As I am doing my blog round (I only have time to read about 4 of them, in all honesty) I stumbled upon a comment in one of them, which most definitely was promo. The post in question was a one sentence touting the "wonderfulness" of a book entitled "Soul Mate". It pissed me off so much to see that comment that no, I am not bothering to post either a link to it or the author's name.
Pretty much the website describes the book as being a contemporary story involving the involvement of a female adult teacher and an underage boy in one of her classes. I am sorry, but this is not "forbidden love" this is a story involving an adult and an underage (as in not of legal age) individual. Just because the adult is a female, doesn't make it a romance. Just because the adult is a female doesn't make it any less wrong than if it was a story involving a male teacher and an underage girl. Bottom line, this is not romance, no matter how the author wishes to present it.
The romance genre continues being "exploited" in this manner whenever someone wants to sell a book that has some sort of romantic relationship in it, and the individual decides that since romance is the best selling genre in fiction in general, that's the easy way to get the bucks. Call it fiction, for crying out loud, but don't call it a "romance". Do these people really think that romance fans fall for this crap? If someone does not believe that romance readers are not stupid, all they need do is research a bit online and they will find a good deal of author asshats that tried to pull that crap on romance fans and then had the balls to argue with the intended audience in romance forums like that in Amazon when they were slammed.
I don't doubt for a second that those books sell at least a few copies, but you can rest assured that those copies are sold either because those buying it were curious and wanted to see for themselves, or because the individuals in question were after the titillation factor or had some sort of "fantasy" and like reading that sort of story. That some of them may be romance fans, I guess so, however, you are definitely not going to get a best seller out of it by tagging the word "romance" to it, contrary to popular belief, lovers of the genre are not stupid.
Sorry, but I am totally FED UP and SICK of that sort of BS.
<end of rant>
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