When Nora Roberts' 151st novel, Chesapeake Blue - which is set in Maryland - recently debuted in the top spot on the New York Times' best-seller list, it was hardly, well, novel.
After all, Roberts has spent so much time occupying that particular piece of prime real estate that she ought to be paying rent.
All told, her romance fiction has spent a shade under seven years on that list and eight months at No. 1, according to information posted on her Web site (www.noraroberts.com).
Last year, Roberts sold more books in the United States than John Grisham or Stephen King. Only J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, out-sold Roberts in 2001. In fact, observers will find two Roberts best sellers currently on the New York Times list: Chesapeake Blue (rated No. 5 as of Dec. 8) and Table For Two, (No. 1 on the paperback list).
It's enough to crown her Queen of the Overachievers.
"Nora is a phenomenon," says Jennifer Crusie, who has taught romance literature at Ohio State University and who herself is a best-selling novelist. "You cannot replicate her career. No one has ever done what she has done, and no one will ever do it again."
As a Maryland resident - Roberts lives in Keedysville - and as an author who has had to find 151 locales in which to set her books, it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later one of her novels would be located in the Free State.
In fact, Roberts (who answered questions through her publicist) says Chesapeake Blue is the fifth book she has set in Maryland. The first was the 1995 release True Betrayals. The following four tell the stories of the Quinn brothers, members of an Eastern Shore boat-building family who one by one meet the right woman and live happily ever after. In Chesapeake Blue, Seth, the youngest Quinn, must resolve his troubled relationship with his birth mother before he can reconcile himself to his growing love for a young shopkeeper.
The earlier Quinn titles, which were published in 1998 and 1999, also debuted at No. 1 on the Times' best-seller list: Rising Tides, Sea Swept and Inner Harbor.
Roberts likes to say that she started writing when she was stranded at home during a snowstorm in 1979, with her two young sons, then 6 and 3, and "a dwindling supply of chocolate."
From a brief experience as a legal secretary, she knew she had a handicap that could impair her writing career: She couldn't spell. But she had one significant advantage. "I could type fast," she says on her Web site.
Indeed.
Roberts' first novel, Irish Thoroughbred, was released in 1981, and she has published nearly seven novels a year since then.
But describing Roberts' success is one thing, explaining it is quite another. What makes Nora Roberts appeal to more readers - and Roberts' fans are singularly devoted - than other romance authors? What combination of storytelling qualities accounts for her unprecedented success?
To understand that, say Roberts' fans and writing colleagues, you have to understand something about the genre itself.
Lasting romance
Some scholars trace the genesis of the modern romance novel back to 12th-century France, when a fellow named Chretien de Troyes dashed off a page-turner called The Knight of the Cart, the first published story about the love triangle between England's King Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere.
"The word 'romance' means a book written in French, as opposed to Latin," says Jeff Rider, a professor of French and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "Stories in Latin were written for the clergy. Stories in French were secular and written for the aristocracy, the 1 percent of the citizens who could read, and they generally were about love."
As the centuries passed and the peasantry gradually became literate, romance novels gained in popularity, exemplified by Sir Walter Scott's 19th-century epic, Ivanhoe. "The modern notion of romance developed from people reading all these medieval stories about love," Rider says.
But by the 20th century, love was thought to be the province of women while men busied themselves outside the home, according to Crusie. As a result, romance literature was devalued (as women themselves became devalued) - unlike genre fiction that appeals heavily to men: science fiction and mysteries. "In academia, romance fiction still is very much looked on with suspicion," Crusie says. "There's still a lot of prejudice against it."
She points out that all genre fiction is characterized by conventions - formulas, if you will - that reassure readers that the universe is just.
Mysteries, she says, punish bad people and reward good people. Science fiction pits reason (often exemplified by technology) against emotion and spirituality and helps us look with optimism toward the future. Romances assuage our fear of loneliness by promising that true love will triumph.
That's why each genre has "rules" from which writers dare not deviate. For instance, in romances, the main characters are good people, the love story is the main focus of the novel, and there is a happy ending, according to Charis Calhoon, communications manager for the Romance Writers of America. Under that definition, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is a romance novel. Her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights is not.
