Romance Novel Statistics: What the Numbers Really Say in 2026

Romance novel statistics at a glance (2023–2026)

These are the romance numbers we checked against the linked reports on October 23, 2026, with older findings clearly dated. Most measure print books sold at stores that report to Circana BookScan, a regularly reported U.S. sales measure. Read the "What it counts" column before you quote anything. That's where most mistakes happen.

What the labels mean. Our book guides use labels like "Author or publisher information." Those don't fit sales data, so this page uses five plain labels instead:

• Reported: the number comes from the company that measured it, or from a trade publication quoting that company.
• Our math: we worked it out from reported numbers, and we show the math.
• Survey: people answered questions. It tells you what they said, not what they bought.
• Dated: the finding is historical and may not describe today; its source and measurement limits still matter.
• Our estimate: a calculation using explicitly stated assumptions, not a measured result. Keep the assumptions with it.

Rows one and six both come from Circana but don't line up. We explain the different windows and the unresolved comparison below. Some Publishers Weekly articles and the detailed Bookseller report require sign-in. The research note records that access limit. Circana's press releases are free to read.

Is romance still growing in 2026?

Not in print, at least not so far. U.S. print romance sales were down 8.6% in the nine-month reporting period ending October 3, 2026, compared with the corresponding 2025 period (Publishers Weekly). That follows the growth since 2021 described in Circana's June 2025 release and the full-year 2025 increase. Onyx Storm's unusually strong launch matters to the first-quarter comparison.

The year started rough. Romance print sales fell 25.4% in the quarter ending March 28, 2026, and Publishers Weekly tied that mostly to Onyx Storm, which sold about 1.9 million copies in the comparable 2025 quarter. Take a book that big out of the comparison and the gap shrinks. By early October, the drop had narrowed to 8.6%.

Romance isn't falling alone. Fantasy was down 8.8% over the same nine months, while the print market as a whole was flat (531.3 million copies, down 0.1%). Those print figures alone cannot tell us whether readers shifted formats or read fewer love stories. Romantasy blends romance and fantasy. The category breakdown in this report has no separate romantasy line, so it should not be read as a total for every book marketed that way.

There are still bright spots. Rachel Reid's hockey romance Heated Rivalry, in a Harlequin paperback edition released in November 2024, ranked No. 6 on Circana's year-to-date print list published April 14, 2026. Rebecca Yarros's Threshing Day sold nearly 858,000 print copies in its first week this fall, according to Publishers Weekly, though the report doesn't say whether BookScan counts it as romance.

A concrete scenario for 2026: if the full-year decline ends between 5% and 10%, a rounded 44-million baseline would imply roughly 40 to 42 million copies. That is conditional arithmetic, not a forecast: 44 million × 0.90–0.95 = 39.6–41.8 million. It also tells you nothing about romance read on screens or through headphones, which print counts can't see.

If you need one sentence: print romance is down in the latest 2026 report, following a year that included a record-setting adult-book launch.

How many romance novels sell each year?

In the U.S., stores tracked by Circana BookScan sold almost 44 million print romance novels in 2025. That's the latest full-year U.S. print total verified here. It excludes ebooks, audiobooks and Kindle Unlimited reading; these are different measures, and we did not verify a complete public total combining them.

The first two rows illustrate the arithmetic; they are not independently verified annual totals. The inputs are rounded, and the 2024 and 2025 reports may not use an unchanged reporting panel. A similar-looking total from a different rolling period does not validate these back-calculations.

What a BookScan number counts, and what it misses

BookScan records print books scanned at the register in the stores and online shops that report to it. Circana says that covers about 85% of U.S. trade print sales. That coverage is not a census of every print sale. Please don't divide by 0.85 to "fix" it, though. That 85% is an average for all books, not a measured rate for romance.

Two things people often get wrong:

• Self-published print books can show up. A self-published paperback sold through a store that reports to BookScan gets counted. The big hole is self-published ebooks, which BookScan doesn't track.
• A copy is not a reader. One person can buy the standard hardcover, the special edition and the paperback. Forty-four million copies doesn't mean 44 million readers.

