The Decibel - The big business of romance novels

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Once relegated to paperback stands in grocery stores, the business of romance novels is hot right now – especially in Canada. In a moment when book sales in other genres appear to be relatively flat or declining, what is it about romance novels that’s making readers fall in love? Deborah Aarts is a freelance business journalist. She’s on the show today to discuss what’s driving this “swoon boom,” how Canada became such a hotbed for romance readers and writers, and what it is about this moment that has readers pining after romance novels. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There was a time when readers of romance novels kept it, well, discreet. But not anymore. These strangers hit it off one night and agreed to me the next day except for she never showed. Why? Because she was entered into the witness protection program that night. This is a vampire werewolf romance. This is a werewolf hybrid werewolf romance. But wouldn't it be crazy if she moved to his small town years later and accidentally showed up at his engagement party as his sisters plus one? When you get to the spice in this one, yeah. I would keep it to private. reading only. He has been pining after her for years and now she's pregnant with someone else's

baby, but he ends up having to do an emergency delivery in her living room and from that moment on. She and that baby are his to take care of. This is a taste of romance book talk, a community on TikTok where romance novel fans passionately discuss the genre. And this is just one of many spaces, both online and IRL, where fans are coming out of the shadows. The genre is big business. and has been for years. But something different is happening now that's led to a romance renaissance. And it's not just because of heated rivalry.

Sales of romance novels are way up, and Canadian authors are leading the charge. Deborah Arts is a freelance business journalist. She's on the show to tell us about what's driving this swoon boom, why Canada is such a big player, and what it is about this moment. that's making readers fall in love with romance.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Hi, Deborah, thanks so much for joining me today. What a delight to be here. I'm very excited to be talking about this topic. I am always excited to be talking about this topic. So, romance novels are having a renaissance, is what you talked about, and I've done some reporting on. What tips you off that there was something going on in the romance novel industry?

Yeah, I think like a lot of. of fans of books in general. I've long been aware that this is a thing and a big part of the book business for a long time. But what really kind of shifted my perception that something new was going on was last summer. I was on holiday with my family for a weekend, a long weekend in Montreal. And it was one of those days where it was just so hot. Everyone was a little irritable. Everyone was just kind of on each other's nerves. And we turned the corner and came upon this bookstore called Joadolive, which is an excellent name for a bookstore. Beautiful name.

Beautiful. And I walked into this gorgeous little stop and thought, okay, we can kill some time here. And the first thing I saw was this wall of romance novels front and center. And I've since learned that Joadileve is a genre-focused bookstore that heavily, heavily prioritizes romance. And it occurred to me that on this Monday afternoon, this bookstore was, you know, fairly booming. and people were buying a ton of romance novels and they weren't sneaking to the back to find them in some corner. These were right up in front and center.

They were talking about it. Some people were kind of sharing recommendations. And it said to myself, like, there is something going on here. And that kind of planted the seed that led me to go a lot deeper than I ever thought I would into the business of romance. Are you a romance novel reader? I sure am. Yeah. Yeah.

I am. What do you like about it? I like it as kind of the jolt of goodness and joy in my kind of reading diet. I read a lot of different things and sometimes I want to be challenged and sometimes I want to be scared. And sometimes I just want a nice, beautiful, optimistic story that's going to kind of warm my heart a little bit. It's kind of akin to the same reason I watch shows like the Great British Bake Off. Sometimes you just want something that's going to deliver exactly what you needed to. Yeah.

Okay. I think that's a good moment to kind of actually define what a romance novel is because I think people know it sort of. But like, what is the definition of a romance novel? It's interesting because the kind of package it comes in has changed quite a lot, very much so in recent years especially. But fundamentally, a romance story is about parties, usually two people, sometimes more, coming together and forging a connection, overcoming some sort of obstacle usually. sometimes there is some salacious language and scenes involved. Sometimes there's not. Not all of these books are spicy as they're called.

You mean sexy. We're talking about sexy here, right? We're talking about sexy, but not all of them are. Some are a lot more chaste than that. Some of them are the exact opposite and extremely graphic in what they depict. But you can almost always count on a connection between humans. You can almost always count on a happy ending. And you can almost always count on people, you know, getting over themselves to a certain degree.

agree to go all in on whatever relationship is on the table. Okay. So good things you pointed out here because sometimes we think about romance novels and sex comes to mind, but it is more than just sex. There's story. There's place. There's also fandom, as we're going to be learning about too. And that has translated into a romance novel boom per se.

