The meet-cute took place in a bookstore. Around the middle of 2019, Elizabeth Held was hunting for great vacation reads at her local independent bookseller, East City Bookshop, a small store tucked below street level in Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. At checkout, Destinee Hodge, a longtime employee of the shop, told Held, a regular, that she was planning to start a book club where people could get together and swoon over romance novels. Held said she’d definitely be there. She was almost out the door when she spun around and told Hodge what she really wanted: to be a co-host of the new club. Hodge gave an enthusiastic yes, and they’ve been paired up ever since.
Some people might balk at a near stranger’s sudden offer to jump on their idea. But it seemed to Held that Hodge didn’t mind; in fact, she was eager to collaborate with someone who valued the genre as much as she did. Her quick agreement is typical of the tight-knit but open-armed community that surrounds romance writing. The pair’s book club, Really Reading Romance, has thrived since it started (even during COVID, when it went remote). The year after their fateful encounter, Held also began writing a weekly romance-recommendation newsletter that now has more than 9,000 subscribers. Held estimates that she reads something like a book a week.
Held may seem to be an outlier at a time when, according to an NPR/Ipsos poll from earlier this year, only 51 percent of Americans had read a book in the past month. But there are millions of people who are just like Held; an industry survey found that nearly half of contemporary fans of romance fiction also read at least a book a week. As demonstrated by the piles of spines that crowd the frames of TikToks where readers and influencers show off what they’re working through, plenty of people read even more. Romance readers have been voracious for decades, making the category a long-term profit engine for publishers, with a reputation for being “recession-proof.” But in recent years, this genre has dominated the industry. Coming out of the pandemic, romance print-book sales more than doubled from 2020 to 2023. In 2024, despite declining sales in other publishing categories, romance fans bought so many books that they helped push total print-book sales into the black.
The market’s growth owes a great deal to what happens in bookstores like Hodge’s—and far beyond them. Thanks in large part to the internet and social media, this demographic has become loud, unignorable, and—for many booksellers and publishers in other literary niches—enviable. Some of the most devoted members of this fan base call their community “Romancelandia.” They are driving the genre into the mainstream by adapting to new platforms; organizing book clubs, podcasts, and meetups; and devouring novels and series as quickly as they’re released. The rest of the industry wants to emulate this success, but as many editors know, chasing a trend can be a futile endeavor. Romancelandia’s social world, harnessed by its business-minded authors, may make its success exceedingly difficult to replicate.
Romance’s first advantage is its flexibility. The category is not a monolith but a broad network of interlinked subgenres, which rise and fall in popularity as readers’ tastes shift. Right now “romantasy” is huge, and “sports romances” are in. “Historicals” are on the wane; “dark romance,” potentially on the rise. These changes are often cyclical, and the big subcategories eventually come back around: “About every 10 to 15 years we have a vampire surge,” Christine M. Larson, the author of Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, a multidecade history of the romance ecosystem, told me. Tying the genre together are its clear and expected plot beats—and, of course, marketing. But because the category is so broad, a romance novel can be any novel that proudly calls itself a romance.
Another important strength of the category may look at first like a contradiction. Despite its long-standing economic success, the genre—and the culture around it—retains the status of a defiant outsider. Since modern romance developed in the 1970s, these novels have been thoroughly ignored by highbrow critics and prestigious-award juries. But such exclusion may have helped their readers—and more importantly their writers and publishers—evolve into a cohort that Larson labels an “open-elite network.”
In open-elite communities, as defined by Larson, more established members help less experienced ones, resulting in an environment of information sharing and mutual support. Larson said these underestimated groups of experts and newcomers can rapidly adapt to changing conditions, learning from one another’s strategies and growing together. She cites Silicon Valley as an example of an open-elite network—one in which a small group of collaborators operating outside the mainstream transformed their industry.
In the case of romance, professional associations such as Romance Writers of America, founded in 1980, brought writers with unsold manuscripts into contact with titans of the genre. The internet allowed writers to riff on one another’s tropes and discuss new ideas for books, and it supercharged the idea that every interaction can be a marketing opportunity. Years before publishers were tracking follower counts, romance writers were watching their platforms grow. And now, in its maturity, Romancelandia retains the features that served it so well as an underdog. Successful romance authors have kept saying yes, for instance, to Hodge and Held’s book club in D.C. At a moment when traditional publications are scuttling book reviews and the economic barriers to entry for emerging writers are harder and harder to overcome, these habits are more useful than ever.
