A few years ago, Scarlett St. Clair was working as a librarian in Oklahoma, self-publishing romance novels on the side, when one of her books went viral on TikTok.
It was a dream come true — and also kind of a nightmare.
Sales of her Greek mythology-inspired fantasy romance novel, “A Touch of Darkness,” and later its sequel, shot up. Bookstores and readers ordered thousands of print-on-demand copies. As an independent author with a day job, St. Clair struggled to keep up.
“I was like, I’m not a warehouse,” St. Clair said.
She tried to find a publisher to take over print distribution, but everyone turned her down, saying they didn’t take on self-published writers. An agent told her that no publisher would match what she was making on her own at the time, more than $10,000 a month.
Then, in the summer of 2021, she got an email from a new romance publisher, Bloom Books. Bloom only had one writer on their roster, but it was an impressive name: E L James, the author of the blockbuster erotica series “Fifty Shades of Grey,” who had recently left her prestigious publisher, Vintage, to help launch the fledgling imprint.
During St. Clair’s first meeting with Bloom, its editorial director wooed her with an elaborate, data heavy presentation. The slide deck included maps of the retail locations where they planned to sell her books: in Barnes & Noble outlets and independent bookstores, but also in Walmart, Target and Costco stores and in airports. They wanted to republish not only her latest hit but her entire backlist and her next novels, and offered her total control over the publication schedule, cover designs and marketing plans.
“Bloom respects the fact that self-published authors are entrepreneurial,” she said.
St. Clair sold Bloom her five self-published novels, becoming the second author on their list. She’s released 12 novels with the publisher, including her seven-book “Hades x Persephone” series, which has sold more than 2.6 million print copies globally.
In an era when TikTok can catapult authors to success overnight, Bloom has developed a lucrative formula: courting self-published authors who have a built-in fan base, taking over their print distribution, building up their brand and market share and turning them into mainstream best sellers.
That model has propelled the careers of novelists who now rank among the genre’s most popular authors, including Lucy Score, L.J. Shen, Elsie Silver and Ana Huang, a mega-best-selling author whose Bloom print editions have sold more than 7 million copies, according to Circana BookScan.
So far this year, Bloom has landed 23 books and two series on the New York Times best-seller list. Last year, it surpassed $100 million in gross sales, and its 2024 sales are up 58 percent. Bloom publishes more than 40 romance authors, and the majority of its writers — roughly two-thirds — have sold more than 100,000 copies this year.
All told, Bloom now accounts for nearly a quarter of the booming market for romance fiction, outperforming much larger rivals. It has become a global operation, and recently launched two new international imprints, Bloom Brasil and Bloom Germany. This fall, it held its first live fan convention in Lexington, Ky., which drew around 500 fans and featured 28 authors, including best-sellers like Sophie Lark, Meghan Quinn and Kennedy Ryan.
Bloom arrived at an opportune moment. In the thick of the pandemic, millions of readers who were looking for escape and distraction turned to romance fiction, lured by the genre’s reassuring promise of an H.E.A. — happily ever after — ending. Romance sales grew by double digits from 2020 to 2023; in 2024, the genre grew by nearly 10 percent, twice as fast as the rest of the fiction market, Circana BookScan data shows. Now no longer a niche, romance has become a major profit driver.
But Bloom took a different approach than legacy publishers, which typically find new authors through agent submissions, and often gamble on whether or not those writers will gain an audience. Instead, Bloom went after popular self-published authors with large but still growing fan bases, and courted them with unusually generous and flexible book deals, in some cases buying only print rights and allowing writers to keep their e-book and audio rights.
While most publishers insist on acquiring rights to all formats, Bloom discovered that even some of the most successful self-published authors were often happy to part with their print rights, which were a small part of their business, to get their books into stores.
Booksellers and retail chains were also desperate to stock books by best-selling self-published romance writers, who have large BookTok followings and huge sales on Amazon. Bloom emerged as a savvy middleman.
Unlike traditional publishing companies, which tend to take a year or more to release a new acquisition, Bloom sometimes crash-publishes books to capitalize on current demand and viral audiences, often getting them out within a few months of acquiring them.
“They paddled out into this vast ocean and they skillfully brought all these authors to shore, and by shore, I mean brought them to romance readers who shop in stores,” said Jules Herbert, who oversees merchandising and book strategy for romance and other genres at Barnes & Noble.
Bloom owes its rapid rise partly to its founding author: E L James, whose “Fifty Shades” series transformed the romance market and sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.
During the summer of 2020, James was casting around for a new publisher after her longtime editor left Vintage. She was introduced to Dominique Raccah, the publisher and chief executive of Sourcebooks, who offered James her own imprint. James didn’t want to be the lone author, but loved the idea of starting something new. After half a dozen meetings, the pair came up with a model for a new kind of publishing business that would attract entrepreneurial authors like James — writers who understood marketing and branding, and had a devoted fan base.
