Once, if you wanted to buy romance novels, you had to know where to look. Some small outlets stocked paperback romances, as well as department stores like Big W in Australia and Walmart in the United States. So did some bookstore chains, but romance wasn’t usually front and centre.
In 2025, things have changed: romance novels are no longer relegated to dark corners. Thanks in part to BookTok and Bookstagram, they’re more visible than ever, with an average growth rate of 49 per cent for three years, according to Nielsen Bookscan figures.
Australian romance readers are “propping up a flatlining national book market”, according to journalist Melanie Kembrey.
Major bookstores now have dedicated romance shelving spaces. Huge romance book signing events are being held in convention centres. Romance readers lined up for the opening of dedicated romance bookstore Romancing the Novel in Sydney’s Paddington last year. It’s just one of many romance bookstores around Australia, part of a worldwide trend.
It’s not the first romance bookstore boom in Australia – that came significantly earlier and receded in the early 2010s. But now they’re back, bigger than ever, joining successful romance bookstores around the world, from the US and Canada to the United Kingdom and France.
This indicates a newfound communal pride in romance as a genre. While it has frequently been derided and dismissed, leading to some readers feeling embarrassed about or concealing their reading, the pendulum has very much swung back the other way.
The new wave of Australian romance bookstores
The romance bookstore is well and truly 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 online bookstore Tales and Tomes, also in 2023. There are many more, some with physical storefronts, some with digital storefronts.
Australia’s earliest romance bookstores emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But while their forebears sought to connect Australian readers to traditionally published books from the US, the current wave of romance bookstores largely seeks to connect readers to independently published books by Australian and international authors.
These books, while usually available digitally, are rarely available in print through mainstream stores. Sales of these books are frequently complemented by special editions and bookish merchandise, like limited-release hardcovers with sprayed edges, candles, bookmarks, stickers, mugs and jewellery. Romance bookstores regularly sell books at – and sometimes even host – major romance signing events.
Australia’s early romance bookstores
Rendezvous The Romance Bookstore opened in Melbourne in 1997, because its owners, avid romance readers, literally could not access the books they wanted to read in Australia, so imported their stock directly from the US.
Several other bookstores followed, such as Temptation in Perth and Intrigue in Canberra, which both opened in 2004. Some are still operating today: Rosemary’s Romance Books, which opened in Brisbane in 2002, and Ever After, which opened in Wollongong in 2003, are still going strong.
However, the advent of the ebook – and especially, from 2007, the ereader – opened new pathways for readers who wanted to access romance novels quickly. Many of these specialty bookstores eventually closed down, including Rendezvous in 2013.
The overseas scene
The return of the romance-focused bookstore began with the Ripped Bodice in Culver City, Los Angeles in 2016. If we take into account the Australian romance bookstore era of the 2000s, we might think of this store as fitting the second-chance romance subgenre – where a former love is rekindled.
The name “Ripped Bodice” defiantly claims the “bodice-ripper” epithet, frequently lobbed at romance novels for their sexual content. It presents itself as an out-and-proud spot devoted to the genre. Its light-filled space and book displays show off the covers of its novels. Its romance-focused events, merchandising and sales techniques like “blind date with a book” (a gift-wrapped novel with a cute blurb) have now become the standard for other romance bookstores worldwide.
Since its opening, other romance-only bookstores have blossomed across the US and Canada, numbering almost two dozen.
The sisters who started the Ripped Bodice opened a second store in one of today’s most trend-setting brand locations (Brooklyn, New York) in 2023. The newest romance bookstore, Lovestruck, has just opened in Harvard Square in Boston, a stone’s throw from the Ivy League university.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the UK’s first romance bookstore, Book Lovers Bookshop, opened in Edinburgh in 2024. In France, the recent opening of L’Encre Du Cœur (Ink of the Heart) in Rouen, also in 2024, was so well received that the founder started a new store within months in Caen, roughly an hour and a half away.
The popularity of these bricks-and-mortar specialty romance bookstores has influenced other booksellers to showcase romance novels, with many rushing to get a share of the readers by creating dedicated sections of romance novels, especially dark romance and young adult romance.
Bookstore Romance Day, an international event celebrating romance in independent bookstores, started in 2019 with just 150 participating stores. Last year, there were over 550.
Falling in love with books
So, what does the last decade’s wave of romance bookstores in Australia and internationally mean?
Australia’s first wave of romance bookstores receded in large part because of the rise of the ebook. The second wave, however, shows we haven’t fallen out of love with print. Indeed, we might have fallen for it more deeply than ever.
Jodi McAlister is the Vice President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, and an author of several romantic comedies published by Simon & Schuster Australia.
Jayashree Kamblé currently serves as the President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. Her new book is Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article
