I’ve been a voracious reader for as long as I can remember, but I was always a snob about romance. The joke was always on me; 90% of what I read was romance, just packaged as a 19th c. literary masterpiece or a 16th c. comedic play. And although those 19th c. novels may be light on the sex (heavy on the yearning), those 16th c. plays were saturated in it. I’m not here to say Emily Henry is Dickens or Ali Hazlewood is Shakespeare, but those vaunted lights of literary perfection would recognize their kin. But I didn’t recognize that then, too consumed with the need to be seen as a Serious Female Reader who loved Joyce (and could hang with the boys who loved DFW) than someone who regularly re-read the Twilight series when times got tough.
I started, trepidatiously, with The Duke and I by Julia Quinn because Bridgerton was just lovely and I wanted more of it. I was quickly obsessed, downloading Regency romances to my kindle at the speed of approximately 1.5 a night. I could read them in a gulp, a four hour shot before bed, and I tore through the genre like it was my job (God, if only). A year later Emily Henry got me into contemporary romance; a few months ago I joined the Fourth Wing train, then jumped into the high-romantasy of Sarah J. Maas with giddy abandon.
In the first nine months of 2023, print book sales fell 4%. Romance sales rose 16%, fantasy sales, 32%. This continues the trend of the last few years, as Book Riot noted at the beginning of last year,
A 2018 study states that romance generates $1.3 billion dollars in the United States and that romance novels account for 25% of all books sold and 50% of mass-market books sold. This makes it the most popular genre of book, but those sales figures have been steadily growing since 2020, as these romance novel trends will show.
NPD BookScan, a market research group, states that romance is selling more in 2022 than at any point since 2014. Its data shows unit sales of romance novels growing 41% in 2021 and growing even more in 2022. Looking at two years of steady growth, July 2022 marked the high point of romance novel sales. This leads book industry analysts to believe that even more romance novels will continue to grow in 2023. The United Kingdom is also seeing an increase in romance sales, with the highest number of romance novels sold since 2012 when Fifty Shades of Grey came out. Looking at a January to August sales period, an estimated 14.3 million romance novels were sold last year compared with just over 11 million sold in the same time period from 2020.
There are a couple big hitters driving these sales, including the aforementioned Rebecca Yarros, Sarah J. Maas, Colleen Hoover, Emily Henry, and Ali Hazlewood, but there’s also a wideness to the romance genre that is truly remarkable. Seemingly everyone is getting published, from authors who have been reliably selling romance novels for decades to many first-time authors. Many authors who have self-published in the past, be it on Amazon or sites like Wattpad are seeing their novels picked up by hungry editors at the major houses, their back catalogue released in print form as if they’re new novels (Mariana Zapata is a good example of this). A lot of this is due to BookTok and Bookstagram, where readers enthuse over the popular hits but also surface hidden gems in back catalogues on a regular basis.
All this is to say, people like to spend money buying physical copies of books that largely focus on monogamous relationships where people have sex. Shocking, I know.
But it is kind of shocking. The publishing industry is about both snobbery and survival. It functions as both the arbiter of taste and as an industry that sincerely believes it could disappear in the near future. We’ve gone through many eras of panic and boom with publishing; from the death of Borders and the imminent death and oft-reported decline of indie book stores, Barnes & Noble, print books as a concept, copyrights as a concept, you name it. Something always jumps in to save the day, be it Harry Potter, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, or just a continuous miscalculation as to how much people actually want to read on a Kindle (In 2021, 23% of the U.S. population purchased an e-book, compared to 45% who bought a printed book; most other countries lag even further behind on parity). Literary fiction continues to dominate literary journals, and book reviews, although authors like Maas and Henry are knocking on the door. But genre fiction, especially romance, has always kept the lights on; it seems like now we’re ready to enthusiastically embrace that fact, rather than hide our book choice in Kindle form or disavow those embarrassing covers (ok, the covers have changed, making romances a lot more palatable to read in public).
So we’ve established that people are reading these books with their two hands after plonking down real plastic money for them, often in person at a real bookstore. What about the elephant in the blog post? What about the SEX? In Vulture’ EmHen profile from last year, Allison Davis described the appeals of romance thus,
Amid the loneliness and disconnection and confusing sexual politics, romance — a genre that honored big feelings and crying jags and a nice, soft world where people were free to be corny and earnest and direct — became a balm. Once denigrated as a guilty pleasure for the desperate, horny housewife, to Gen-Zers, romance wasn’t embarrassing at all. In fact, they loved it.
And all of that is beautifully put; it could be the official motto of the romance novel union: Write a world where people can be earnest without fear. But I think it is important to write a world where people can also be horny without fear. Sex is something people still feel prudish about, still feel vulnerable about, and thankfully and hopefully forever still crave. But for so long, it has been considered sort of indelicate, common, embarrassing, to write frank and detailed sex scenes, too close to porn but less ok because it’s for women. When asked about her own relationship to sex in books, Henry said, “Sex and the conversations that sex leads to or that happen during sex, or the embarrassment that can come with having sex with someone for the first time,” is an essential part of a love story. A novel with a love story that fades to black at essential moments, or just ignores entirely that sex would happen if the story were real, is, in my opinion, doing a disservice to its readers. That’s not to say that everyone who writes a novel must be comfortable enough to write an explicit sex scene, or that every novel has to be R-rated (that would necessarily limit some audiences, of course), but it is a choice with consequences when you leave that out.
It’s so easy to make fun of sex when it’s on the page. Sex can be as cringey as it can be hot. It makes us blush; it makes us squirm. Sex in romance novels operates on many levels, some more fantastical (there’s a lot of really tall guys built like a house, yes), but also some that make you feel seen. Seeing your desires in print is a way of honoring them, lifting them above the level of shame that still seems to cling to the expression of desire, especially women’s desire. I want to repeat: books don’t all have to have sex. But normalizing the inclusion of sex in books normalizes our own desires. The increasing number of romance novels about queer or non-white or queer non-white characters helps normalize those desires too. If a book is about a romantic, sexual relationship between two people, it should be the norm that is includes at the very least direct acknowledgements of that sex. In so many more highbrow novels we follow characters through the intimate moments of their lives, see them cry and vomit and love and kill, but when the sex comes, if it comes at all, we get pushed out of that intimacy, and for what? To stay “literature” instead of “cliterature?”
And not for nothing, reading about sex is also really… instructive! It’s like having an older-sister-figure that is willing to just spill the beans on what everyone seems to be doing and the whole world is obsessed with but that no one wants to just… talk about, in detail, on the page. We know that a lot of young people watch porn to learn how to have sex. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan, in one of the essays in her incredible book The Right to Sex, writes about asking her students about why they watch porn and having many of them frankly confess it’s the only place they could think to learn how to do it ahead of the actual, you know, doing it. In the words of one Guardian article title: “Porn isn’t a great way to learn about sex – but where else do young people work out how to do it?” Well, here’s a place. Here’s a place to find your niche(s). Here’s a place to explore your desire in private, just you and the page, but also feel the validation of those desires by knowing so many others are out there enjoying those pages too.
I love that this has been changing. I love that I can strike up a casual convo at a random bookstore and have the clerk gush about how much she loved the scene where the two lovers FINALLY get together in Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Mist and Fury. “Chapter 55,” she whispered. “Just wait until you get to chapter 55.” Reader, she was right.