respectingromance:

I’m assuming you’re referring to this post. Let’s dive into this gray area!

It’s not that they’re not romance novels. Like I said, such books – which, by the way, I read and enjoy – are romance novel-ish, just with all – okay, most* – of the stigma scrubbed off of them: 

• They have no sex scenes or the sex scenes they do have are succinctly and casually described (think “We fell backwards onto the bed as he scrabbled at his nightstand for a condom.” End scene.) 
• They get a lighthearted cover design that indicates, “Yes, I’m definitely for ladies but don’t be too embarrassed to read me! I’m not like those books!” 
• And they usually come out in hardcover first or at least a trade paperback. You gotta be Lisa Kleypas or J.R. Ward to get a hardcover in mainstream romance world. (Yeah, yeah, it’s because we’re “such voracious readers.” It has nothing to do with a lack of respect. At all. Everyone swears. And someone is going to comment on this about how they like that romance novels are mass market paperbacks because they’re cheaper and how is it a problem. I’ll dig into that on the next anon.)
• In brick-and-mortar stores, they’re shelved with fiction, rather than romance.

Okay, so you’ve taken a romance novel, made sure the sex is brief and euphemistic, given it a “better” cover, published it in a sturdier format, sold it in the fiction section rather than the romance section and charged almost $30 for it.

Then you get busy pitching it to romance readers because we’re the ones who buy books and prop up the whole damn publishing market. 

Ok, I have a confession to make:

I’m a book snob. *BUT* not in the “typical” way most people mean when they say they are “book snobs”.

What I mean when I say I am a book snob is that I’m a snob about “non-genre specific fiction”.

I rarely…RARELY…go into the “general fiction” section of a bookstore.  Mainly because I know what I like (romance, YA, mysteries, and children’s lit) and those are in “genre specific” areas of the store.  General Fiction is just…general. It’s not specific; you might have a romantic element to the story, but you’re not guaranteed to get that HEA you desire when reading a romance (and if there’s no HEA, then I feel like I wasted my time).  You might get a thriller/mystery element of the series, but again, there’s no guarantee that the crime/mystery will be solved as you are promised when reading a traditional mystery novel. 

Basically, all the years of snobbery that I have felt from General Fiction towards genre-specific books has ironically reversed itself: I am now snobbish towards General Fiction because they are *not* genre-specific.