27. Romance Novels

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things – Episode 27: Romance Novels

Host: Zachary Crockett (Freakonomics Network)
Date: April 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Zachary Crockett explores the commercial and cultural phenomenon of romance novels—the largest and fastest-growing book genre in North America. Crockett unpacks the history, business models, evolving subgenres, and the stigmas attached to romance publishing, with firsthand accounts from industry insiders, authors, and devoted fans. The episode examines how romance novels became a $1.4 billion industry and how self-publishing, diversity, and fandom are reshaping its future.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Origins and Growth of the Romance Genre

• Traceable Roots: The romance novel’s lineage goes back to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), but the genre didn’t boom until Harlequin popularized mass-market romance in the 1950s.

  • [03:04] “The book that's often called the first modern English novel... is about the protracted courtship between a maidservant and her wealthy employer.” (Zachary Crockett)

• Harlequin’s Rise: Initially a multi-genre publisher, Harlequin found wild success with British imports from Mills & Boon, rapidly making romance its core business.

  • [03:53] “Very quickly, those romances became the bestsellers across the company.” (Diane Maghi, Harlequin VP of Editorial)

• The “Romance Wars”: The 1970s-80s saw an explosion of new publishers and subgenres (“bodice rippers”), as companies battled for a growing, voracious readership.

  • [05:08] “There were so many more options... But as in any war, there are casualties. Ultimately, there were two main players, Harlequin and Silhouette.” (Diane Maghi)

• Market Dominance: By 1984, Harlequin had absorbed its chief rival, Silhouette, cementing a near-monopoly in traditional romance publishing.

The Breadth of Romance Subgenres

• Infinite Variety: Romance now encompasses everything from “alien abduction romance” to “dogs with jobs.”

  • [06:23] “You have paranormal romance, you have alien abduction romance, you have what's called monster romance… medical romances, teacher romances—which I tend to avoid.” (Danielle Flores, romance superfan/teacher)

• Market-Driven Experimentation: Publishers use data and trend-watching to refine offerings, sometimes surprised by hits like Amish romance or dog-themed books.

  • [07:11] “If you have a dog on a cover, it's guaranteed to actually really perform well.” (Diane Maghi)

The Importance of Book Covers

• Marketing Science: Covers serve as critical marketing tools, signaling heat level and subgenre to browsers within seconds.

  • [08:04] “If she's got 10 seconds in front of a bookcase, we want those cues to be very immediate.” (Diane Maghi)

• Visual Repetition: A running in-joke among voracious readers is spotting the same stock images reused in new contexts.

  • [08:22] “So if I'm shopping by covers, I see the same guy… it's kind of funny.” (Danielle Flores)

The High-Volume, Subscription Business

• Magazine Mentality: Half of all romance readers finish at least one novel per week, some as many as 30 per month. Harlequin’s profitable subscription/book club model keeps physical sales buoyant.

  • [08:56] “We have an incredibly large and viable book club business... readers subscribe to a series...[getting] multiple series delivered to their door in print form every month.” (Diane Maghi)

• Prolific Writers: To keep up, publishers depend on hyper-productive authors—some with hundreds of books to their names.

  • [09:32] “Believe it or not, we have someone who's written over 300 [books].” (Diane Maghi)

The Author’s Perspective: Money, Respect, and Structure

• Unsung Profits: Despite their success, romance authors and books have been underestimated and stigmatized—often written by women, edited/distributed by men.

  • [11:23] “They were the cash cow... but they bankrolled the, you know, 'respectable' books. We used to say that authors were like mushrooms... fed a lot of crap and kept in the dark.” (Brenda Hyatt, author)

• Low Royalties: Traditional advances and returns were meager, even for bestsellers.

  • [10:43] “For a $3.99 book, I got no more than 20 cents per book. Most people had no idea... If you were a published author, you were rolling in dough. That was so not true.” (Brenda Hyatt)

The Self-Publishing Revolution

• New Opportunities: Ebook platforms empowered authors to reclaim rights and income, dramatically increasing royalties and visibility for longtime backlist titles.

