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Romance fiction is wildly popular but still doesn't get its due in mainstream cultural media, finds Adam Minter.

It was on Saturday night, the fourth and final evening of the Romance Writers of America Annual Conference, that I finally faced feelings of inadequacy. In retrospect, it was an inevitable crisis, but not for the reasons I would have expected. It had nothing to do with that Friday workshop filled with more than 100 women discussing Alpha Heroes (strong, possessive men who love passionately) and why they, romance readers and writers, love them. Or with the tall, handsome cowboys at Amazon's party on Thursday night while I stood in a corner, nursing a bottle of water.

The conference, held last month in San Antonio, is a largely female affair. This year, it attracted more than 2,100 writers, editors, publishers, publicists and anyone else with an artistic and/or commercial interest in the popular book genre. According to RWA, 91 percent of those who buy romance books are women and so I, expecting to be marginalized to some degree, was not surprised when I was.

What shook me were the sales numbers announced as various literary luminaries took the stage at Saturday's Rita awards - named for Rita Clay Estrada, RWA's first president, and more or less the Oscars of the romance genre. To offer just one example: Author Stella Cameron's online biography was read before she arrived on stage to present this year's Rita for Romantic Suspense. It opens, "Stella Cameron is a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author. With over 14 million copies of her books in print".

That is not the kind of number that you generally hear being widely thrown around at other book industry conferences. In my genre of so-called "serious" non-fiction, selling 1,000 copies of an e-book a month is highly respectable. In the hyper-charged world of romance, that is often barely a start. Of the roughly a dozen workshops I attended at the conference, it felt like all but a few had a New York Times or USA Today best-selling author on the panel.