My pursuit to uncover a clear definition of women's fiction and understand what differentiates it from romance sent me to the depths of the publishing industry and back. I share with you my quest to answer these questions. The first stop on this grand adventure took me in search of hard, warm facts. Tattered Cover shelves women's fiction in the general fiction area. This practice makes it difficult to analyze sales, since Women's Fiction isn't sold or shelved as its own category.
Women read more than men and women buy more books than men.
These conclusions support the theory that the concerns of women's lives are very important in today's literature. Scouring my own dusty archives of previous Romance Writers Reports and Romance Writers of America industry statistics, it is clear the romance genre is a staple of women's fiction. The romance market is serious business, producing serious revenues, by serious women. Women's contemporary fiction is a growing market and includes many of the facets of other genres. The woman is the star of the story and her changes and emotional development are the subject.