  • [14:51] “I realized I was making more money from these books as ebooks than I had ever made publishing them traditionally.” (Brenda Hyatt)

• Invisible Success: Because self-published sales aren’t tracked by industry stats, the genre’s real financial power is mostly “under the radar.”

  • [15:32] “You go looking online for statistics and it looks like ebooks are not a big deal… a lot of authors are really making bank and they're kind of flying under the radar.” (Brenda Hyatt)

• Higher Earnings: Median income for romance authors is ~$32,000/year—triple other genres; ~20% make six figures, thanks largely to self-publishing economics.

  • [16:10] “Nearly one in five authors brings in six figures a year, largely thanks to... self-publishing.” (Zachary Crockett)

Changing Content and Representation

• Rising Heat: Self-publishing has allowed for much “spicier” books unrestricted by publisher gatekeeping.

  • [16:50] “There's no formal rating system... but on a scale of 1-10... mine is a 7.” (Delaney Diamond)
  • [17:20] “It’s sort of middle-of-the-road sex... not just in the bed, in the car, or something against the wall.” (Delaney Diamond)

• Diversity Struggles and Advances: For decades, publishers claimed romances with Black or other non-white leads “don’t sell”—a myth debunked by self-publishing data and reader demand.

  • [18:57] “She claimed at that time that black romance doesn't sell, which I knew was not correct because... there were a lot of readers of it.” (Delaney Diamond)

• Industry Efforts: Publishers now offer mentorship and scholarships to diversify their author pool; more queer and racially representative romances are getting published.

  • [20:08] “Queer romance has come into its own. You've seen more of that, so that's refreshing.” (Danielle Flores)

Robust Fan Culture and Ongoing Stigma

• Community Online and IRL: BookTok, Facebook groups, podcasts, and conventions give fans and writers platforms to connect, recommend, and celebrate the genre without judgment.

  • [20:37] “It's fun to be in a place where no one's going to snicker. Everyone's going to be like, I read that too.” (Danielle Flores)

• Enduring Stigma: Even as the genre booms, romance novels and readers often face ridicule or condescension.

  • [20:59] “Even my own school community that I love and adore, when they found out I read romance novels, the whole group laughed... I was like, pretty good. You should read one.” (Danielle Flores)

The Genre’s Appeal and Endurance

• A Need for Hope: For readers, romance novels offer escape and the promise of a happy ending, a welcome contrast to the challenges of everyday life.

  • [21:29] “It doesn't matter who you are. You are completely entitled to your own happy ending. I get enough of reality all day long, right? I don't need to know that life is hard. I'm looking for my reading to give me hope.” (Danielle Flores)

• Tech’s Silver Lining: E-readers help fans enjoy even “spicy” novels discreetly.

  • [22:08] “The eReader was... like sliced bread for romance readers. I can be reading a really erotic sex scene on the bus... no one's gonna look at me sideways.” (Danielle Flores)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• [02:33] “On average, I probably read about 250 romance novels a year.” (Danielle Flores on her reading habit)
• [05:08] “The Romance Wars was really, I think, a very exciting time... But as in any war, there are casualties.” (Diane Maghi on industry turbulence)
• [10:43] “For a $3.99 book, I got no more than 20 cents per book... That was so not true.” (Brenda Hyatt on author earnings)
• [15:32] “A lot of authors are really making bank and they're kind of flying under the radar.” (Brenda Hyatt on self-publishing success)
• [16:43] “Now you can actually make a living at writing through self-publishing. So it's a totally different game.” (Delaney Diamond on the self-publishing revolution)
• [18:10] “All the books had only white characters... I wrote my first romance novel and I made the heroine black.” (Delaney Diamond on early efforts at inclusion)
• [20:59] “Some people in the books are having better sex than people I know in real life.” (Danielle Flores responding to stigma)
• [21:29] “It doesn't matter who you are. You are completely entitled to your own happy ending.” (Danielle Flores on why the genre matters)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:31 – Danielle Flores’ introduction and reading journey
• 03:04 – History of the romance novel and Harlequin's origins
• 05:08 – “Romance Wars” and consolidation of the industry
• 06:12 – Subgenres explained and discussed
• 07:11 – Unusual subgenre hits (Amish romance, “dogs with jobs”)
• 08:33 – Reading volume stats and subscription model
• 09:22 – Prolific authors and their career paths
• 10:43 – Economics for traditional romance authors
• 11:23 – Gendered industry politics and lack of respect
• 14:28 – Ebook revolution and self-publishing's economic impact
• 16:10 – Current incomes for romance writers
• 16:43 – Changes in content and increasing “heat”
• 18:10 – Representation and early Black romance efforts
• 19:14 – Publishing constraints; progress for diversity
• 20:37 – Fan culture and conventions
• 20:59 – Stigma and reader experiences
• 21:29 – The value of escapism and hope through romance fiction
• 22:08 – E-readers and reading privacy

