Writing popular fiction

often resembles fantasy. Because the reader is lured on, not by fights and chases so much as by anticipation of disaster, the Gothic bears many similarities to suspense novels.
    Just as you must not underestimate the job of a Gothic novelist, you must not underestimate the Gothic readership. That audience cannot be summed up in a phrase like "dewy-eyed schoolgirls," because it includes women of all ages. Likewise, you cannot think of them as "dull, unimaginative women," because some men and many bright ladies have been bitten by the Gothic bug. I
do
believe that a large percentage of the
Gothic
readership is composed of housewives who, growing weary of the sameness of television programming, begin to read. These are people who have never been readers before, and they prefer to start out with books that seem familiar to them. (Gothics resemble television soap operas, though they are considerably less insipid than those daytime serials.) A percentage of this audience will remain content with the Gothics, while others will move on to different kinds of novels. As a result, all writers benefit by the growing audience, and the Gothic author can be certain of a constant flow of new readers.
    By far, the majority of Gothic novels are published as paperback originals. Here, the advances range from $1,500 to $2,500 for new Gothic writers and as high as $3,000 and $3,500 for a popular paperback author like Dorothy Daniels. Because the demand for Gothics is so great, the successful Gothic novelist can obtain multiple-book contracts, such as Dorothy Daniels' 12-novels-a-year deals with Paperback Library. Advances, for the most part, are the sum total of the paperback Gothic author's earnings, for subsidiary rights are seldom picked up in this field.
    At one time, only the best Gothic writers were published between hardcovers, those whose talent for characterization runs deep and who manage to stretch the formulized plot into moderately unique arrangements that give the genre more life and excitement than it usually has: Elizabeth Goudge, Victoria Holt, Daphne Du Maurier. Recently, however, the hardcover market has opened up to a whole range of Gothic talents, and the new writer has a better chance of being published there. Periodically, hardback Gothic novels achieve long runs on the bestseller lists, with all the subsidiary money
that
means, including huge paperback advances, book club sales, and foreign editions. The new Gothic novelist, however, should understand that these are dishes he will not taste for some time, if at all.
    The first thing a potential Gothic novelist must learn is the plot formula which is peculiar to the Gothic, which does not supersede the traditional plot formula discussed in Chapter One, but which severely refines it. With few exceptions, the Gothic-romance plot follows this skeleton: A young heroine, alone in the world and often an orphan, goes to an old and isolated house to take a new job as a secretary, governess, nurse, or traveling companion to a motherless child or older woman in a family of some financial means. Everyone in the house is a stranger to her. At the house, the heroine meets a cast of suspicious characters (servants, the master or lady of the house, usually one or two sons of the lady, neighbors) and soon finds herself plunged into some mystery—either of supernatural or more mundane origins, most often concerning the death of someone in the house. Inexplicably, she becomes the target of the supernatural or mundane killer's attacks—or else, because she begins to snoop around in hopes of discovering what's happening, she becomes fair game for the murderer. Concurrent with the development of this mystery plot is the growth of a romance between the heroine and one of the young men in the household or in the household of a neighbor; or between her and the master, if he is unmarried or a widower. Either this man is her only safe haven in the dark events of the story—or he is as much a suspect as any of the other characters. If he is the only character with whom she can have a romantic relationship, he should always turn out to be the good guy she wants to think he is, for the conclusion of a Gothic must always promise marriage or the development of genuine love between heroine and hero. If the story has two handsome men, you can let her fall in love with one and fear the other—but plot the story so that her favorite turns out to be the killer, while the man she fears becomes the