Colleen Hoover and the modern romance novel explosion

If you were to make a wild stab at which books were the most popular, what would you choose? Your personal favourites — say, mysteries, or big sagas, blockbuster reads from writers such as John Irving or Stephen King?

The book industry is having a fine romance: with books about love.

Romance for a new generation

One of the authors who has helped cement the place of romance in the popular imagination — or at least on the bestsellers lists — is Colleen Hoover. Her “It Ends With Us” was the No. 1 bestselling book in Canada in 2022. According to BookNet Canada, Hoover’s books alone drove a 55-per-cent increase in the romance category when compared with 2021, with five of her titles topping the list.

The same trend was seen in the United States. Publishers Weekly reported that “unit sales of fiction titles rose 8.5 per cent over 2021, led by a 52.4-per-cent increase in sales of romance books.” And those sales were driven in large part by, you guessed it, Colleen Hoover.

“The list of bestselling romance titles in 2022 is … led by Colleen Hoover, whose ‘It Starts With Us’ and ‘It Ends With Us’ topped the romance charts. Those two books, along with a handful of other Hoover titles, resulted in a banner year for Simon & Schuster …”

Hoover is published in Canada by Simon & Schuster, which noted in an email to the Star that the author has sold more than 24 million copies of her English-language books “in all formats” across the world. It has seen its sales of romance books “skyrocket” as a result.

Much of this traffic is driven by younger readers. According to BookNet Canada, the hashtag #RomanceRecs has more than 390 million views on TikTok, “an undeniable source of influence on book-reading behaviour.” It’s an observation that Simon & Schuster echoes.

“An increasing number of younger, and often more diverse readers have discovered and embraced this genre, much of it fuelled by BookTok,” the publisher said in a statement. “Where sales have traditionally been driven by retailer merchandising and press coverage, a lot of the original buzz for these books was driven by enthusiastic BookTok readers.”

The Harlequin effect

There used to be a saying: that 4.1 Harlequin romances sold around the world every second. That particular publisher was, at one time, the first name that sprang to mind when the words “books” and “romance” were mentioned.

And it’s still going strong. Dianne Moggy, vice-president of editorial for the Harlequin Brand Group, which includes 11 category lines, noted that they publish more than 800 romance titles a year. And they’re not all those paperbacks we remember from our parents’ bookcases or grocery store shelves: roughly 40 per cent of their books sell digitally.

The genre’s popularity has driven a deep change in the content of books and an increased focus on giving readers what they want.

“We’ve really been trying to increase the representation across every series we publish,” Moggy said. “So we’re trying to ensure that our readers are actually seeing themselves reflected in the books … whether it’s race and ethnicity or body image or neurodiversity.”

Those concerns have translated into sales in the Canadian market. BookNet Canada recorded that sales in romance featuring LGBTQ characters increased by 10,406 per cent between 2017 and 2022, with sales from 2020 to ’21 increasing 301 per cent, and from ’21 to ’22 by 136 per cent. Fiction romance in the workplace rose by 1,793 per cent during that five-year period, and for African American and Black categories by 1,733 per cent.

The desire for more representative romance is an aspect of the genre that attracts Muslim writer Uzma Jalaluddin, whose latest, “Much Ado About Nada,” comes out in June.

“I’m attracted to the subversive aspects of romance, the ways that romance writers (like myself) use the tropes and expectations of this genre to explore other issues, such as identity, immigration or prejudice,” she said. And so she writes love stories set in immigrant neighbourhoods with South Asian, Muslim characters.

“When I wrote ‘Much Ado About Nada’ I set it in a massive Muslim conference in Toronto,” said Jalaluddin. “As much as my book is a swoony second-chance romance, it’s also about Muslims having fun and inviting the reader into their space.

“After all, love is love no matter who you are, how you dress or what you believe. Also, no one else was writing them. (I’m glad that’s changing now.)”

Stomping on the tropes and using them in new ways

HarperCollins, whose parent company News Corp. bought Harlequin from the Toronto Star’s parent company, Torstar Corp., for $455 million in 2014, is like many publishers, increasing the number of trade paperback or hardcover romances it offers.

