Romance

New Nielsen research gives a clear picture of who romance readers are. It's no surprise that 84% are female and only 16% male, but in 2015 53% of readers were in the 18-44 age range, considerably younger than might have been expected, and only 13% are over 65.  Read more

If you're writing genre fiction, or planning to, it's important to understand what's working in the market and what's already out there. This is the sort of information you can only get by a close study of publishers' genre lists and by reading as many books in your chosen genre as you can.  Read more

Last week's annual Books and Consumers research from Bowker showed some interesting trends in book-buying both in the UK and the US. In 2012 British consumers bought 296m books, compared to 288m in 2011, but for the fifth year in a row spend declined from £2,137m ($3.226) to £2.1086 ($3.182) as the lower prices for ebooks started to affect the overall price mix.  Read more

Certain genre areas of fiction publishing seem to be coming into their own in a big way at the moment, which is good news if that’s the area you write in.  Read more

The romance genre is doing very nicely, thank you, in spite of the recession. When conglomerate publishers such as HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster have been announcing sharp downturns in sales (see last week's News Review ), Harlequin/Mills & Boon (the US and UK companies respectively) just go from strength to strength.   Read more