Writing Romance as a Guy

With romance being such a female-dominated genre, it’s rare to find male authors writing kissy stories — but Jordan Riley Swan is one of those rare birds. In this interview about his novel The Heart’s Bidding, we talk about his experiences with finding his footing in the romance genre without ending up on the r/menwritingwomen subreddit.

Why did you decide to use a gender-neutral pen name?

I knew I was going to be writing in two genres for most of my career — romance and fantasy. There’ll be some crossover into paranormal fantasy and things of that nature, but if you do any research online, one of the first things you’ll see is that there have been studies where male-named authors in the romance genre sell up to 40 percent less than female authors in the same genre.

The coin flips in fantasy. Female names tend to sell a little worse than the male names. In fact, I’ve heard that J.K. Rowling was advised to use “J.K. Rowling” specifically because of that built-in stereotype or prejudice. It’s unfortunately part of the industry.

I assumed that what would happen is that if I went with an androgynous name and wrote a sweet romance, then automatically people would assign the gender they want to see on it, and the same thing with fantasy. In fact, at my first Romance Writers of America event, I…