Why one report says 51 million and another says 44 million

The 51 million figure is a 12-month total Circana published in June 2025. The figure of almost 44 million covers the reporting year ending December 27, 2025. Both come from BookScan, but they don't fit together, so don't line them up as if they were a trend.

Here's the simple part. A 12-month total published in June covers a different window from the year-end report. The public material we checked does not establish whether category or methodology differences also contribute, so we cannot fully reconcile the totals (June release; year-end report). The safe rule: pick one series, name it, and don't subtract one report's total from another's.

Romance then and now: the long view

Historical romance-sales estimates were much higher than today's tracked counts. They come from different methods and retail coverage, though, so they cannot establish a clean all-time trend. The snapshots below keep that history visible without treating unlike measures as comparable bars.

Historical estimates and tracked-sales snapshots (U.S.; not a comparable series)

Graphic: Romance Book Guide. Historical figures from Andrea Martucci's research at Shelf Love; 2025 from Circana BookScan via Publishers Weekly. Different methods and coverage; not a comparable series.

One clear change is the decline of the cheap paperback. Mass-market paperback sales across all genres fell from 131 million copies in 2004 to 21 million in 2024. In December 2025, Publishers Weekly reported that ReaderLink would stop distributing the format at year-end. Ebooks and Kindle Unlimited offer other ways to read, but these figures do not measure how much paperback reading moved there. Harlequin's own ads in 1982 claimed U.S. romance paperbacks sold around 250 million copies a year. That's a marketing claim documented by Shelf Love, not an independently checked total, which is why it isn't in the graphic.

What share of book sales is romance?

About 5.8% of the U.S. print units tracked in the 2025 report were romance, roughly 1 in 17, by our math from Circana's totals. Romance was the largest genre in the adult-fiction print breakdown reported in October 2025. If you've seen "a quarter," "a third" or "half of all books," those figures described narrower slices of the market, years ago.

The math, so you can check it: 44 million romance copies ÷ 762.4 million total print copies (both from the same Publishers Weekly year-end report) = 5.8%. Both numbers come from the same report, so the share is fair for that tracked print market. It tells you nothing about ebooks.

Where the bigger percentages came from:

• "About half" traces to 1992, when romance was reported at 48.6% of mass-market paperbacks, which is one format out of several (historical source analysis).
• "A quarter of all books" is another recycled claim. Shelf Love's historical analysis shows why old shares for narrower publishing segments should not become shares of every book sold.
• "One in three fiction books" comes from Nielsen data reported in 2016. It covered fiction only and is now ten years old. RWA's own page gives a different figure: romance was 23% of the U.S. fiction market in 2016; the summary does not fully specify the measurement basis.

So is romance the best-selling genre? Within the adult-fiction print breakdown cited here, yes. That does not make it the majority of all books. Adult nonfiction is a bigger slice of the tracked market, and the best-selling title in the 2025 report was a self-help book, The Let Them Theory, at more than 2.8 million print copies.

How big is the romance market in dollars?

We did not verify a current public total for what Americans spend on romance across print, ebooks, audio and subscriptions. The familiar "$1.44 billion" is not a current measurement. Andrea Martucci's historical source review traces the roughly $1.4 billion claim to an RWA report from 2012 and the last refresh of RWA's market-size figures to 2013. That predates BookTok and much of today's digital-reading market.

For a concrete sense of scale: 44 million tracked print copies at an assumed average paid price of US$12–18 would imply about US$530–790 million in retail spending. We did not verify that average price. This is an illustration for the tracked print copies, not a measured value for print or the whole romance market.

Adding an assumed audio share and a guessed ebook subtotal would produce a precise-looking number without establishing total consumer spending.

What's counted, and what isn't:

If you read through a subscription, our Kindle Unlimited romance books guide explains why a Kindle ebook isn't automatically part of Kindle Unlimited.

Who reads romance novels?

The widely quoted reader profile, 82% women with an age band of 35 to 39, comes from a 2017 survey of 2,000 romance readers. Romance Writers of America commissioned NPD (now part of Circana) to run it. We found no newer public profile with equivalent sampling that establishes today's reader population. The newer survey below also has 2,000 respondents, but it answers a different question.