Yeah. Let's put some numbers to that. How well are romance novels performing right now? By every metric I was able to find the answer, I guess, would be gangbusters. I mean, this is the segment of the book business that shows a clear kind of, if we're going to use the language of business, hockey stick growth curve. You can see in sales of print books since the pandemic, they've gone up more than 100%. Audio books and e-books, which are a huge part of the equation, are a little more difficult to measure on the same kind of set of criteria. But everything I saw pointed to a similar trajectory on those fronts.

Sales of romance novels by Canadian authors has gone up almost 400% since the stuff. of the pandemic, which is wild. At Indigo, if you look at, you know, the biggest bookseller in the country, it went from being the 20th category, something like that in terms of book sales to the fourth. Sales are up more than 400 percent there or nearly 400 percent. Yeah, it's wild. And Harlequin, which remains a Canadian headquartered company, still sells two books every second, I think, is the exact stat. It is close to that, and that is a wild statistic to me. That's incredible. And we're going to talk more about Harlequin in a moment. But just to keep it on to like what's going on in the romance novel industry and the boom here. Something else that I learned from your reporting is that, you know, audiobooks and e-books, which is a big part of this, right? Huge. It's because the people that read them read so many different titles that like they kind of download a whole bunch at the same time. Is that kind of part of it as well? These are high volume readers. It is not abnormal for a romance reader to go through three, four books a week. And that is sometimes more.

You know, sometimes people have these playing if they're doing audiobooks all the time. It is a voracious audience. And, you know, if you're looking at translating this into business numbers, that's a repeat customer. And that's something that you want to wrap your arms around, as it were. How does this compare to the overall trends in the book industry? Like, how is the book industry itself doing? Yeah. I mean, it depends on what you measure.

Bookstores in general are kind of in shorter supply, although there is a renaissance happening in the romance front in that regard that's very interesting. It's very difficult across most book genres to see anything that has a growth curve anywhere close to romance. Some are up, some are down. There are some spikes here and there, but there's been nothing that I was able to see that has a consistent and high growth curve of romance sales in that sense. The industry as a whole is flat to maybe a little bit contracting, but it's a little hard to use the numbers that were given because it's hard to calibrate things like e-books. in audiobooks, which as we mentioned are something that people are really into these days. But it's clear by every expert that I spoke to for this piece said that Romance is very clearly the star that they're all in on.

Yes. What is clear romance is booming here. Who are the people buying these books? Yeah. So when I went into this story, I fully expected it to be a whole lot of me. And I'm, you know, this is an audio medium, so you probably can't see. But maybe you can hear that I'm a middle-aged woman. And I expected a lot of me in the audience.

I went to a reading party for kind of my quote-unquote research for the story. It was a delightful and pleasant way to spend an evening with people. And it was like there wasn't any sort of through line in the demographics there. It were younger people. There were older people of all ethnicities, of all gender expression. It was truly like a little microcosm of Toronto in this room of people reading books together. Yeah. Yeah.

And a lot of men. A lot of men. I think that might be surprising for some people. to be hearing. Yeah, I think so too. And the booksellers I spoke to all said that, you know, more and more, they're seeing guys, you know, your classic stereotypical dude bros going in and buying these books and not saying they're a gift for my partner or whatever, they're buying them for themselves. What about age? All over the place. There's a lot of, I mean, yes, there's a lot of adult women and, you know, the 18 to kind of 50 range is where a lot of people are buying them.

but there's a huge growth in the YA audience. A lot of teens are going to romance. And a lot of older people, and this is something that I find really wonderful because a lot of these bookstores are very overt about, you know, how spicy and salacious a lot of these books are. And there's these generations of older women who've used to hiding these novels under their pillows who are coming in and just being delighted that they can pick a book from a wall

that has a meter with how spicy it is. And they don't have to hide this. It's just, is this kind of joyous big tent that are all finding this through line and finding themselves attracted to these stories. I could imagine that part of the reason why we're seeing so many different people coming to romances because of who are writing these books. So how has that changed? Like, who is writing romance novels? Yeah, a lot more different people in a lot more different ways. And there's a lot more channels to becoming an author in romance than there might have been years ago.

So the fact that we know names like more many people listening will know names like Rachel Reed and Carly Fortune, who are now legitimate global celebrities in this space and have sold millions of books in the Heated Rivalry series. I'm going to say, you have to mention Rachel Reed is heated rivalry. Rachel Reed is heated rivalry. Carly Fortune has written many kind of summer kind of cottage country romance. She's got Our Perfect Storm, which is out earlier this summer, her most recent one. And these are international household names. almost to a degree, is a very different time than, you know, Harlequin novels were often using pen names or anonymized format for the authors.

