telenovela – She Lit

After a hiatus on the book-related themes, CW’s Americanized telenovela Jane the Virgin returned to having Jane go into crisis mode over being a published author. This time, she’s dropped by her publisher then eclipsed by the book offer her son’s father’s other baby mama gets.

The episode starts with Jane announcing to her family that her publisher dropped her since her first book wasn’t selling (the episode of her mediocre reviews was a few months back) to the point where the publisher declined the option for a second one.

This storyline is all too real as the success of being an author, or even publishing that second book, is low.

Then Jane’s rant turns to the hardship of being a published woman of color author. “We don’t get a second chance like our peers,” Jane cries. Again, too much truth. As a novelist querying my work, it’s disheartening to see authors — sometimes 50+ — on a webpage of a literary agency with everyone being white except maybe one racially ambiguous author.

But Jane recovers! Rafael, her son’s father as she was artificially inseminated which is the premise of the show, gets his ex-wife, Petra, to hook Jane up with a meeting with a book agent friend. At the meeting, she fails to capture the book agent’s attention with her first two ideas in the romance genre — one with reincarnation and the other with vampires — rejected because they already had authors writing those ideas. Then she comes up with a “Fifty Shades of Grey”theme with a character reversal of the heroine starting the erotic adventures. The book agent says sure to the idea until Petra appears.

Petra is also Jane’s hotelier frenemy. The book agent recalls her Ocean Drive feature to his business partner, and they coin her the “non-evil Ivanka” while casually offering her a lifestyle book deal.

Of course, this creates a rift between Jane and Petra since Jane is already a published author who had writing dreams forever while Petra has never written. As Petra tries to make peace with her “moral compass” Jane, she offers the gig to ghostwrite her book. Jane agrees. This again happens to authors where the second book idea still needs baking so they take a ghostwriting job in the meantime to pay the bills.

Will Jane actually do the ghostwriting? Will Jane’s second book idea come to her in the next episode? Will her old publisher somehow change its mind and take her back? Stay tuned.

After a weekslong break in the sultry telenovela spoof, Jane the Virgin returned with another author dilemma that agents and publishers just recently started talking about: social media.

Jane’s romance novel finally comes out to the tune of 10,000 units. This makes Jane nervous since, like most new authors, she assumed more books would be published. With the underwhelming number of books available, she worries about the marketing.

The marketing team tells her she needs to get book buyers with unveiling her dramatic life — from being accidentally inseminated with a hotelier’s sperm by the hotelier’s ob-gyn sister while a virgin to losing her police officer husband in a twisted drug ring scheme associated with the hotel. These events and more — as you can imagine — were documented in the local news, therefore her notoriety could attract readers. It’s not the classy way Jane wants to find an audience.

Though Jane doesn’t want to share her life, her publisher tells her she needs to do just that through social media to get 20,000 followers to qualify for the Miami book festival. Yes, that many to talk at a book festival. And her social media channels are lacking, but luckily her father, a telenovela superstar with thousands upon thousands of followers, plans to help her. The romance department opens up for Jane with her father’s younger hot co-star actually getting her the followers by faking a public breakup.

The episode ends happily with Jane chatting about her life on stage with her favorite author, Maria Semple of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, autographing three books, and having 5,000 more books published.

Again, Jane’s novelist life comes together so well with some real-life hiccups. When I heard the advice from literary agents about upping social media to market your book last year at the Los Angeles Times book festival, I couldn’t believe the added amount of work to be an author. It’s a new phenomenon to use social media to fetch book sales, even before there’s a book. Modern technology makes life harder sometimes. Now, back to Twitter to see if my latest post attracted any followers.