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Conclusion

This episode provides a vibrant, candid look at the romance novel industry—its economic engines, creative abundance, and evolving social relevance. Through interviews and industry insights, listeners come away with an understanding that romance fiction is both a critical commercial force and a cultural touchstone, providing not just entertainment but also hope, representation, and community for millions.

Transcript

[Zachary Crockett]

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[Jennifer Garner]

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[Danielle Flores]

Terms of lies see capitalone.com for details.

[Zachary Crockett]

As an English major at Stanford University in the early 1990s, Danielle Flores spent her days reading the classics, the novels that her professors deemed to be culturally significant. But outside of the classroom, Flores was introduced to a different kind of literature.

[Danielle Flores]

Two of my college roommates read romance novels and were avid readers, and I made fun of them, and they just kind of smirked and said, have you actually read an official romance novel? And I was like, no, please, why would I do that?

[Zachary Crockett]

She eventually put her skepticism aside and gave romance a chance.

[Danielle Flores]

I absolutely fell in love with it. And for the next four years, I got through my classwork by making room for the romance novels, and I haven't stopped since.

[Zachary Crockett]

Today, Flores is a high school math teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. She reads so many romance books that she has a spreadsheet to keep track of them all.

[Danielle Flores]

On average, I probably read about 250 romance novels a year.

[Zachary Crockett]

Flores is one of the millions of readers who make romance books a $1.4 billion business. While the rest of the publishing market reels, physical sales of romance books are up more than 50% over the past year alone.

[Brenda Hyatt]

You know, everybody wants to find the love of their life and live happy ever after.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, romance novels the romance novel goes Back a long way. The book that's often called the first modern English novel, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, published in 1740, is about the protracted courtship between a maidservant and her wealthy employer. But romance as a mass market commercial industry didn't really take off in North America until the 1950s with the Canadian publisher Harlequin.

[Diane Maghi]

The company actually started as a multi genre publisher. You know, published everything from mysteries to cookbooks and westerns.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Diane Maghi, Harlequin's vice president of editorial.

[Diane Maghi]

One of the genres they added to their publishing list were romances that were published by a company in the UK called Mills Boone. And very, very quickly those romances became the bestsellers across the company.

[Zachary Crockett]

At first, Harlequin's romance line was pretty tame. That is, until the mid-70s, when a new wave of historical romance books arrived. Soon to be nicknamed Bodice Rippers. The stories were often set in the Regency era, around the start of the 19th century, and featured descriptive erotic scenes, some of them non consensual. Harlequin sold these books in places where women went to shop. You could walk into a supermarket or drugstore and find yourself face to face with an alpha male in a ruffled shirt, his eyes glinting at you from the COVID of a paperback. By the end of the 1970s, Harlequin was selling more than 70 million of those paperbacks every year. Other publishers took notice and a fierce battle erupted over readers attention. It became known as the Romance Wars.