A few months later, Bloom published its inaugural title, James’s “Freed,” a spinoff “Fifty Shades” novel told from the perspective of the domineering, B.D.S.M.-loving billionaire Christian Grey. James oversaw everything from the release date to the marketing and advertising strategy to the cover design. She took the cover photo — a moody close up of a man’s hand — in her kitchen. Her son was the hand model. She even chose the specific confetti — pink, heart-shaped — that would add a splash of color to the cover, and mailed it from London to the cover artist in Naperville, Ill., where Sourcebooks has its headquarters.
James, who got her start writing fan fiction, said that joining a start-up imprint and gaining more control over the publication process suited her “rebellious” streak.
“It reminded me of going back to my indie roots, where you’re not at the beck and call of a big publishing conglomerate,” James said in an interview. “I always say that I wrote a control freak, and he gets it from somewhere.”
James and Raccah often meet twice a month to talk about publishing trends and marketing plans, and James sometimes acts as an informal mentor to Bloom’s other authors, helping them navigate the stress of sudden fame or advising them on how to handle a social media backlash. Some employees refer to James affectionately as Bloom’s “den mother.”
“She made us who we are,” Raccah said of James.
Landing a romance superstar like James also helped Bloom establish its brand, and submissions started pouring in. When fiction buyers at big chains like Barnes & Noble and Walmart saw authors trending on TikTok but were unable to stock enough of their books, they would sometimes tip off Bloom, which moved quickly to acquire and release those authors, among them rising romance writers like St. Clair, Jeneane O’Riley and Piper C.J.
Last year, the literary agent Kimberly Whalen was struggling to find a publisher for her client Raven Kennedy. Her dark fantasy romance series “The Plated Prisoner” had drawn a huge readership on Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s e-book subscription service. Kennedy wanted her novels in major stores, but didn’t want to give up the lucrative e-book rights.
No publisher would agree to those terms, Whalen said, until Bloom came along. Kennedy signed with them in January, and Bloom crash-published Kennedy’s six-novel series, releasing the first book in March and the rest over the next five months, a quick cadence that helped build momentum and stoke demand.
In another unorthodox strategy, Bloom released the series simultaneously in hardcover — as a collector’s item for Kennedy’s dedicated fans — and in paperback, a more affordable format for readers who were new to her work. It paid off: Kennedy landed on The New York Times and USA Today’s best-seller lists, and sold more than 386,000 print copies.
“While it’s an older series, it’s new to the majority of readers,” said Paula Amendolara, senior vice president of sales at Sourcebooks. “It’s just the fan base that knows about it, and those fans are going to come back because we have a different package.”
Lucy Score began self-publishing contemporary romance about a decade ago, after being laid off from her job as a newspaper reporter. She had published more than 20 books on her own when her novel, “Things We Never Got Over,” blew up on TikTok in 2022. Score and her husband scrambled to fill print-on-demand orders, and sold more than a quarter million physical copies of the novel. But Score was still missing out on sales at mass retailers, so she was intrigued when Bloom offered her a print-only publishing deal.
Bloom has since acquired print rights to almost all of Score’s backlist titles, and has re-edited and republished her novels in rapid succession. In the past two years, Bloom has released nearly 20 of Score’s books, and has sold more than three million print copies. Her books are now stocked not just in bookstores and retail outlets everywhere, but overseas, at the front of Target stores and in Aldi grocery stores.
After seeing there was a ravenous audience for her best-selling “Knockemout” series, Bloom released deluxe hardcover editions with colorful, designed edges this fall, two years after releasing them in paperback.
“Lucy told me, ‘the fans will come to this,’” said Christa Désir, Bloom’s editorial director.
All three novels in the series came out on a single day this past November, and all of them hit The Times’s best-seller list for hardcover fiction.
“Unlike a traditional deal where the publisher tells you, ‘here’s your cover, these are the edits, here’s your launch date,’ it’s very collaborative,” Score said.
Other companies are also chasing after self-published novelists and allowing them to keep their e-book rights, including HarperCollins’ imprint Canary Street, which bought Jasmine Mas’s “Cruel Shifterverse” series, and Simon & Schuster’s Atria, which acquired print rights to Penn Cole’s best-selling “Kindred Curse Saga.”
But none have cornered that market like Bloom. The imprint has done so well that it is now turning away most of the submissions it receives. It doesn’t plan on growing its author ranks too much more, and is more focused on expanding the audience for its current writers, according to its executives.
“The problem with Bloom right now,” Whalen, the literary agent, said, “is that everybody wants to sell to them.”
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