The 2017 profile, and how to use it

From RWA's summary of the December 2017 survey:

The format numbers overlap. Plenty of readers do all three, so they add up to more than 100%. RWA set age and gender quotas from a nationally representative sample of book buyers who said they were likely to read romance. The survey was taken in December 2017; its public summary does not specify country coverage. An "average age 42" claim from a different study should not be substituted for this survey's reported band.

What's changed since then? Circana said in 2023 that new, younger readers drove the post-2020 boom, with BookTok and TV adaptations leading discovery. Longtime names like Nicholas Sparks, Debbie Macomber, Nora Roberts and Julia Quinn lost ground to newer authors such as Lucy Score, Ana Huang and Ali Hazelwood. In its June 2025 release, Circana reported that 26% of romance book buyers said they were reading "much more" than a year earlier. The public release does not give that study's sample size or field dates.

What romance readers say they like (2025)

A trope is a familiar story pattern, like enemies-to-lovers, where two rivals fall for each other. In a 2025 survey, readers' top three picks were forbidden romance, friends-to-lovers and enemies-to-lovers, all within three points of each other.

Chart: Favorite tropes in one 2025 survey of U.S. romance readers

Survey by Talker Research for ThriftBooks: online, January 2–8, 2025, 2,000 U.S. adults who read at least three or four romance novels a year. The percentages overlap; they are not parts of a single pie. Chart: Romance Book Guide.

The same survey found the least-liked tropes were love triangles (23%), office romances (22%) and fake dating (21%). Two cautions. First, the published summary does not establish whether one- or two-point gaps between tropes are statistically meaningful. Second, the survey was paid for by a bookseller. Talker's methodology describes incentivized, non-probability online recruitment, quotas, English-language interviewing unless noted, and unweighted data; it is not a random sample of all Americans. Headlines said "men are bigger romance fans than women," based on 63% of men and 60% of women calling themselves die-hard fans. But the survey only asked people who already read romance. It tells you nothing about how many men read romance.

The most popular answer doesn't have to be yours. Say you can't stand love triangles but would happily read three marriage-of-convenience books in a row. Our marriage of convenience romance books guide shows how differently one trope can play out from book to book.

What we still don't know about readers

• A verified current, nationally representative profile of all romance readers: age, gender and income.
• A verified public profile covering the full population of Kindle Unlimited romance readers.
• An all-market profile of who writes romance. The Ripped Bodice's 2019 study found that 8.3% of more than 2,400 romance titles from 18 studied publishers were by authors of color. Later updates exist, including coverage of 2024, but publisher samples are not a census of all romance writers, including independently published authors.

Romantasy, dark romance, hockey romance and BookTok

In its June 2025 release, Circana named romantasy and sports romance among the fastest-growing romance subjects, each with triple-digit growth, alongside romantic suspense and contemporary romance. Dark romance authors were among the fastest risers. BookTok (the book community on TikTok) was also one of the leading discovery routes identified in Circana's earlier account of romance's growth.

• Romantasy. A Circana analyst called it the highest-growth category in the whole U.S. print market in 2024 (NPR). Onyx Storm set an adult-title opening-week record in January 2025. Bloomberg's July 2024 reporting projected US$610 million for 2024, versus US$454 million in 2023; the projection is not a year-end result.
• Dark romance. These are love stories built around darker themes and morally gray leads, often with intense content. Circana named H.D. Carlton, Rina Kent and Elsie Silver among 2025's fastest-growing romance authors. It linked the trend to growth in psychological thrillers (+29%), dark fantasy (+23%) and horror (+13%). In BookNet's comparable-store analysis, sales assigned to the new "dark romance" category code grew by more than 100,000% in 2025. BookNet says the code's introduction in 2024 explains part of the increase. It measures sales assigned to that code, not the number of readers.
• Hockey and sports romance. Heated Rivalry ranked No. 6 in Circana's year-to-date list published April 14, 2026. The ABA's weekly romance bestseller list is a separate view of sales at participating independent bookstores; it is not the whole U.S. market.
• BookTok. Print sales for authors Circana tags as BookTok authors grew about 20% in 2024, their fifth straight year of growth. In the UK, nearly 15% of romantasy purchases in 2024 were discovered through video-sharing sites, up from 10% the year before and 5% in 2021 (NIQ). "Discovered" is the key word: that's where buyers first heard of a book, not proof the video caused the sale. And it covers romantasy, not all romance.
• LGBTQ romance. Sales reached 1 million units in the 12 months ending May 2023, up 40% (Circana). The release does not explicitly state the format coverage.

