received a contract a week later.
Today, she sets herself a daily goal of 2000 words to meet her three-books-a-year output. “If I don’t finish that before school pick-up, I go back to it at night.”
As she advised aspiring writers in an interview with Christchurch City Libraries, “You have to keep writing, keep learning your craft, and really research what publishers want.”
On a roll
Publishers want what readers want, and a growing number of readers want the emotion-laced, hope-filled, quick-fix escapism of romantic fiction.
Lockdown isolation, Netflix series Bridgerton and the bubbly enthusiasm of BookTok, the TikTok-linked review app, have all helped push romantic fiction to the forefront of fiction growth figures.
In the UK, sales of romance novels – including erotic, historical, paranormal, spiritual, medical and LGBTQI romance – are at their highest since 2012, when EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey shimmied across our shelves. In the US, sales of romance books jumped 24 per cent in the year to March 2021.
Official New Zealand sales figures show the “romance and sagas” category in this country now represents 15 per cent of all adult fiction sales, up from 9 per cent five years ago.
In libraries, crime still leads the genre pack, but romance writers Nora Roberts, Colleen Hoover and Nicholas Sparks feature in Auckland Libraries’ top 100 most-borrowed books of 2022, and romance constitutes nearly a quarter of the 100 most-popular ebook titles.
And readers are getting younger. According to Nielsen’s 2015 Romance Book Buyer Report, 30-44-year-olds read the most romantic fiction, followed by 18-29-year-olds (thanks to BookTok, a growing number of these younger readers are buying print rather than digital versions).
Romance fiction has long been mocked for its formulaic rules, including the necessary happy-ever-after (or, at least, happy-for-now) ending – and, as Romance Writers of New Zealand advises, “you never, ever kill the dog”. But, as i-D magazine’s James Greig wrote last year, “It’s rare to see people make fun of detective novels for eventually revealing the culprit.”
Lane blames this “eye-roll reaction” on the fact that most romances are written by women for women (84 per cent of romance readers are women). “You don’t make fun of a guy reading crime fiction, even if he reads the same author and the same kind of story over and over again.”
New Zealand’s focus on literary fiction is wonderful if that is what you love to read and write, she says. “But a lot of us love reading romance fiction. A lot of women have busy lives and maybe they’re having a hard time – it’s a beautiful thing to pick up one of those novels and it will take you on a roller coaster of emotions with that guarantee of a happy ending.”
Bristling with passion
As a blend of love story and romance, not all the Lost Daughters books will have a happy ending, but the first, The Italian Daughter, bristles with love, passion and the dilemmas of emotional commitment.
The story begins in 1946. Felix reaches for an engagement ring for Estee, the young ballerina he has loved since they were star-crossed adolescents. Estee is in torment. “No,” she whispers, “I want you to propose to me when you’re truly free to do so.”
From here, the story jumps to present-day London, where Lily is given a tiny box, one of seven retrieved from a former home for unmarried mothers. Inside is a programme from La Scala Theatre and a recipe written in Italian left by her grandmother’s birth mother for her lost daughter.
Who was Lily’s great-grandmother? What do these fragments reveal about Lily’s ancestry? A job as an assistant winemaker in northern Italy allows her to uncover the past and pitch into her own romantic adventure.
The chapters are short, the plot fast. The women are usually beautiful (if they are young), elegant (if they are older) and the men “devastatingly handsome”.
Winning acceptance
It is a cauldron of emotion – the first kiss, the loss of a child, presumed betrayal. Men sweep lovers off their feet, couples tumble on to beds (sex tends to be a series of asterisks), career-focused Lily surrenders: “She felt more like a character from a fairy tale; the setting, the people, the man, seeming as if they belonged to another life.”
Each of the next seven books – The Cuban Daughter will be out in June – will follow another young woman tracking clues left by her grandmother that will lead her to an exotic, and presumably love-filled, location.
“I wanted to write a series that reminded people what it felt like to travel, to be around people, to fall in love,” says Lane, who came up with the idea for the series during lockdown. “I wrote the stories I wished I was reading at that time.”
Despite the sniffy disdain of mainstream literary publications and indie bookshops, such stories are coming in from the cold. As Stuart Kells, an adjunct professor at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, wrote in 2019, romance writing is now being reappraised and revalued. The recurring themes of the genre, including anxieties about marriage, sex, choice of a partner and the pressure to adhere to social rules, “plausibly reflect something fundamental about urban life and the human condition”, Kells wrote.
Last year, Allen & Unwin announced its new commercial fiction prize, offering a $10,000 advance to novels of any genre that are, wrote publisher Michelle Hurley, “well-written, propulsive, character-driven”. Auckland writer Josie Shapiro is the inaugural winner.
Book festivals now host successful New Zealand romance writers such as Jackie Ashenden, Barbara DeLeo and NYT bestselling author Nalini Singh; next month, Auckland Libraries will be running a “Love is Love” romance promotion.
“You read constantly that New Zealand writers can’t make a living from writing fiction,” says Lane. “But if an author in America or London can achieve these things, why can’t we? I want young writers to know that you can actually dream and succeed.”
- The Italian Daughter, by Soraya Lane (Hachette, $36.99)