"Genre fiction is about reading the same fabulous story again and again," Calhoon says. "Successful romance writers walk a fine line between keeping their guarantee to the reader, and innovating within those formulas."
Not only does Roberts walk that tightrope, she makes it look easy.
"Nora writes classic romance, and that actually is very hard to write," Crusie says. "Stories that aren't romance novels can end happily when the protagonist utterly destroys the villain. But in classic romance, there is no villain. What the protagonist and antagonist do is compromise, and that is a very soft climax. Romance novels are about an emotional struggle, and it is very, very hard to keep that active and alive on the page."
Passion for writing
Roberts' fans say her prose is clean and laced with humor. It moves along at a quick clip, and she doesn't let extraneous elements get in the way of the love story. Her authorial voice is common-sense, down-to-earth and pragmatic.
"Even though I know it's fiction, even though some of the characters are too good to be true, there is much that I can identify with," says Sue Noyes, 42, of Danville, Penn., who maintains a Web site devoted to Roberts' books at www.adwoff.com.
"Nora 'gets' relationships. The give. The take. The love. The hate. The confidence. The insecurity. The doubts."
In addition, Roberts loves to write, and it shows in her novels.
"There's nobody who works harder than Nora, and nobody who loves it more," Crusie says. "I have been on vacation with her on a cruise. While I was on deck drinking mimosas, she was down below, writing. I think that woman would write if she was in a hospital - sedated."
Success, of course, breeds success, and Roberts' extraordinary productivity keeps old fans content while winning new ones.
"Being prolific is very good for your career," Crusie says. "Your name is out there all the time, and people can always find your books. One book a year seems to be the minimum needed to keep readers interested."
In addition, Roberts practices savvy public relations. "I'd like to believe that Nora's accessibility adds to her popularity," Noyes says. "I discovered her in March 1997, when I challenged readers on Nora's message-board and on [mystery writer] Patricia Cornwell's to convince me to read one or the other.
"Nora responded herself. The rest, as they say, is history."
And Nora Roberts is making more of it every day.
Smell of success
Here is Nora Roberts by the numbers, with data culled from her official Web site (www.noraroberts.com):
Chesapeake Blue is Roberts' 151st book. There are more than 200 million copies of her books in print, under her own name and that of her pseudonym, J.D. Robb.
Over the last 20 years, an average of 13 books by Roberts were sold every minute.
If you place all of Roberts' books top to bottom, they would stretch across the United States from Los Angeles to New York City five times.
Roberts' books have spent a combined 34 weeks at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list, and 11 debuted at the No. 1 spot. She's had 69 New York Times best sellers. Twice in her career she's had four books on the New York Times list at the same time.
According to USA Today's best-seller list, the only author of any genre to sell more books last year than Nora Roberts was J.K. Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter series.
She was the first author to be inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame.
Roberts' Web site receives more than 60,000 visitors a month. Her online newsletter has more than 46,000 subscribers.
- Mary Carole McCauley
Sweet home, Maryland
What does Nora Roberts' 151st novel have to say about the Free State? Very little, and a great deal.
Chesapeake Blue is suffused with atmosphere that is identifiably Eastern Shore. But residents hoping to find recognizable local landmarks will be disappointed.
The novel traces the love affair between Seth Quinn and Drusilla Whitcomb Banks, who moves to the fictitious town of St. Christopher's and opens a florist shop to escape her socialite upbringing.
And while St. Christopher's has obvious parallels with St. Michaels, Roberts says the town in her book is a loose amalgamation of several towns on the Eastern Shore where she did research. Other specific locations - the Quinn brothers' boat-building business, a bar called Shiney's known for its leggy waitresses "and the very worst live bands to be found in the entire state of Maryland" - came from her imagination.
Still, there is enough physical description right from page one to give readers who never have visited Maryland some authentic local flavor:
He was coming home. Maryland's Eastern Shore was a world of marshes and mud flats, of wide fields with row crops straight as soldiers. It was flatland rivers with sharp shoulders, and secret tidal creeks where the heron fed.
Seth lives in a little blue-and-white house where, as the dust jacket puts it: There's always a boat at the dock, a rocker on the porch, and a dog in the yard.
Sounds like home to me.
- Mary Carole McCauley