But the challenge does not end in putting her works out there—it’s getting global and local publishing to support Filipino authors.    

“A Filipino author’s biggest struggle is having to deal with colonial mentality within the Philippines (publishing and bookselling) and then being treated as invisible outside of it. That’s changing, but slowly. A Filipino romance writer only really breaks through thanks to the intentional support of people (readers, fellow authors, editors, librarians, educators) who already have a platform and are committed to diversifying their reading,” she added.  

She is also pushing to normalize optioning, wherein a producer or studio pays an author a fee for the exclusive, time-limited right to develop a book into a film, TV show or streaming project.   

“The current practice of inviting authors to pitch our books to a producing or writing team, where no business relationships are promised, just opens us up to exploitative deals or having our work ‘inspire’ someone else,” she warned.   

Esguerra also noted that while there are the usual challenges in writing and publishing, romance writers struggle with the misconception that what they do is “easy” as they simply write about their “real lives.”   

She noted that “romance books are used to judge women and held up as cautionary tales because some books perpetuate the narrative that women and queer people should suffer when they try to find love.”     

To address this, she said: “My response is to talk and write about romance writing as craft that requires skill, as often as possible.” 

Protecting the IP of Romance Literature   

Esguerra has already made many strides in protecting her IP, from registering her pen name and RomanceClass as trademarks with the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) to working with the National Library for the registrations of her books.   

With her books available in online markets, she also wants to strengthen the IP protection of her works, especially against new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and the unauthorized use of digital works to train these technologies.  

Esguerra credited learning about IP to another female Filipino writer, Bebang Siy, who is also a copyright and authors’ rights advocate. “Hearing her experiences of helping compensate IP owners made it real for me—our books are intellectual property, and valuable,” she said.  

While she did not understand copyright when she was first published in her late 20s, she was lucky that her first contract did not acquire her copyright.   

“So many authors saw form contracts that turned over copyright to the publisher and never questioned it, and I don’t think I would have known the difference as well,” she said.  

Esguerra firmly believes that writers should own their stories and IP rights. “I actually would recommend every writer to handle their own copyright and IP protection regardless of whether they work with a corporate publisher or publish it themselves,” she said.  

While this knowledge of IP protection has served to guide her on her writing journey, she has also been passing this knowledge to the community of romance writers she founded, as well as other writers. 

For example, she published advice to keep copyright on her Wattpad in 2014 in Taglish, and that page alone later garnered 58,000 views with Wattpad users sending it to their friends.