But in terms of who they are, there's people of all different backgrounds and all different experiences that are now finding success in this genre. And this is where Canadians are really punching above their weights as well, too. We've got, you know, authors like Usma Jalaladin, who writes these wonderful story set in around Toronto. So she has like Aisha at last and much to do about Nada. And these are really, really great. And as she described it to me, just like overtly Muslim stories,

often retellings of classic kind of romance tropes. And they are wildly successful. People of any kind of background and interest can find an audience in Canada writing these books. And, you know, there are many channels to get there, including self-published route, the traditionally published route. It's, again, a really diverse range of stories getting. told, and that's really great. So you mentioned Carly Fortune, which we should say as a former globe editor,

interestingly enough. So Carly Fortune is a very big name out there. And so is Rachel Reed. Can you give me some numbers as to how popular they are? Like how many books have they sold? Yeah. So when I was reporting this piece earlier this year, we were at, I think, for Carly, three million books in 30 languages around the world.

And Rachel Reed, 2.5 million copies, most of them sold. in the time since the heated rivalry series launched in late last year, those numbers are almost certainly much higher now, and I think are both pretty astounding in terms of anyone who's ever tried to sell a book in this country, knowing selling anything close to that is very, very rare. We'll be right back. I'm Robin Doolittle, and I'm a reporter and the deputy head of investigations at the Globe and Mail. And we need your help.

Every year, seniors in Canada are defrauded out of millions of dollars. And we want to look into this. We're starting an investigative project that's going to examine the scams that target the elderly. If you or a loved one has been impacted by a grandparent scam or a fraud like this, the Globe and Mail would like to speak with you. You can reach us at Elder Fraud at Globondmail.com. That's Elder Fraud. at globe and mail.com.

So, Deborah, you laid out that Canada is a big player in the romance novel industry. How does Canada factor into this world of romance novels? You know, it's really interesting that we really do seem to punch above our weight in telling these stories, maybe because it's cold. I don't know what the deal is, but... We need something steamy. Yeah, we need something. Sometimes.

It was a really long winter this year, which might be why a lot of these books move. so much. But I think if we look back to it, you have to go back to, you know, 1949 in Winnipeg when Harlequin was founded and it wasn't founded as a romance company, a romance focus company. It kind of backed into it and really locked into it. But Harlequin Canadian success story still headquartered in Toronto and has over the years employed hundreds, thousands of people in the business of telling love stories. And that's kind of created this across the board just aptitude for telling these stories really, really well. And, you know, we're also really good at figuring out how to market these books. And that was Harlequin in the 70s,

kind of locked into a formula that was envied and replicated in kind of, to varying degrees of success around the world of just telling these stories and getting them to, quote, unquote, where the women are in whatever ways they could. So talk about the formula. What is the formula? Because that's a big part of romance novels, right? And, this is something that Harlequin really did well. Sure did. And the books now are far less formulaic than they were at that point. But there was a time about in the 70s where they locked into every book would be exactly

192 pages. Sometimes they would make the font bigger or smaller to fit that formula. They would be very, very kind of consistent in the tropes that they would hit in the kind of story beats and how they would be laid out. But the distribution angle is really interesting because a lot of traditional booksellers were not at all interested in selling these kinds of books. They thought, hmm, they were a little, if I can editorialize, snobby about it. And the leadership team at Harlequin at the time thought, okay, well, we'll find a new way.

And they started selling them in drugstores and the carousels of grocery stores. And I don't know if you remember seeing those, I certainly did when I was too little to be looking at them. They had like a straight into the home distribution kind of subscription model that was really ahead of its time. And as a result, these books became more. accessible, they also became a lot spicier, a lot more graphic in their content, and the sales just ballooned. They expanded

around the world and led it to be the powerhouse that it is today. Romance novels have been big business for years. But I think, Deborah, it's fair to say that readers and authors haven't gotten the respect despite this success. Why is that?

Oh, that's an interesting question. I mean, there's a long history of of products and content geared towards women that has not been given respect as serious art. That's maybe part of this as well. But I think there's a general tendency to view this as frivolous as a, I hate this term, but guilty pleasure as something that is, you know, something that should be not a point of pride to be enjoyed, something that needs to be a little bit hidden.

