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.\u2019s 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\u2019d 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\u2019ve been paired up ever since.<\/p>\n
Some people might balk at a near stranger\u2019s sudden offer to jump on their idea. But it seemed to Held that Hodge didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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<\/a> 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\u2019re 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 \u201crecession-proof<\/a>.\u201d But in recent years, this genre has dominated the industry. Coming out of the pandemic, romance print-book sales more than double<\/a>d<\/a> 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<\/a> into the black.<\/p>\n The market\u2019s growth owes a great deal to what happens in bookstores like Hodge\u2019s\u2014and far beyond them. Thanks in large part to the internet and social media, this demographic has become loud, unignorable, and\u2014for many booksellers and publishers in other literary niches\u2014enviable. Some of the most devoted members of this fan base call their community \u201cRomancelandia.\u201d 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\u2019re 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\u2019s social world, harnessed by its business-minded authors, may make its success exceedingly difficult to replicate.<\/p>\n