Romance = HEA?

There are two ways to deal with romance, I was once told by an author in the Kindle Marketplace (where romance is a BIG moneymaker): you have HEA and HFN.

The end of your series must ALWAYS have an HEA. Period. It's what genre readers expect and are paying for. Your individual titles may end in an HFN (Happily For Now), as long as it comes with the hook for the next book's conflict.

But that's along the lines of sales funnels and stuff I don't pretend to understand (yet).

To this end, "romance" is not what you think it is. For example, many consumers might call Nicholas Sparks "romance" books. They are not. They're a unique beast unto themselves. "Romance," when you start asking about HEA and HFN, is solely a marketing/genre construct for selling your book that falls beyond the scope of people like Sparks and Gabaldon, because they don't follow those rules necessarily.

If you're worried about romance in the scope of HEA and HFN as definitive of the genre, you may need a rewrite to avoid the disaster you indicate you keep coming up with.

But this is NYCM where genres are flexible, and the points don't matter (because there are 4,000 of us, and what're the odds we're going to pass onto R2, am I right). So enjoy yourself, and write something romantic with a terrible tragedy ending. Rip out some hearts and love every minute of it.

But if you're publishing? Yes, you need to look for HEA/HFN, but that's the only place where I've ever seen it mandated as a genre convention.

I'm in your heat.  Hi.  

9 out of 10 marriages end in divorce!  If you can make a happy ending outa that you can steal my idea.

I feel less alone now 

I'm in heat 37, which is also a romance. Feel like my story is a bad Lifetime movie plot. You know, one with Tori Spelling and Rob Lowe acting out a completely unrealistic storyline? Yeah, that's mine.