Trends tell you what's popular, not what you'll love. A hockey romance and a quiet Regency courtship can both be exactly right, just on different nights. If you came for the numbers and now want a book, our guides to Regency romance books and clean romance books start with the details that change your pick: setting, relationship, how much intimacy is on the page, and the ending.

Popularity is a crowd's answer. Your next book is a personal one. The Next Chapter, Romance Book Guide's email letter, sends romance recommendations, new guides and occasional news about books Romance Book Guide publishes, with your tastes in mind. You can unsubscribe any time.

Send me The Next Chapter

Romance outside the U.S.: Canada and the UK

Canada's romance sales were still growing in early 2025, up 9% in the first half of the year. The UK went the other way: its Romance & Saga category hit a spending record in 2024, then sold 15% fewer copies in 2025. Each country measures differently, so keep these numbers separate from the U.S. figures.

Canada

BookNet Canada tracks Canada's English-language trade print book market. Its findings:

• 2024: the narrower Fiction / Fantasy / Romance category rose 82% over 2023; Fiction / Romance / Fantasy rose 175%. These are separate classifications, not a single all-romance total (BookNet's detailed report).
• First half of 2025: romance up 9%. Fiction / Romance / Fantasy rose 111% versus the first half of 2024, and sports romance was up 294%. Paranormal romance fell 49% and workplace romance fell 33%.
• Since then (BookNet, April 2026): romance sales peaked in the first quarter of 2025 and slipped through the second and third quarters. In a Q1-to-date snapshot presented in March 2026, romance accounted for about 9% of print units sold by a fixed group of comparable retailers, not the whole market or the full SalesData panel (original transcript). BookNet tied part of the early-2026 attention to Heated Rivalry.

Growth and share answer different questions. Growth compares romance with itself a year earlier. Share compares romance with everything else sold. A genre can gain share while selling fewer books, if the rest of the market falls faster.

UK and Ireland

NIQ BookScan tracks the UK print market under a category called Romance & Saga. This is not a count of every title marketed as romantasy; NIQ also discusses major romantasy authors within science fiction and fantasy. The table below is UK-only. Per NIQ data reported by The Bookseller in February 2026:

Notice that the reported early-2026 spending rose while copies fell: average spending per copy was higher, without establishing why. Copies and spending can move in opposite directions, so say which one you mean. For Ireland, NIQ's annual review says Romance & Sagas also fell short in 2025; it does not provide an equivalent romance-only numerical table.

Audiobooks, libraries and Kindle Unlimited

Romance is a big audiobook genre. Publishers reported romance audiobook revenue up 30% in 2024, the biggest reported genre increase (APA's 2025 release). In 2025, romance stayed among the top genres by audiobook revenue. The public 2025–2026 APA releases checked here do not give a romance-only dollar total.

• Audiobooks. Audiobook sales revenue in the APA's publisher survey hit US$2.22 billion in 2024 and US$2.43 billion in 2025. In its 2026 consumer survey, 58% of U.S. adults aged 18 and over said they had ever listened to an audiobook. Romance was named among the top revenue genres, alongside science fiction/fantasy and mysteries/thrillers/suspense; general fiction had the largest share.
• Libraries. People borrowed 820.5 million ebooks, audiobooks and magazines through OverDrive's services in 2025, a worldwide total covering public libraries, schools and other institutions (OverDrive). Romance and romantasy titles appeared in its global top-ten checkout lists, but the release does not provide a romance-only checkout total.
• Kindle Unlimited. We did not verify a public Amazon total showing how much Kindle Unlimited reading is romance. Amazon's royalty rules explain payment by eligible pages read, not a romance-only total. Written Word Media's monthly fund tally adds to US$699.9 million for 2025, worldwide and across all genres, excluding separate All Stars bonuses. We could not recheck all twelve monthly announcements against Amazon's originals; the tally is author royalties, not U.S. romance spending.
• Ebooks. Circana's PubTrack Digital service uses publisher reporting. We did not verify a complete public count that also covers self-published romance ebooks.

