200908260005MyRomanceStory is a division of Arrow Publishing that has been turning out romance comics for a while now — unspectacularly, but they made it this far, so something must have worked. A check of their website reveals these sorts of storylines, just so you know where we’re coming from:

Volume 101. Surprised By Love 
The best surprises come wrapped in love…
Featuring:
 Whitewater Rapture 
Could Wolf and Annie survive the consequences of one night of wild passionate love in the Canadian wilderness? 

Wildfire 
David was determined to have Ashley despite her bitterness toward men. But it took a dangerous forest fire and a midnight visit to finally break down her resistance.


A couple of press releases just out from the company. First, they have hired Valencia Wood as Director of Media Development to help “spearhead Arrow’s expanding publishing offerings.” Wood has worked on a variety of multimedia projects in film, music, and so on and hopes to get MyRomanceStory’s works out into other media.

Wood’s first move, via another press release, is to put their romance graphic novels on iPhones. This is one of the best press releases we’ve read in some time! Instead of the boring story of new content for mobile devices, price points blah blah, it’s a story of frustrated desire, mixed signals and finally…union.

“The iPhone opens up an exciting platform for readers to experience our romance novels,” says Pat White, CEO Arrow Publications, LLC, the publisher of MyRomanceStory.com. “The colors are vibrant and the text is easy to read.”

However, getting these stories up was frustrating.

At times, MyRomanceStory editors suffered the same mixed signals as their fictional heroines since they were never sure what Apple wanted. Form emails would indicate that there was a problem with the submission, but wouldn’t specify the text, image, or even the panel. As White explains, “We present stories of couples falling in love. That involves romantic and necessary intimate scenes. We spent a lot of time editing and re-editing. If only we could have spoken to someone at Apple to understand exactly what changes they wanted.”
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“We were sensitive to Apple’s range of readers so we submitted edited versions targeting what we thought was a general audience,” Managing Editor, Tom King, adds. “But although we edited out some of the love scenes and text, we still got rejections.”

Once Apple launched its ratings system and got over the initial bottleneck of submissions, Arrow noticed a faster turnaround for its Apps approval.

It was clear that although Arrow and Apple were experienced in their respective fields, preparing content for worldwide digital delivery was a challenge. Content creators wanted specific feedback while Apple, working with a large, diverse group of developers, often required a one-size-fits-all approach. Through this entire process, Apple, too experienced the pains of becoming a movie distributor, music distributor and bookseller.

Romance fans can go to the iTunes App Store and search by keywords “myromancestory” or “romance story” to find the Arrow titles.


Wasn’t that great? Please, marketing people, let’s put the drama back into press releases!

7 COMMENTS

  1. “vibrant colours”? Shades of mud is vibrant?
    Ever since Arnie the art director left, Carla the colorist only worked with one palette, always the same; the one he made with his sensual hands, his cobalt blue eyes boring into the screen that bathed his finely chiseled face in its flickering glow, that fateful night when…never mind.

  2. Is that Valencia Wood in the photo? What a striking woman!

    As for the App, I am thrilled to see such movement. I am a closet romance hound and I would love to get my romantic stories / romantic-comedies to the people but I could never do it through the direct market because it would just die a thousand deaths.

  3. Mr. Robinson, this 2006 description of Arrow is encouraging:

    Arrow Publications accepts romance fiction in a graphic novel format and they publish about 50 titles each year. Arrow Publishing is a 21 year old publishing company based out of Washington, D.C. and is also the publisher of http://www.myromancestory.com. 25% of the yearly titles released are by first time authors, and over 90% is unagented work.

    The Web site at http://www.arrowpub.com/ encourages submitting material.

    SRS

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