Romantic Times Rewind: March 2016 Ads & Features

In this week’s podcast episode, we’re looking at the ads and features in the March 2016 issue of Romantic Times, aka RT Book Reviews.

Special and massive thanks to Shannon Stacey for sending me this issue!

You can also find all the RTRW content at our category page for Romantic Times Rewind. 

And, most importantly, if you want to listen and follow along with this entry, we have more detail in the audio, but you can click play and listen and read and absorb all the visual goodness:

Cover time!

As we’ve mentioned, RT had two basic styles of cover: author headshot, large/small cover art, or a mix of both. This is some great cover art so I’m not surprised it’s the main image.

A tale of two ads on two pages!

I thought the text was hard to read, and the overall effect was beige.

Then I saw this ad:

SO many questions.

Is that guy the moon?

Is that other guy growing out of a tree?

Is that third guy growing out of the gravel?!

I’ve never been to Wyoming. Does this type of thing happen there? Giant heads growing out of the ground? Like I said, questions: I have them.

Special fun times: if you worked in or around romance publishing, you’ll recognize many of the people in this full page collage of the RT Holiday party:

(If you want to zoom in on a larger-sized version of this page, I’ve uploaded a higher-res version.)

Up in the top left below the circle picturing Kathryn Falk, there’s a picture of Jude Deveraux.

Imagine going to a holiday work party and there’s Jude Deveraux. I would expire.

Suzie Weber was very upset that the RT Review Source reviews, which are the section of mostly self-pub books reviewed for a fee, are not easy to find on the RT website.

Suzie can’t find the reviews, so the advice is to search “RT Review Source” on the RT site. There’s no menu item, alas. Woe!

This issue had several articles about YA, including an article about DIY YA, or self-pub and the YA market. Jennifer L. Armentrout had smart things to say:

“Armentrout believes that once an e-tailer figures out how to allow teens to buy their own books without using their parents’ accounts, sales of self-published YA will skyrocket. “Amazon is trying to launch things into space; they will figure out how to bypass the barriers to teens paying for books,” she says. “It’s going to really change the landscape in the sense that you’re going to start seeing more digital sales from teens” once the payment barrier is removed.

There’s another kid-specific hurdle – a friendly one! – that stands between teens and their self-published YA: librarians.

“A vast majority of teen readers get their books from the library,” Armentrout explains, “and there’s the stigma of self-publishing that holds these educational institutions back from adding self-published titles to their collections. Even though most self-published books are as edited as traditionally published books, the stigma of typos and poor grammar is a concern for educational institutes.”

And author Mari Mancusi wrote an article about making the move from adult romance to YA.

 

YA isn’t about looking back at being a teen. It’s being that teen now. You want it to feel legit. You have to get into their heads. Their thought processes are different. Their world is immediate. Their emotions are raw, and what might seem inconsequential to an adult might feel like the end of the world to a teen. Also, whereas romances tend to draw on a lot of backstory – where something that once happened to the hero and heroine shapes their reactions to current events – in teen fiction, that past is happening now. Those experiences need to be on the page.

We’ve talked about this in other episodes, especially when there’s a review that criticizes a heroine in a YA novel who is a teenager for…acting like a teenager.

We both stopped for a bit at this ad – yet again, we’re back in the age where publishers had blogs.

Amanda was intrigued by the cover for Resist where that guy is getting to second base on the cover.

We also talked about this guy.

You know this guy, right?

Amanda thinks he looks like the underside of a stingray:

She’s…not wrong!

Amanda was transfixed by the bizarre use of title case in this ad:

The Mercury Is Rising!

Also, this guy is On! Fire!

I maintain that this cover model knows what an iPhone is. Amanda thinks her dress is poorly tailored.

We had a lot to say about this ad, which looked to me like a collection of Clancy-esque books, which is probably the point.

We had SO many questions based on this one quarter-page ad:

First, Tirgearr Publishing is still in business – hell yeah! Most of the time, when we encounter a digital press in this era of RT, they don’t exist any more (neither does the magazine itself).

And they have MERCH. GAME OF TOMES.

I can’t endorse schtupping atop your passport, but everything else is making me very happy.

Check out these PANELS from the RT in 2016:

This one in particular was indeed excellent:

ANATOMY OF PARANORMAL ROMANCE:
LOVE, MYTH, AND MAGIC
Paranormal romance is the only genre that mixes monsters, heroes, humor and unique mythology, yet lets the love story take center stage. The panel focuses on unique mythology, distinguishing characteristics and tropes o paranormal ro mance. Find out more about this unique genre that threatened to put Scribd out of business.

MODERATOR: Ilona Andrews
PANELISTS: Nalini Singh, Darynda Jones, Jessica Clare (a Jessica Sims)

What a lineup!

There were also a few ads for the RT, which, trigger warning, was at the Rio in Vegas that year.

First, 10:15-11:45 pm? PACIFIC TIME?!!? There is no way I’d be able to do that now.

Amanda went to this party. Apparently handcuffs were involved!

And then there’s this late-night event:

THE BAT PACK. Heather Graham, hand on my heart, throws the greatest parties. In Pittsburgh, as you’ve heard me say, there was a hangin’ on stage. I miss the Heather Graham parties.

This article from the Review Source, about video platforms. Look at this nostalgic collection!

120 seconds max on YouTube, y’all!

And then there were some covers in the Review Source we had some questions about.

The color palate of Blinding Fate is like 2020s interior design – beige and grey. And this is a suspense novel, not an inspirational!

Is that horse ok? Are those people ok? Are they growing from the same field as the guy in Wyoming!?

And…hang on…

Does that guy have two heads?!

And multiple arms?

What is happening?

People growing out of leaves and gravel, two headed magenta folks, and a 120 second limit on YouTube. What a time it was.

Thanks for joining us in March 2016!

A reminder: if you join the Patreon, you’ll get access to the entire issue as a PDF.

See you next month, when we head to April 2006, a time when contemporary and “new reality” (AKA paranormal) were in the same section, and all the romantic suspense author headshots were glaring like they were all mad at me.