Bookstores, paperbacks and the people behind the old numbers

Romance-focused bookstores have expanded quickly. The American Booksellers Association counted 157 romance-focused member stores in 2025, and more than half had opened in the previous two years. Meanwhile, the cheap paperback that carried romance for decades is disappearing, and the group behind many of the old romance statistics has shrunk.

• Bookstores: two counts, two definitions. The ABA's 157 includes member stores that focus on romance (AP, July 2025). An independent tally by Lady Jane at Romancing the Data, updated April 12, 2025, identified 59 physical U.S. romance-focused bookstores operating by the end of 2024, compared with four in 2022. These differently dated counts should not be treated as a single comparable series.
• Paperbacks. As above: 131 million mass-market copies in 2004, 21 million in 2024, and about 15 million through October 2025, across all genres (Publishers Weekly).
• Romance Writers of America. The trade group behind many of the "romance industry" figures still circulating filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2024. By the May 2024 filing, its membership had fallen from about 10,000 before 2019 to about 2,000, according to court filings (Publishers Weekly). Its widely recycled 2017 reader profile predates both this contraction and the recent romance boom.

Seven romance statistics to stop citing

These seven numbers keep turning up in articles, on stats pages and in social posts. Each one is outdated, misapplied or has no source you can trace. Here's where each came from and a better line to use instead.

Andrea Martucci at Shelf Love has investigated the history of romance's bad data. Her essays on the billion-dollar claim and print sales history are worth reading in full.

How to cite a romance statistic

A good citation keeps five things together: the number, what it counts, the country, the time period and the source. Link to the original report when you can. When a trade publication is reporting someone else's data, name both, as in "Circana data, reported by Publishers Weekly."

What each kind of number can and can't tell you:

That table also answers a question many writers ask: romance selling well as a genre says almost nothing about what one romance author earns. Category growth can come mostly from a handful of very big books.

Ready-to-use sentences:

1. Circana BookScan tracked almost 44 million U.S. print romance sales in the reporting year ending December 27, 2025, up 3.9% versus the comparable 2024 period, according to Publishers Weekly.
2. Tracked U.S. print romance sales fell 8.6% in the nine-month period ending October 3, 2026, compared with the corresponding 2025 period, according to Circana BookScan data reported by Publishers Weekly.
3. Romance made up about 5.8% of the U.S. print units in Circana/PW's 2025 report, roughly 1 in 17, by Romance Book Guide's calculation from 44 million ÷ 762.4 million tracked copies.
4. In a January 2–8, 2025 online survey of 2,000 U.S. adults who read at least three or four romance novels a year, 45% named forbidden romance as a favorite trope (Talker Research for ThriftBooks).

To credit this page:

Romance Book Guide Editorial. "Romance Novel Statistics: What the Numbers Really Say in 2026." Romance Book Guide. Last checked October 2026.

You're welcome to cite any number here; a link back helps readers check the context. Please keep the original source's name with the number, too. Circana, NIQ, BookNet and the others did the measuring. Our part is the comparison and the explanation. You can also download the at-a-glance table as a CSV spreadsheet file, the historical snapshots (SVG · PNG), and the trope chart (SVG · PNG), with credits included.

How we checked these numbers

We checked the linked reports on October 23, 2026, recorded their periods and distinguished direct evidence from secondary reporting and assumptions. When a figure only reached us secondhand, we say so. When sources differ, we identify the difference and say where it remains unresolved.

Romance Book Guide helps you find romance books that feel like your kind of love story — comparing real books by setting, relationship, content level and ending, with the author or publisher information behind every pick, so you can choose your next read with confidence. For this page, we used the same habit on sales reports and reader surveys: show the source, show the date, show the limits.

