Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, August 2, 1994                   TAG: 9408180046
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By PAULA SPAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

`ROMANCE' MAY BE THE GENRE, BUT THE LUST IS FOR A CONTRACT

Among the 1,720 members in attendance at the Marriott Marquis Hotel - most of them women who write in spare rooms and on kitchen tables and have yet to sell a manuscript - the real passion is to get published. The most cherished fantasy is signing an author's contract. ``Nothing can match it,'' promised the keynote speaker Nora Roberts, who - with 27 million copies of more than 100 titles in print - should know. ``Not even really great sex.''

Often the fantasy begins the way it did for Wendy Hilton-Jones, a State Department staffer from Vienna, Va. who first began reading romances when ``Sweet Savage Love'' got passed around her college dorm. ``You think, `I can write as well as that,''' says Hilton-Jones. So the fantasizers come to the RWA convention - this being the 14th - to meet published writers who dispense pointers, and editors and agents who can put them in print. ``It's about the business of romance,'' says Hilton-Jones.

Romances now account for close to half of all popular fiction sold. With $750 million in annual sales, the genre has thrived unabated through women's liberation, publishing-industry upheaval, economic downturn and the VCR.

Novice authors rarely strike it rich - advances for the previously unpublished run from $3,000 to $5,000. But there beckons the ``mainstream'' success of writers such as Roberts, Sandra Brown and Catherine Coulter, whose hardcovers appear on national bestseller lists.

It's become a tough game to break into.

``We have so many titles in production and under contract that we could publish into 1997 without buying another book,'' a Bantam editor advised 200 rapt note-takers at a workshop. Still, 700 or so of this year's conventioneers have published romances, and every year several more acquire the coveted pink satin ribbon attached to their RWA nametags that indicates a first sale.

There probably are 8 million stories in this Naked City - love stories that are at least 60,000 words in length, feature likable heros and heroines with strong libidos, and deliver unshakeably happy endings.

Romance novels can be futuristic (in one recent Bantam Loveswept title, the couple's matchmaker is an artificial intelligence computer) or otherworldly (featuring werewolves or angels). But editors say they also see a resurgence, after the ``glitz and glamour'' romances of the '80s, of ``the more traditional family-oriented plots - books with weddings and children, those rituals everybody dreams of,'' says Silhouette Editorial Coordinator Leslie Wainger.

Some books verge on the realistic: They're contemporary; they acknowledge social issues; they may have black or Latina heroines. Emilie Richards' ``Dragonslayer,'' published by Silhouette, features a hero who works with urban youth gangs and a heroine who is a nurse in a public health clinic.

Furthermore, there's a move in some quarters to ditch the ``clinch'' cover, with its requisite rugged (and preferably bare-chested) stud locked in embrace with his disheveled-but-stunning lover. Bantam's Loveswept has changed to floral borders and patterns emphasizing the author's name and title. A recent Silhouette cover bore a still life of a bridal veil hung in a rustic barn.

But romance novels can't get too realistic. ``The expectation of the reader is, they're not going to be depressed; they'll be uplifted,'' says one Silhouette editor. ``They won't be reading about their own rotten lives; they'll be swept away.''