ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the fine line connecting work and love in an industry based on love stories. It explores how writers become romance workers, examining the discourses circulating in Romance Writers of America (RWA) and amongst writers that enable both published and aspiring romance authors to create and maintain a legitimated subject position. The chapter considers the place of creative labor in the current economy, how romance writers are placed within it, and how organizations like RWA shape these placements. It suggests that reiterated statements of love by writers partly emerge due to tensions of the incorporation of writing into the market, as well as its uncertainties. The chapter examines how talk of love offers authors another kind of relation to writing—one understood to be outside of the structures of the market—and legitimates their artistic identity in an industry that often seems out of their control.
