Agree or Disagree: RWA Contest Categories Should Be Overhauled

Sylvia Day’s recent position piece on the possibility of an “Erotic Romance” category in the RITA’s, as well as yet another newbie’s query about what the heck “Long Contemporary” means made me start looking at the realm of RWA contest categories a little bit closely.

Here are the contest categories as they’ve stood for as long as I’ve been in RWA (with the exception of the Mainstream with Romantic Elements category, which is a relatively new edition):

Short Contemporary
Long Contemporary
Traditional Contemporary
Single Title
Romantic Suspense
Inspirational
Regency
Short Historical
Long Historical
Mainstream with Romantic Elements
Young Adult
First Book (RITA only)
Novella (RITA only)

When I look at that list, it looks positively Byzantine. Traditional Contemporary (i.e., super-short category romances with no sex) hasn’t made it in the Golden Heart Contest for years, and I’m sure it will pretty soon fall out of the RITAs, since the ONE publisher who is still publishing it just cancelled both lines it was published under (i.e., Silhouette Romance and Harlequin Romance). There’s supposed to be a new line to take its place, but I’m thinking that the days are numbered.

Okay, moving on. Short Contemporary and Long Contemporary used to stand for the category romance lines that were short and long, respectively (No shit, Sherlock). But what has happened to those lines in the last few years? Well, you’ve still got your Desires and your Presents to fill up the short requirment, though Temptation has gone the way of the Dodo (being shuttled into an imprint of Presents/Mills and Boone Modern). Love and Laughter/Yours Truly/Duets/Flipside have all met early demises.

Long Contemporary isn’t faring any better. You’ve still got Intrigue and Intimate Moments (though their numbers have been slashed) and Superromance — and, if it ever gets up and running, Epic (or whatever it’s being called this week) and Nocturne, the paranormal line, which isn’t debuting for another year or so. However, a lot of these long category lines are slippery to define. What will be the right category for a Next book — it’s category, but it’s not a romance. What about Bombshells? Are they long contemporaries? Romantic Suspenses? Mainstream with Romantic elements? How about Intrigues? RS or Long Contemp? What about a Paranormal Intimate moments? LC, Para, RS…? Nocturne, I’m sure, will be in the same boat.

Single Title is a mess, what with no one knowing if their book is a single title book or a romantic suspense or paranormal book that is ALSO a single title romance. I mean, there are plenty of books that fit in there quite neatly (Rachel Gibson’s, Wendy Wax’s, etc.) but there are other people who go there because they just don’t know where else to go.

Similarly, Romantic Suspense, Paranormal, and Inspirational are all doing okay, as long as you don’t think about whether or not the books belong in any other categories instead. If you are writing a fantasy or a Christian book, but it isn’t a romance, do you put it in mainstream or in para or in inspy? What if it’s an inspirational romantic suspense? How suspenseful does your book have to be before it stops being an ST and starts being an RS? How paranormal? How Christian? what if it’s paranormal AND historical? Are you screwed, or only if you get a judge who thinks that all paranormals should be kept well away from other books so they don’t bleed their paganist ways onto the rest of us.

Now we get to another clusterfuck in the historical categories. Regency is having the same problem as the category books above — almost no one is publishing them anymore. The Kensington line died this year. So do you enter what is called “the regency-set historical” into this category, or just abandon it to the Signet Regency folks and go play in the short historical sandbox. And what word count method do you use to determine if your book is “long” or “short” historical? I mean, when we’re talking Long Historical, we really mean like Gabaldon and Gore Vidal, right? Except, would Gabaldon be paranormal? Or Mainstream with Romantic Elements?

Mainstream with Romantic Elements sounds easy enough, unti you realize that it basically means, “anything and everything we want to unload but doesn’t fit elsewhere.” The women’s fiction and chick lit novels it was created for are still the ones that make up the bulk of the entries, but one of my friends has judged this category in the Golden Heart contest twice, and she says she’s never once seen a chick lit. Apparently, they send her all the bizarre western historicals that aren’t romances and fantasies that aren’t romances and space operas that aren’t romances and whatever. And wouldn’t juding a “short historical” against a “long historical” actually be a LOT easier than juding some light and fluffy Manhattan-set chick lit against some futuristic action-adventure about space aliens and giant robots from Venus? So why do they get two cateogries but mainstream gets one? Is it because there are SO MANY historical romances out a year, and they think there sheould be more awards per entrant? And why are they giving out a romance award for a mainstream book, anyway? (Addendum, I just finished judging this category in another contest, and let me tell you, I got a LOT of romances in it.)

Young Adult is a realtively blissful respite from the rest of the craziness. Got teenage characters? Stick ’em in here! Even if they are paranormal or historical or Christian or whatever. We’ll take ’em all. Much like the MSWRE category, however, you wonder if they are all getting a fair shake.

Same goes for Novellas. Every genre goes. And why do we classify by length in some instances, by subject matter in others, and by markets in a third? If we are dividing out for Christian markets and children’s markets, how far away are we (and some recent bloggers would argue not far at all) on dividing out based on racial markets? Do you see why this is bad?

Best First Book. Thank goodness there is one category we can all agree on. Except, are we counting Best First Book That Can Be Entered Into The RITAS? What about people with previously-published novellas? Hmmm…

Interesting. Are these actual problems? Are there ways to fix it? Who knows? I’ve been told that the RWA Awards aren’t taken seriously in the industry (and they aren’t — I’ve never seen RITA winner placed all over a book the way Hugo or Nebula winner is!) because they are also given to unpublished writers. I don’t think I buy that. I think the reason they aren’t taken seriously is because there are so gosh darn many of them! Seriously! There are 12 novels that win a RITA every year. Compare that to the Hugo: 2 at most.

I think, and I know this sounds radical, but after checking out the Hugo and Nebula categories, I think we would be much more in keeping with other industry awards if we streamlined it like this:

Best First Book (first book by single author or by both members of authorial team)
Best Novella (under 40k)
Best Short Romance (40k-80k)
Best Full-Length Romance (over 80k)

There. Fewer awards, sure, but imagine the prestige if you actually get one! Aw, hell, if you want to get really picky, I’ll even change throw in historical for y’all, though you’ll note, there’s none of this nonsense in other awards. You don’t see “Best Actress in a Period Piece,” “Best Director of a Supernatural Film” at the Academy Awards, do you? Is a book for the CBA market the same as “foreign film” I wonder? Should that get its own category? What about YA? Egads, this is a slippery slope.

So no, ruthless it is. Four awards, and none for this “not romance, but with romantic elements” stuff (I can say that, writing it). It doesn’t belong in the ceremony at all, IMO.

Think of how short that ceremony would be! More time for drinking! Less for tracksuits and party politics. Radical, to be sure, but maybe that’s a good thing.