“I think the definition of romance has spilled into a number of different areas,” said Margaret O’Neill Marbury, a VP at HarperCollins, responsible for trade titles at the company that owns Harlequin.

Popular American writer Curtis Sittenfeld, who publishes with Random House, has recently waded into the genre with her latest novel, “Romantic Comedy.”

It sets up an interesting dynamic, showing at first the typical dorky, not-so-good-looking guy with the gorgeous model. Then she flips that trope on its head by having the dorky, not-so-gorgeous writer develop a crush on a famous pop star who used to date models.

The book becomes an examination of gender relations and the rituals of romance, yes, but it also does something traditional romances do: has an emotional arc, strong characters you can relate to, some drama that keeps them apart and, well, a happy ending.

“I thought that it would be fun. That was my main motivation. I started it in the summer of 2021,” said Sittenfeld in an interview. “So it was the pandemic, I guess it was about 15 months or 16 months in, and it felt like a pretty dark time, I think, globally and personally. I definitely wrote ‘Romantic Comedy’ for escapist pleasure for myself. And then I hoped, eventually, for readers.”

“Some people will say that romance is just ChickLit reinvented,” said Canadian author Chantel Guertin, whose latest book is “Two for the Road.”

She argued that romance now is not “a 20-something girl who’s bumbling through life trying to find a guy. Now the heroines are so strong and they are self-assured, and very successful and have great careers. That romance element is part of it, but as a person they have got it figured out.”

And, while in the more traditional romance, the happy ending is a must, commercial or trade fiction stories don’t always have to have one, Marbury said, “but they do have to be hopeful,” and there still has to be a strong relationship or pull between the characters. Think of writers such as Nicholas Sparks, Emily Giffin and Jojo Moyes.

The “happily ever after” is the point

But the happy ending has a big role to play, and a lot of readers and writers like it that way.

Romance book sales grew throughout the pandemic, a time of uncertainty, as Guertin pointed out. “We often felt as if we had no control of our situations and we certainly didn’t know what things were going to look like in the next few months.

“Once you know the book is going to end happily, you remove that layer of unsettling and uncertainty, and then you actually enjoy the ride of the journey of the story, which actually is often very complex,” Guertin said. “And you can really delve into the characters and their stories because you’re not concerned about how it’s going to end.”

And you can escape from the reality of the everyday.

Jalaluddin, too, is a believer in the happily-ever-after ending. “Partly this is because I’m a hopeless romantic, wrapped in the outer trappings of a cynic,” she said.

“But mostly it’s because I’m attracted to optimistic stories that demonstrate the good in humanity; and romance novels, with their focus on love, relationships, problem-solving, a dash of adventure or intrigue, are at their heart heaped with optimism. It is baked into the very DNA of the genre, because no matter what else happens there will be a happy ending for all. Who can resist that?”

Certainly not the readers buying those millions of romance books being sold every year and those who, during the pandemic, turned to the genre for an emotional and psychological lift.

Can artificial intelligence write us a love story?

As romance continues to modernize its approach, it seems as if it might be particularly vulnerable to being written, perhaps unknowingly to readers, by artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT and others. With its fairly predictable structure, it would seem a particularly promising genre for AI to target.

“We’re not looking to AI to generate content at all,” said Moggy. “But it’s a big concern in terms of the number of submissions we get and how do we police that?”

She noted that they received a submission earlier in the week we spoke and weren’t sure whether it was AI-generated or not. “But it certainly is very similar to another book we have published.”

While AI might be helpful in terms of writing marketing copy based on metadata, for example, when it comes to the creative process and content, “that’s where I get very nervous about things,” said Marbury.

It’s romance, after all. And doesn’t it all come down to love? Can an algorithm capture emotion? It’s a question we’ve been asking since Hal in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“I think you’ve hit the real point here,” said Moggy. “Can it bring the emotion, which is what the reader connects to … if that emotion is missed, then I think you’d miss what the romance reader is looking for.”

Hopefully, for the industry — and writers and readers — this will result in a happy ending.

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