Research note

• What we checked:
  • Circana press releases from 2023 and 2025
  • Circana sales data as reported by Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch (2024–2026)
  • The Audio Publishers Association's 2025 and 2026 releases, and OverDrive's 2025 results
  • American Booksellers Association figures as reported by AP and WBUR, plus an independent bookstore tally
  • BookNet Canada's 2025 and 2026 reports, NIQ's public annual reviews, and the accessible teaser for The Bookseller's detailed UK report
  • NIQ's 2025 romantasy survey summary, Talker Research's 2025 survey release for ThriftBooks, and Romance Writers of America's published 2017 survey summary
  • Reporting on RWA's 2024 bankruptcy and The Ripped Bodice's diversity research, plus Shelf Love's historical research
• Check date: October 23, 2026, for every source.
• What reached us secondhand:
  • Bloomberg's dated romantasy projection, read in its authorized syndication
  • The Kindle Unlimited fund total, summed from Written Word Media's monthly table; all twelve Amazon originals could not be rechecked
  • The historical 1992, 2008 and 2023 figures documented by Shelf Love
• What we did not verify:
  • A complete reconciliation of Circana's rolling and annual romance totals
  • A complete current ebook, Kindle Unlimited or worldwide romance total
  • The full subscriber text of The Bookseller's February 12, 2026 article: its detailed UK figures remain attributed to that report; we could inspect its date and 800,794-copy teaser
  • The current primary Ripped Bodice report/chart, which was inaccessible; later coverage confirms that updates after 2020 exist
  • Private sales data, which we don't have access to
• What's ours: every "Our math" figure shows its calculation. The print-spending illustration, annual back-calculations and 2026 scenario are conditional on the assumptions shown, not measured market totals or a forecast.
• Tools: we may use software, including AI tools, to help organize research and drafting. Romance Book Guide remains responsible for everything we publish.

Romance Book Guide is operated by Kozi Publishing LLC. Read how we check and describe evidence and our publishing and commercial disclosures. Spotted a number that's wrong or out of date? Suggest a correction with a source.

Questions people still ask

How many romance novels are published each year? We did not verify a current public count covering every traditionally and independently published romance title. A useful count must distinguish unique works from editions and formats, define romance, name the country and year, and explain which publishers or platforms it includes. A catalog's results count alone does not establish that total.

What's the best-selling romance novel of all time? We did not verify a comparable all-time ranking. Publishers announce lifetime sales in different ways: worldwide or U.S.-only, all formats or print, single books or whole series. Those numbers can't be fairly compared. One well-documented record is Onyx Storm's adult-title opening week at BookScan: Publishers Lunch reported 1,288,300 hardcovers in January 2025.

How much romance is self-published, or read through Kindle Unlimited? We did not verify a complete public percentage for either. Self-published print sold through reporting retailers can appear in BookScan, while ebook-platform sales and Kindle Unlimited page reads are different measures. Amazon's KU royalty documentation explains eligible-page payments but does not provide a romance share. An estimate needs its own source, date and method.

Are these numbers for the U.S. or the whole world? The main sales figures are U.S.-only. Canada and the UK have their own section and labels, and OverDrive's library total and the KDP fund tally are worldwide. Survey coverage is stated separately; RWA's public 2017 summary does not specify its country coverage.

Where to go next

If you came for a number, you've got it, with the source attached. If you came because you love romance, the more useful question is what you want to read next. Start with the detail that matters most to you:

• Clean romance books for love stories without explicit sexual scenes
• Clean Regency romance books for historical courtship with the door closed
• Regency romance books for a wider historical shelf at different content levels
• Marriage of convenience romance books for couples who say "I do" before they fall in love
• Kindle Unlimited romance books if you'd rather borrow than buy

Not sure what you're in the mood for? Build your reading brief: answer four quick questions and get a short summary of your tastes to use anywhere you shop for books. It doesn't recommend specific titles.

Build your reading brief

Sources

Checked October 23, 2026. The research note above identifies secondary reporting and the full-text access limits.

