The romantic novelist Ethel M. Dell was a recluse, and actively avoided marketing herself as a personality in any way, but her formula was successful. She reached a very large audience publishing 98 titles and earning, at the height of her career, about £4M annually in today’s values. Her plots included a popular and heady mix of heterosexual, implicit same-sex relationships, sexual deviances, gratuitous violence, death and exoticised notions of Empire and masculinity. Although being publishing alongside literary giants she was vilified by the establishment no doubt jealous of her substantial earnings. With an escapist and non-literary appeal to a lower middle class reader universe Ethel used a very successful multi-media marketing strategy with magazine serialisation, hard copy books, film, theatre and radio to reach this audience in the UK, the United States, Europe and the British colonies. A forerunner to Mills and Boom’s success Ethel was very influential in setting the scene for mass market romantic fiction. Barbara Cartland stated that Ethel was her greatest influence.
David Tanner holds a degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies (London University), lives in the UK and has lived in the United States, East Africa, Japan and the Philippines and has worked in over 40 countries. He has published military history (Burma 1942 Memories of a Retreat) and an historical novel of the Great Game and the Russian threat to British India in 1904 (Cossacks at the Door). His analysis of Dell and her work (Literary Success and Popular Romantic Fiction: Ethel M. Dell, a Case Study) appeared in The Book World Selling and Distributing British Literature 1900-1940.