[Diane Maghi]

Well, the Romance wars was really, I think, a very exciting time. You saw a lot of different lines and imprints being launched by various publishers, which was fabulous for the writing community and fabulous for the reading community because there were so many more options to select from. But as in any war, you know there are casualties. Ultimately, there were two main players, Harlequin and Silhouette.

[Zachary Crockett]

In the end, Harlequin had a bigger budget and more legal manpower. It bought out silhouette in 1984 and established a hold on traditional romance publishing that lasts to this day. The company is now a subsidiary of HarperCollins, and it puts out around 800 new romance titles every year. The bread and butter of its business model is what's known as category romance. And they come in just about every flavor you can imagine.

[Danielle Flores]

In romance, everyone has their cup of tea, someone out there is pouring it. You just gotta find it.

[Zachary Crockett]

Danielle Flores started out reading historical romances, rich dukes, horses and carriages, clothing with lots of buttons. Eventually, she branched out.

[Danielle Flores]

You have paranormal romance, you have alien abduction romance, you have what's called monster Romance, either monster to monster or human to monster. Like orcs or, you know, made up creatures, you know, weird things like that. You have medical romances, you have teacher romances, which I tend to avoid.

[Zachary Crockett]

Brewery owners, NASCAR drivers, gargoyles, whatever your thing, someone has written a romance novel about it. The titans of the industry are constantly researching what their readers want. Their goal is to distill heartache, lust, and emotional turmoil into a science. But sometimes even the publishers are surprised by the success of certain subgenres.

[Diane Maghi]

The Amish romances that we publish are incredibly popular. Something else that's really resonating right now are books featuring canine units and dogs. Internally, we refer to it as dogs with jobs. If you have a dog on a cover, it's guaranteed to actually really perform well.

[Zachary Crockett]

Covers are important in every genre of publishing, but nowhere more than romance. In the 1990s, the beefy chest and flowing mane of a model named Fabio Lanzoni graced more than 450 romance book covers. He became a minor celebrity and a bestselling romance novelist himself. These days, romance covers are a little more varied and with more subgenres now than ever before, the COVID has become the publisher's greatest marketing tool.

[Diane Maghi]

We try to help the reader understand immediately what story she's going to get. You know, if she's got 10 seconds in front of a bookcase, we want those cues to be very immediate.

[Zachary Crockett]

Some stock images do get used over and over again in different contexts.

[Danielle Flores]

So if I'm shopping by covers, I see the same guy that has been out, has a sword, he's in a bathtub, there's another person behind him now, like, so it's kind of funny.

[Zachary Crockett]

Romance fans like Flores notice things like that because they have an insatiable appetite for new books. Industry data shows that around half of all romance readers go through at least one novel every week. Some read as many as 30amonth. Magi says the business model is closer to magazines than books. It's high volume and driven by subscriptions.

[Diane Maghi]

We have an incredibly large and viable book club business where readers subscribe to a series and they can get four or six or eight and multiple series delivered to their door in print form every month.

[Zachary Crockett]

To fill all of this demand, Harlequin has to find prolific writers, extremely prolific writers.

[Diane Maghi]

I'm just about to write a little paragraph to help celebrate an author who has just published her 175th book.

[Zachary Crockett]

That must be some kind of record.

[Diane Maghi]

Believe it or not, we have someone who's written over 300.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's like writing one book every two months for 50 years straight.

[Diane Maghi]

So that's a lot of books.

[Zachary Crockett]

The majority of these authors started out as romance readers. First.

[Brenda Hyatt]

I started writing when my kids were toddlers. They were 2 and 4, and I wrote during nap time.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Brenda Hyatt, a romance author based in Key Largo, Florida.

[Brenda Hyatt]

What I wrote were, I guess you'd call them the shorter, sweeter, traditional Regency romances. So there was nothing sexy about the books really. It was more comedy of manners and that sort of thing.

