30 May 2016
IN 2013, the Romance Writers of America (RWA) estimated that sales of romantic novels amounted to $1.08 billion, and accounted for 13% of adult fiction consumed that year, outselling science-fiction, mystery and literary novels. In the five years to 2015 in Britain alone, romance and erotic fiction sold 39.8m physical books worth £178.09m. The sector has also been among the most innovative, with a strong tradition of independent and self-publishing. It was one of the first to capitalise on the anonymity offered by e-books and, according to Jellybooks, a British company that analyses e-book data, romance readers are twice as likely to read on smartphones than literary novel or non-fiction readers.
