Romance bookstores are booming, dishing ‘all the hot stuff you can imagine’

NEW YORK – Last summer, when Ms Mae Tingstrom had the idea to open a romance bookstore in Ventura, California, the first thing she did was search online to see whether there was already one in her region.

She found The Ripped Bodice – a bookstore in Culver City that was doing so well that it was expanding to a second location in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.

“That was intimidating,” she said.

If its success was daunting, it also suggested that there might be room for another romance store. So in February, she opened Smitten on a busy strip of Main Street, about 100km from her competitor.

In the months since, Smitten has become a vibrant hub for romance readers, with author signings, tarot readings, book clubs, as well as trivia and craft nights.

Customers sometimes approach her with highly specific requests. “Someone came in and was like, ‘I like fantasy, I want it to be queer, I want it to have representation from a different culture and I want it to be as smutty as possible,’” Ms Tingstrom said.

And they come in often. “I have regulars who come a couple of times a week,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Didn’t you just buy two books the other day?’”

Once a niche that independent booksellers largely ignored, romance is now the hottest thing in the book world. It is, by far, the top-selling fiction genre, and its success is reshaping not only the publishing industry, but also the retail landscape.

Over the past two years, the country went from having two dedicated romance bookstores – The Ripped Bodice and Love’s Sweet Arrow, in Chicago – to a national network of more than 20. Among them: Tropes & Trifles in Minneapolis; Grump & Sunshine in Belfast, Maine; Beauty and the Book in Anchorage, Alaska; Lovebound Library in Salt Lake City; and Blush Bookstore in Wichita, Kansas.

More are on the way, including Kiss & Tale in Collingswood, New Jersey; The New Romantics in Orlando, Florida; and Grand Gesture Books in Portland, Oregon, an online romance store that is moving into a storefront.

The bookstores are largely owned and operated by women. And women make up the majority of the readers who have sent romance sales soaring – from 18 million print copies sold in 2020 to more than 39 million in 2023, according to Circana BookScan, which does point-of-sale tracking for the publishing market.

“There’s been a cultural shift around the way that we think and talk about media that has been primarily written by, and directed towards, women,” said Ms Becca Title, a former immigration defence lawyer and the owner of Meet Cute, a romance bookstore in San Diego.

“More people are realising not only that romance sells and that it has commercial value, but it also has artistic value and entertainment value.”

Romance writers such as Sarah J. Maas, Emily Henry, Colleen Hoover and Rebecca Yarros dominate the bestseller lists: Six of the top 10 best-selling fiction authors in the United States so far this year are romance writers.

Publishers are expanding their romance lists, wooing self-published romance authors with large advances and adding new imprints.

The shift is huge from the days when romance was looked down upon as frothy and unserious “chick-lit” or as smut. Even just a few years ago, many independent bookstores carried only a small selection of romance novels, often relegated to a shelf in the back of the store.

Many of these stores have a flirty, flamboyantly feminine aesthetic: heavy on pink, accented with heart and floral motifs, decked out with signs and merchandise that play on familiar romance tropes – enemies to lovers, forced proximity, forbidden love, secret identity.

They carry every conceivable romance subgenre: historical, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, young adult, supernatural and romantasy, and sports-themed. Many also stock self-published novels, which mainstream booksellers typically do not carry.

Ms Melissa Saavedra, owner of Steamy Lit, a romance bookstore in Deerfield Beach, Florida, discovered romance a little over a decade ago, when she was serving in the US Navy as a petty officer.

Her gateway was E.L. James’ erotica series Fifty Shades Of Grey (2011 to 2012), which she read on her tablet when she was in her bunk on the USS America, an amphibious assault ship.

After leaving the navy in 2017, she worked as a travel agent for sports teams. When work was slow during the pandemic, she came up with the idea for The Steam Box, a quarterly subscription box of romance novels paired with sex toys. It quickly took off.

The Steam Box was also a way to erode the lingering stigma surrounding erotic romance and women’s sexual pleasure.

Ms Saavedra, who was born in Lima, Peru, and moved to South Florida when she was 10, also made it her mission to promote romance authors from diverse backgrounds.

She decided to open a bookstore when she realised that her community in Deerfield Beach was a romance book desert, particularly when it came to diverse romance.

At Steamy Lit’s opening weekend in February, 500 people showed up and the store sold 900 books.

Since then, the store has had book signings with more than 30 writers, including Kennedy Ryan, Ali Hazelwood and Abby Jimenez, who held an event there in May that featured baby goats in pyjamas, in an adorable allusion to a baby goat scene from her novel Part Of Your World (2022).

On a sunny Sunday afternoon this past spring, Steamy Lit was full of readers browsing, sipping prosecco and getting books signed by A.H. Cunningham, a romance writer promoting her new novel, Out Of Office.

Ms Rosen Fulmore, a frequent shopper at Steamy Lit, carried a stack of several worn novels for Cunningham to sign.

“I hope you don’t mind the water damage,” she said to Cunningham.

“I love that they’re well loved,” Cunningham replied.

Ms Fulmore heard about the store when Ryan, one of her favourite authors, posted on social media that she would be having an event there, and she has since become a regular customer. “It’s got all the hot stuff you can imagine in a one-stop shop,” she said. NYTIMES