Deborah Cooke: Author

It’s a holiday today, so I get to be nostalgic!

Last Friday, we were talking about changes in publishing, in what kind of information and feedback are readily available to aspiring authors. That reminded me of an enormous change that occurred in the mid-nineties.

It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time, we didn’t have the internet. It was hard to make connections with other writers – we met at conferences, essentially, or at local RWA meetings – and harder yet to get to know each other well enough to exchange confidences. There just wasn’t enough connect-time. It was typical for an author to hook up with one other author, typically someone who had sold to the same house at roughly the same time, and develop a relationship there. And if that didn’t happen to you – or it didn’t work out over the long term – you were pretty much out of luck in terms of writer-friends.

Then came CompuServe. Compuserve was a bulletin board system, accessed through local dial-up servers. (Just typing that makes me cringe.) So you would subscribe to certain topics, log on, and your computer would harvest all the new messages in that topic. It was pure text, nothing else. No graphics, no hotlinks, no live chat. The closest thing to live chat was to send a message to someone who was online at the same time – then five minutes later get a reply from him/her. It was slow but writers glommed on to it like crazy. It gave us the connections we were all craving.

So on CompuServe were groups for writers, dedicated to their questions and queries, with topics devoted to published authors with CompuServe accounts – so they could interact with their fans – and published author forums too. There was one forum called GEnie Romance Exchange or RomEx. (I think GEnie was the software protocol that supported the bbs, but I forget.)

RomEx was quite the social hub – I’d log on once a day at least, and go do something else while my trusty Mac SE30 chewed through the bbs and downloaded all the new messages. It could take half an hour, for text only, depending upon how many topics I’d subscribed to. Then I’d log off and get my fix of connecting with other writers, many of whom lived far far away.

It’s hard to explain how wonderful this connection was. Maybe the fact that we all put up with the technological constraints says it all. It was our virtual water cooler – where we gathered to chat. We shared ideas, talked about publishing, reviewed trends, gave each other pointers and did some joint promotion. The publication now managed by RWA called Romance $ells, for example, began on RomEx. It had exactly the same format, we paid $50 each for a full page black and white ad, one member did the desktop publishing as a volunteer effort (I think those people took the post for a year, or four issues), and we shared our bookstore mailing lists, creating one master mailing file. The sum of our payments covered the printing and postage costs.

I don’t know what happened to CompuServe and GEnie. I remember an overnight unannounced price increase, one which led to my unsubscribing along with a lot of people I knew – it seems we weren’t prepared to put up with crazy pricing for our connection! Maybe it was because other options were becoming available that we could stand to let it go.

At any rate, RomEx lived on, in another bbs format. It became RWAOnLine, RWA’s first online chapter, and it’s still out there, providing connections to writers.

Now you know. It amazes me that this was all of 15 years ago.