In part because of their self-perceived outsider status, romance authors frequently see themselves as businesspeople as well as artists, responsible for their own survival and financial future. In contrast with fans of other genres who expect stars to drop a thick new novel every half decade or so, romance readers expect their favorite authors to publish fast and frequently, and writers are typically happy to oblige. Sarah MacLean, the New York Times best-selling author of romances including Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, has published 18 books in slightly more than 15 years. “‘We will publish as fast as you can write’ was sort of the sense,” MacLean told me about her first deal, for three books, with HarperCollins.
With its baked-in entrepreneurial streak, Romancelandia has long been open to new technologies. When Amazon launched Kindle Direct Publishing in 2007, romance writers lined up to get their work straight to readers. Self-publishing especially benefited romance writers. According to Larson’s book, from 2009 to 2014, romance authors’ median income from books increased by 73 percent. And today, editors at traditional publishing houses offer deals for future work to romance novelists who have already found success independently—perhaps on Kindle’s platform or through writing popular fanfiction. The model is analogous to those of tech start-ups: Writers bootstrap their first book or two, then hope a company with more money will call them up to the big leagues—if, that is, they can prove significant author-market fit.
The collaborative, open-elite dynamic thrives on social media. Romances were some of the earliest successes to emerge from TikTok’s landscape of book-review videos, known as BookTok. The genre’s intense emotional valence happens to be a perfect match for the video platform, where many videos are filmed as direct, first-person addresses. Although social media has its great share of manufactured viral moments, the enthusiasm that launched authors such as Colleen Hoover onto best-seller lists reflects genuine fan passion. Leigh Stein, an author and book coach who teaches courses on TikTok and online strategy, specifically mentioned Hoover’s Facebook fan club, where she interacts with readers: She “doesn’t act above her audience, even though she’s a very wealthy woman now,” Stein told me. “That’s part of her popularity.” Authors connect with readers through social posts, book clubs like Held’s, and podcasts including one hosted by MacLean. This isn’t entirely unique to romance—science fiction and young-adult fiction have intimate, well-established readerships, for instance. But Romancelandia in particular prides itself on being a community of equals.
That’s not to say that all the authors truly are on the same level—or that their social world is always harmonious. In 2019, a controversy sparked by allegations of racism against the Romance Writers of America’s board of directors led to its membership dropping calamitously; the group, previously one of the largest writers’ associations in the country, later filed for bankruptcy. Fans continue to point out that on algorithmic platforms such as TikTok, stories about straight white people falling in love are promoted above all others, and the community is also rife with plagiarism accusations.
Traditional publishing is notoriously slow to shift its practices to meet the times. (Consider how long it took to develop ebooks and secure audio rights.) Popular imprints such as Berkley and Dell already publish plenty of romance novels. But less genre-inclined editors are taking notes too. Susan Swinwood, the editorial director at Mira Books, an arm of Harlequin, told me she’s noticed editors in other categories looking to snap up work that comes with a built-in audience, such as cookbooks from Instagram influencers and nonfiction from subject-matter experts with online followers, just as romance editors have been doing for years.
Some publishers are eager to emulate not only the marketing techniques of the genre, but also its tropes and its predominant emotional registers: joy and hope. “I’ve come to really value anyone who can make me laugh as much as they can make me cry,” Jesse Shuman, an editor at Ballantine who works with books across literary- and upmarket-fiction categories, told me (he’s also Stein’s editor). Cleyvis Natera, a literary novelist, turns to the genre for craft elements. “Everyone is expected to read literary fiction, because it’s instructive. And I think romance is instructive in that same way,” Natera told me. “How do we keep the attention of our readers, and how do we build loyalty?” Stein said her new book, a literary novel about a TikTok hype house, went into a second printing before it was even published—possibly thanks to the approaches she’s learned from romance.
But the alchemy that makes Romancelandia work (and makes its authors a real living) may prove to be unrepeatable outside this particular community, whose members gather for reasons far beyond mutual commercial support. MacLean keeps podcasting, which allows her to connect with fans and other authors even as her books hit best-seller lists. More established authors keep offering a helping hand to newbies. “People are surprisingly open to reading work and blurbing work by an author that they have no connection to,” Maggie Cooper, a literary agent who represents writers across categories, told me. Held keeps running the Really Reading Romance book club because it’s a bright spot of creativity and community in her life and the lives of others. And in a turn that’s quite common for the romance world, she’s making the transition from reader to writer: She is now working on a nonfiction book about romance novels.
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