• Circana. "Another Year of Romance, with a Dark Twist." June 4, 2025.
• Circana. "From Laggard to Leader: Record Sales of Romance Books Reflect Next Generation of Contemporary Readers." July 10, 2023; original author-share graphic attached to the release.
• Circana. LGBTQ fiction sales release. June 6, 2023.
• Circana, via infoDOCKET. 2024 book sales results. January 22, 2025.
• Circana. Books: BookScan coverage and PubTrack Digital.
• Circana. Top 10 books: the year-to-date list published April 14, 2026. This is the period used for Heated Rivalry's No. 6 rank.
• Publishers Weekly. "Print Book Sales Rose Slightly in 2025." January 9, 2026.
• Publishers Weekly. "Print Book Sales Saw a Small Sales Increase in 2024." January 10, 2025 online; January 13 print issue.
• Publishers Weekly. "Print Book Sales Dip 0.9% in First Nine Months of 2025." October 10, 2025.
• Publishers Weekly. "First Quarter Print Sales Fell 3.1%." April 2, 2026 online; April 6 print issue.
• Publishers Weekly. "Print Sales Stay Flat Through September." October 13, 2026; reporting period ended October 3.
• Publishers Weekly. "Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks." December 12, 2025 online; December 15 print issue.
• Publishers Weekly. "Romance Writers of America Files for Bankruptcy." May 30, 2024 online; June 3 print issue.
• Publishers Lunch. "Onyx Storm Sets BookScan Record." January 30, 2025.
• Harlequin. Heated Rivalry, Rachel Reid: paperback edition, ISBN 9781335534637. November 26, 2024 edition.
• NPR, via WFAE. "Readers flock to fantasy and dark romance love stories." June 29, 2025.
• Bloomberg, syndicated by The Straits Times. Romantasy market report and 2024 projection. July 2024. The article's headline uses Singapore dollars; this page identifies the U.S.-dollar figures in its text.
• Audio Publishers Association, via infoDOCKET. 2025 survey results covering 2024 revenue. June 2, 2025.
• Audio Publishers Association. Survey results: 2025 sales and 2026 consumer listening. June 2026 release; also reported by Shelf Awareness on June 8, 2026.
• OverDrive. 2025 digital lending results. January 21, 2026.
• Amazon KDP. Kindle Unlimited royalty rules.
• Written Word Media. KDP Global Fund monthly payouts. Third-party monthly table; 2025 figures summed for this page.
• Associated Press. Report on romance bookstores and reader communities, including the ABA's 157-store count. July 2025; later WBUR coverage, September 24, 2025.
• Lady Jane, Romancing the Data. "The Rise of Romance Bookstores." Updated April 12, 2025; revised physical-store tally.
• American Booksellers Association. Indie Romance Bestseller List. Weekly independent-bookstore sales list.
• BookNet Canada. "Discounts, data & decisions: Navigating hesitant consumer spending." June 12, 2025; distinguishes Fiction / Fantasy / Romance from Fiction / Romance / Fantasy.
• BookNet Canada. "Subjects on the move in the Canadian market." August 11, 2025.
• BookNet Canada Tech Forum. "Trendspotting: Book subjects on the move in the Canadian market." March 30, 2026 transcript; April 7 summary.
• The Bookseller. "Ice and spice: romance sales are running hot and cold as the year develops." February 12, 2026. Full article requires sign-in; the research note above records the access limit.
• NIQ. "Dragons and magic and fae, oh my." August 11, 2025.
• NIQ. "Bestsellers and trends: UK and Ireland 2025." 2026 annual review.
• Talker Research for ThriftBooks. Romance reader survey. January 30, 2025; methodology.
• Romance Writers of America. About the romance genre: 2017 reader survey summary.
• MPR News. "Who is reading romance novels?" June 13, 2016.
• Publishers Weekly. "New Survey Finds Little Improvement in Diversity in Romance Publishing." 2020 coverage of The Ripped Bodice's 2019 study; later coverage mentioning the 2024 report, November 14, 2025.
• Andrea Martucci, Shelf Love. "The Data Does Not Exist to Support 'Romance is a Billion Dollar Industry.'" January 22, 2024.
• Andrea Martucci, Shelf Love. "Actually, Romance Novel Print Sales are Down." May 26, 2025.