When Jonlyn Scrogham decided to open a romance novel bookstore last year in Louisville, Kentucky, the 37-year-old had modest expectations. The space she rented was tiny; her annual sales projections were small, too.

Though she had been an avid romance reader for decades, she wasn’t sure how many others shared her excitement. She worried that people would think the concept was silly, or that not many people would visit.

But not long after A Novel Romance opened in July, she said, customers were showing up from Tennessee and Virginia, saying they had traveled three or four hours just to visit. Within two months, Scrogham was already halfway to what she had projected would be her annual sales total. And all of this happened without her spending “a single dollar” on marketing.

“It’s all been driven by Instagram, TikTok, word of mouth and Facebook,” she said. “People coming in, and the romance community talking to each other.”

Scrogham is part of a quiet but rapidly growing trend. At least eight other dedicated romance novel bookstores opened across the US in 2023, in cities from Wichita, Kansas, to Belfast, Maine. At least three more have opened so far in 2024, in Florida and in Utah, with another planned in Portland, Oregon.

“People are driving from states away – people who are seeing us online and want to come,” said Jaclyn Wooten, the founder of Blush Bookstore in Kansas. An employee said that one customer described flying in from Baltimore on a private jet. “All the businesses around us are like, ‘What is going on over there? What are they doing?’”

As a genre, romance is defined by its focus on a central love story, and by its promise of a “happily ever after” for its main characters – or at least, in more contemporary novels, a “happy for now”. Romance connoisseurs often refer to the amount of sex in the novels as a book’s “spice level”, which from ranges from quite mild to very spicy indeed.

Six years ago, there was only one romance bookstore in the US: the Ripped Bodice, in Los Angeles, named after the “bodice ripper” historical romances of the 80s and 90s. But as romance publishing has boomed, with US print book sales increasing 117% over the past three years, romance fans are opening up more brick and mortar stores to meet the demand.

Annual print sales of romance novels more than doubled in the past three years, from 18m in 2020 to 36m in 2023, driven in part by BookTok, according to Circana, a consumer analytics firm.

Over the same time, the number of romance-focused bookstores in the US grew from just two to at least 15, with a handful more in Canada and Australia. Many of them have names that play on favorite romance tropes, like Grump and Sunshine, Meet Cute and Slow Burn Books. Their decor – often heavy on the pink – is playful and celebratory, designed as a backdrop for TikTok and Instagram content.

The stores stock a wide variety of popular romance genres, from the Regency-era love stories that inspired Bridgerton, to contemporary novels about hot hockey players, to “romantasy” series like A Court of Thorns and Roses, to a wide range of LGBTQ+ romances. Despite book bans in some US states, 1m LGBTQ+ romance novels were sold between May 2022 and May 2023, a 40% increase compared with the year before, according to Circana.

When the sisters Leah Koch and Bea Hodges-Koch began raising money for the Ripped Bodice in 2015, the idea of a romance-only bookstore had plenty of doubters. Some family members and friends thought the idea was too “niche” to succeed, Leah Koch said. A few older romance novelists criticized the store’s cheeky name, arguing they were portraying the genre in a bad light. Some critics suggested a bookstore focused on sexy romance novels was an affront to religious values.

But the idea also struck a chord among romance fans: the sisters raised more than $90,000 from supporters on Kickstarter to make the Ripped Bodice a reality.

The Los Angeles store is widely acknowledged as the originator of the current trend, and it did well enough that the sisters opened a second outpost in New York last summer.

A romance bookstore occupying prime real estate in Park Slope is a significant change for a genre that has often been “sidelined” and treated as something deserving of criticism or shame, said Jayashree Kamblé, a LaGuardia Community College English professor who studies popular romance fiction. It “really creates a wonderful sense of pride and community”, she said.

On a rainy day in mid-August, not long after its launch, the Brooklyn store was full of twentysomethings, some with their phones raised to document their visit. They all said they had heard about the Ripped Bodice on TikTok or Instagram.

Reshma Haque, 24, said she had long been a fan of romantic young adult fantasy like the Twilight novels and Harry Potter fanfiction, but that she had started reading more romance novels in 2020, around the same time she had joined TikTok.

