In 1998 I was the managing editor of Genesis Press. The publisher at Genesis was personal friends with Kathryn Falk of Romantic Times and had done a deal with her for us to put out some limited hard cover editions of romance classics to be published under the "Romantic Times Classics" imprint. The first in the series was The Little Pretender by the legendary queen of romance, Barbara Cartland. The publication of this book was to coincide with some sort of celebration for Barbara Cartland over in England. Shortly before the text of the book itself was to go to the typesetter, I got the foreword text from Ms. Falk’s assistant at RT. It was, to put it mildly, an amusing read because it outlined in great detail Ms. Falk’s first-hand account of the celebration over in England which had not occurred yet. I especially liked her description of how Barbara Cartland elegantly walked down the grand staircase of her home to meet the attendees, etc. I sent Ms. Falk an e-mail asking if she really wanted to put this in the book given that it was total baloney. I ended the e-mail with a comment that even though romance author’s generally deal in fantasy, this was stretching it a bit. About an hour later I got a phone call from the publisher telling me how “shocked and outraged” Ms. Falk was that I would speak to her that way and that she wanted me fired immediately. So that’s the story of how I ticked off the queen of romance over a novel written by the queen of romance.
Funny and sad at the same time. The readers of that novel will no doubt believe the foreword, unless like me, they'd only be reading the novel while stuck in a waiting room with no other reading material a available, and skim it from a totally sarcastic slant on romance novels. I thought Danielle Steel was the queen of romance.
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