By Deepti Hajela
The Associated Press

NEW YORK - There are workshops on plot development and characterization, meetings with publishers and editors. And, of course, there are tips on sexy love scenes.

After all, this is a meeting of romance writers.

The Romance Writers of America's 23rd annual conference opened Wednesday, bringing together more than 2,000 published authors, want-to-be-published writers, editors and others connected to a lucrative section of the fiction market.

Despite being a target of derision and stereotypes over the years, the romance genre generates more than $1 billion in sales each year.

According to figures from the RWA, romance novels made up more than one-third of all fiction books sold nationwide last year, and more than half of all fiction paperbacks sold.

"There are smart, savvy women who write romance, and smart, savvy women who read romance, and we read it because it is emotionally satisfying for us," said author and RWA board member Gayle Wilson.

The conference, which ends Saturday, was to include a book signing for charity by 500 authors. But the rest of the meeting was given over to a not-so-sexy part of publishing: seminars on business issues facing writers, sessions about the industry, spotlights on particular publishing houses.

It also set up sessions about the craft of writing - research into settings, pacing, plot twists, characterizations.

And there were topics specific to romance: the psychology of the alpha male hero, that strong, charismatic man who always gets the girl; the elements of the strong heroine who can rescue herself from danger.

The conference demonstrates romance writers' professionalism, said Wilson, and belies stereotypes about its authors such as "the notion that we're all frustrated housewives who don't know about the real world."