“In most bookstores, there’s a little section tucked into the back for romance,” said Madeleine Goetz, 27, who said she had read 128 romance novels last year while out of work because of the Hollywood writers’ strike.

Seeing an entire store of romance novels was “pretty wild”, Goetz said. “I love romance. This is a welcoming place to be.”

‘Permission to love it out loud’

Independent bookstores of many different kinds have flourished since the pandemic, and their ownership has grown more diverse. But analysts say the romance genre has particularly benefited from its popularity on BookTok, where viral TikTok reading influencers promote their favorite novels.

Booksellers say a new generation of romance fans is driving a change in the public perception of romance, a genre that was once greeted with “sneering and leering”.

“Gen Z, they’re more open, they’re bolder, they’re more willing to be vulnerable. I think it’s giving us millennials, and also the baby boomers that love romance, more permission to love those things out loud,” Scrogham, the Kentucky bookstore owner, said. “I think we’re undoing generations of guilt and shame.”

Bookstore owners are also seeing “a hunger for in-person community meeting, a space for people to gather that isn’t the internet”, as Becca Title, 33, the founder of the Meet Cute Bookshop in San Diego, put it.

Readers are becoming “increasingly conscientious” about pursuing their hobby in an ethical way, producing “a wave of people wanting to support authors and support small businesses”, rather than just buying books on Amazon, Title said. (One of her favorite authors, Sarah MacLean, once said that “name is destiny” for romance characters, as it is for a bookseller named Title.)

A great in-person experience is crucial to the success of the new stores, owners said. Many of the shops host book clubs and frequent author events. Every angle of the Ripped Bodice’s new Brooklyn location, inside and out, presents an appealing background for cellphone footage. There are old books arranged as art installations on the walls. The bathroom is covered with affirming Post-it notes. The toilet paper is pink.

Koch and Hodges-Koch painstakingly documented every step of renovating the Brooklyn store on TikTok and Instagram, including Leah stenciling hearts on the hand-painted floor, a video that went a bit viral.

In Kansas, Blush Bookstore grew so quickly that, within months, it had to move to a larger space, “a 1920s stone cottage with a working fireplace”. Wooten laughed: “We are a bookstore theme park.”

As well as romance novels, Blush and other bookstores feature merch for people who see being a reader as a part of their identities, including neon signs reading “Main character energy”, bookmarks with the slogans “hot girls read romance” and “definitely not smut”, and T-shirts proclaiming the wearer is “in my cowboy romance era”, or, for those hockey romance readers, a “puck bunny”.

The founders of the new stores say they work hard to make them safe, welcoming spaces for all kinds of readers, and that, while romance readers are usually assumed to be women, men are showing up, as well.

In Louisville, Scrogham said, her tiny shop is sometimes crowded with 10 or 15 enthusiastic romance fans. “We’re really excited about things that bring each other joy – swapping stories, swapping recommendations,” she said.

That’s especially meaningful for Scrogham, who opened her romance bookshop as a way of grieving the sudden, unexpected death of the man she had been dating, a chef and Dungeons & Dragons “super nerd” who had loved books and had urged her to follow her dreams.

“Being surrounded by love stories – it’s kind of an ember of hope, that maybe mine didn’t die with him,” she said. “I find romance in general to be a very hopeful genre, and hope was something I really needed.”

Romance bookstores in the US and Canada:

US

• Vancouver, Washington: The Romance Era Bookshop

• Los Angeles, California: The Ripped Bodice

• San Diego, California: Meet Cute Bookshop

• Salt Lake City, Utah: Lovebound Library

• Wichita, Kansas: Blush Bookstore

• Kansas City, Missouri: Under the Cover

• Minneapolis, Minnesota: Tropes and Trifles

• Tinley Park, Illinois: Love’s Sweet Arrow

• Chicago, Illinois: The Last Chapter

• Louisville, Kentucky: A Novel Romance

• Belfast, Maine: Grump and Sunshine

• Brooklyn, New York: The Ripped Bodice

• Chesapeake, Virginia: Novel Grounds

• Fort Pierce, Florida: Wanderlust Book Boutique

• Deerfield Beach, Florida: Steamy Lit Bookstore

Canada

• Calgary, Alberta: Slow Burn Books