And I think that's kind of had ripple effects of perhaps attaching. some very unfair stigma to both authors and readers of the genre because they've always been a lot more than what people have given them credit for. And they've always made the book business quite a lot of money that needs to be pointed. This has always been a profitable part of the business. So I think in terms of what is changing in this is that people are starting to recognize more and more that this is not, this is not some sort of hidden pleasure. It should be something that is not something someone has to be afraid to wear loud and proud in terms of their family. Yeah, so of course we're seeing that this is changing. The stigma is not there. And there is celebration going on. But I'm curious, like, what is it about this particular moment that's

making romance novels so popular? Like, what are people looking for? I'm laughing to a degree because we're speaking in the Globe and Mail headquarters where you read the headlines every day and there's a lot of depressing things happening in the world. It's rough out there. So I think to a degree there is a sense that romance offers, yes, escapism, but it's escapism to a place that is fundamentally premised on the goodness of humans and their ability to come together and find solutions for things. And it's also the fact that this fandom has become a real community in its own sense. You know, there's, because people are so overt in their fandom, they consider themselves members of Romancelandia, as they call themselves in the fandom. They go to events

together, they connect online on all these spaces, people are finding a real sense of almost fandom-like belonging in this romance community. And it's not dissimilar to what you might see among sports fans, I don't think. It's really giving people a place to connect. And with all the headlines that we see about loneliness and isolation and people feeling disconnected is really providing a powerful kind of antidote to that. Where are people finding this community? Book Talk and Bookstagram.

These are the Instagram and TikTok kind of communities. You can call them where people really, really geek out about this stuff and platforms like Goodreads and other similar kind of online spaces. But what's kind of striking me and what has really come clear in the research for this piece is that this is a very offline community as well too. Yes, they connect online, but they are meeting in real life. they are going, you know, en masse to these author signings and treating them like a day out. They are, you know, going on pilgrimages to the sites of their favorite books.

And that includes, you know, the arena in Guelph where they filmed heated rivalry. There's people making a day of it and going to do that. They're going to bookstores with their friends. They're meeting and then they'll go for cocktails afterwards or coffee or whatever the case may be. It is, you know, a private kind of act of reading has become very social in this community. and online and in real life. You know, it's interesting because reading is fundamentally a solitary activity, right? What do you think it is about this genre that makes people want to come together?

Oh, it's just delightful. I mean, I'm an enthusiast at heart. I love nothing more than talking about things that I love. And when it's a happy story, it's just so fun to go into it. But I think the kind of tropey nature of these books in terms of, you know, there are a whole like enemies to lovers, fans, which is exactly what it sounds like, or there's, you know, grumpy sunshine, which is a kind of grumpy person who's paired up with someone who's chipper and upbeat. You know, all these different, like, very predictable beats mean that you can kind of, I don't know, compare and swap stories and find a lot more to read with each other.

So it's an interesting phenomenon because there is a lot to talk about about these books. Can I tell you a story about how I, my first romance novel, I don't read many romance novels, but back in 1998, I was doing a book report because I was in elementary school. And I picked up a book from my mom's shelf. And I was like, oh, this looks great. It's called The Long Road Home. And I read it. I'm like, it had everything.

It had a nun who like left the convent and got, she, she fell in love with the priest. There was a whole story. And I wrote this up, the great eight me. And the funny thing was, you know who that author was? Danielle Steele. Wow. And that is a very wealthy woman. And you know what?

I was like, this is this book has it all. And I presented it to my grade A class. Anyway, I just wanted to tell that funny story. I love that. I love that. Have you heard of this author, Danielle Steele? I was like, have you heard of this person? Yes, we have.

Okay, just to end here, we're seeing a lot in the romance novel industry. That's bucking trends. There's the brick and mortar stores, in-person events, huge sales numbers. So much of it seems rooted in a desire for community, as we've been talking about. How do you think this boom in romance novels intersects with questions of loneliness and isolation that people are feeling? I think it is pretty fundamental to why these books are taking off right now.

You know, it's not only in the community that we've talked about here, but it is just a little reminder every time you pick up one of these books that, you know what, humans are really good at sorting our stuff out and putting our differences behind us if there are differences

in finding ways to really connect with one another and connect can carry a lot of baggage when I'm saying that there. Connect can mean a lot of different things. but I think it's just a little bit of every romance novel is like a little bit of a vote of confidence in the ability of humans to kind of figure it out and come together. And I think that when people are feeling so disconnected and feeling isolated from one another is so intoxicating. I just can't get enough of it. I always keep kind of an emotional support romance in my pile of books beside my bed just in case those days where I'm feeling a little dispirited about humanity.

and I don't think I'm alone in that. Deborah, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been delightful. Thank you. That was Deborah Arts, a freelance business journalist. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our associate producer and intern is Cynthia Jimenez.

Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mahal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is. our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks for listening.