HMN 2025: How Romance bookstores are booming worldwide—and followers are lining up for love

Once, for those who wished to purchase romance novels, you needed to know where to look. Some small shops stocked paperback romances, in addition to malls like Big W in Australia and Walmart within the United States. So did some bookstore chains, however romance wasn’t often entrance and middle.

In 2025, issues have modified: romance novels are not relegated to dark corners. Thanks partially to BookTok and Bookstagram, they’re more visible than ever, with an average growth rate of 49% for 3 years, in keeping with Nielsen Bookscan figures. Australian romance readers are “propping up a flatlining nationwide ebook market”, according to journalist Melanie Kembrey.

Major bookstores now have dedicated romance shelving spaces. Huge romance ebook signing occasions are being held in convention centers. Romance readers lined up for the opening of devoted romance bookstore Romancing the Novel in Sydney’s Paddington final 12 months. It’s simply one in every of many romance bookstores round Australia, a part of a worldwide trend.

It’s not the primary romance bookstore growth in Australia—that got here considerably earlier and receded within the early 2010s. But now they’re again, larger than ever, becoming a member of profitable romance bookstores all over the world, from the US and Canada to the United Kingdom and France.

This signifies a newfound communal pleasure in romance as a style. While it has regularly been derided and dismissed, resulting in some readers feeling embarrassed about or concealing their studying, the pendulum has very a lot swung again the opposite manner.

The new wave of Australian romance bookstores

The romance bookstore is nicely and actually alive in Australia. Books Ever After opened in Bowral in 2018, Fiction and Friction in South Australia’s Murray Bridge in 2020, A Thousand Lives in Victoria’s Yarra Valley in 2023, and the net bookstore Tales and Tomes, additionally in 2023. There are many extra, some with bodily storefronts, some with digital storefronts.

Australia’s earliest romance bookstores emerged within the late Nineties and early 2000s. But whereas their forebears sought to attach Australian readers to historically revealed books from the US, the present wave of romance bookstores largely seeks to connect readers to independently published books by Australian and worldwide authors.

These books, whereas often out there digitally, are not often out there in print by way of mainstream shops. Sales of those books are regularly complemented by special editions and bookish merchandise, like limited-release hardcovers with sprayed edges, candles, bookmarks, stickers, mugs and jewellery. Romance bookstores usually promote books at—and generally even host—main romance signing occasions.

Australia’s early romance bookstores

Rendezvous The Romance Bookstore opened in Melbourne in 1997, as a result of its owners, avid romance readers, actually couldn’t entry the books they wished to learn in Australia, so that they imported their inventory instantly from the US.

Several different bookstores adopted, comparable to Temptation in Perth and Intrigue in Canberra, which each opened in 2004. Some are nonetheless working right now: Rosemary’s Romance Books, which opened in Brisbane in 2002, and Ever After, which opened in Wollongong in 2003, are nonetheless going sturdy.

However, the advent of the ebook—and particularly, from 2007, the ereader—opened new pathways for readers who wished to entry romance novels shortly. Many of those specialty bookstores ultimately closed down, together with Rendezvous in 2013.

The abroad scene

The return of the romance-focused bookstore started with the Ripped Bodice in Culver City, Los Angeles in 2016. If we take note of the Australian romance bookstore period of the 2000s, we’d consider this retailer as becoming the second-chance romance subgenre—where a former love is rekindled.

The title “Ripped Bodice” defiantly claims the “bodice-ripper” epithet, regularly lobbed at romance novels for his or her sexual content material. It presents itself as an out-and-proud spot dedicated to the style. Its light-filled area and ebook shows exhibit the covers of its novels. Its romance-focused occasions, merchandising and gross sales methods like “blind date with a ebook” (a gift-wrapped novel with a cute blurb) have now grow to be the usual for different romance bookstores worldwide.

Since its opening, different romance-only bookstores have blossomed throughout the US and Canada, numbering almost two dozen.

The sisters who began the Ripped Bodice opened a second retailer in one in every of right now’s most trend-setting model areas (Brooklyn, New York) in 2023. The latest romance bookstore, Lovestruck, has simply opened in Harvard Square in Boston, a stone’s throw from the Ivy League college.

On the opposite aspect of the Atlantic, the UK’s first romance bookstore, Book Lovers Bookshop, opened in Edinburgh in 2024. In France, the current opening of L’Encre Du Cœur (Ink of the Heart) in Rouen, additionally in 2024, was so nicely obtained that the founder began a brand new retailer inside months in Caen, roughly an hour and a half away.

The reputation of those bricks-and-mortar specialty romance bookstores has influenced different booksellers to showcase romance novels, with many dashing to get a share of the readers by creating dedicated sections of romance novels, particularly darkish romance and younger grownup romance.

Bookstore Romance Day, a global occasion celebrating romance in unbiased bookstores, began in 2019 with simply 150 taking part shops. Last 12 months, there have been over 550.

So, what does the final decade’s wave of romance bookstores in Australia and internationally imply?

Australia’s first wave of romance bookstores receded largely due to the rise of the e book. The second wave, nevertheless, exhibits we’ve not fallen out of affection with print. Indeed, we’d have fallen for it extra deeply than ever.

This article is republished from The Conversation below a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.