[Zachary Crockett]

As a reader of Harlequin and Silhouette books, Hyatt noticed that they all followed the same structure. A woman meets a potential mate. Tension builds. There's a catastrophic conflict in the third act, there's a grand gesture by which the hero regains the heroine's trust. And then, most importantly, there's got to

[Brenda Hyatt]

be a happy ending.

[Zachary Crockett]

Hyatt studied this structure and went on to publish half a dozen historical romance books. With Harlequin. The money wasn't as good as she thought it would be.

[Brenda Hyatt]

I still have a framed photocopy of my very first advance check. And it was, yeah, it was $3,000. And then royalties would be based on the COVID price and books sold. For a $3.99 book, I got no more than 20 cents per book. Most people had no idea. They assumed that if you were a published author, you were rolling in dough. That was so not true.

[Zachary Crockett]

That was not the only problem she found. Within the publishing industry, the distributors were almost all men.

[Brenda Hyatt]

A lot of the publishing decisions were made by men. The books, they were written by women for women, and they got no respect. They were the cash cow of the publishing industry. They brought in all the bucks, but they bankrolled the, you know, respectable books. We used to say that authors were like mushrooms, you know, they were, you know, fed a lot of crap and kept in the dark.

[Zachary Crockett]

But the world of romance was on the brink of, of a revolution. That's coming up. The economics of everyday things is sponsored by crowdstreet. You're the kind of person who reads the fine print, who likes to make your own calls, who's built a life, not to mention a career, by thinking independently. So why shouldn't you invest that way too? Crowdstreet is built for self directed investors who, who want direct access to private market opportunities like private equity, private credit and real estate. Vetted offerings, transparent data and clear diligence summaries help you make confident, informed choices. Because independence doesn't stop at your desk or your business or your weekend projects. It should extend to your investments too. Invest the way you live independently. Learn [e-mail].

[Jennifer Garner]

Hi, I'm Jennifer Garner. Being a business owner takes hard work and a whole lot of miles. So once upon a farm needed a serious business card. We chose the Capital One Venture X Business card with unlimited double miles on every purchase. We earn rewards on all the things we need to grow our business. Venturex business gives us big purchasing power so we can spend more and earn more. We redeemed miles to travel the country and partner with new stores. Capital One what's in your wallet?

[Danielle Flores]

Terms apply. See capitalone.com for details.

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[Zachary Crockett]

By the early 2000s, ebooks and self publishing started to take off and romance authors were some of the first to take advantage of this new technology. Without the support of a publishing company, Brenda Hyatt bought the rights to her old books back and decided to republish them herself as ebooks. It transformed her career.

[Brenda Hyatt]

After a couple of years of doing that, I realized I was making more money from these books as e books than I had ever made publishing them. Traditionally, epublishing has created this long tail for backlist and books can keep selling and selling and selling.

[Zachary Crockett]

Hyatt went from earning 6% royalties on her books when they were sold through bookstores to 70% when they were sold in electronic format through Amazon. One of the books she resurrected even became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller seller 17 years after it was first published. And she wasn't alone in her success.

[Brenda Hyatt]

I know quite a few self published seven figure authors. The profit margin is, you know, much higher on ebooks because there are no print costs and the funny thing is, you go looking online for statistics and it looks like ebooks are not a big deal. And that's because all those statistics come from traditional publishers. The self published books are not included in those statistics. And so in that sense, they're almost invisible to the financial world. But, you know, a lot of authors are really making bank and they're kind of flying under the radar.

[Zachary Crockett]

A recent survey from the Authors Guild found that romance writers across the publishing industry earned a median income of about $32,000 from their books in 2022. That's more than three times in any other genre. Nearly one in five authors brings in six figures a year, largely thanks to the favorable economics of self publishing. One of those authors is Delaney Diamond. She has self published more than 50 books in 13 years.

[Delaney Diamond]

Now you can actually make a living at writing through self publishing. So it's a totally different game.

[Zachary Crockett]

Diamond's work taps into a trend. Romance books, especially those that are self published, have gotten spicier. There's no formal rating system for the heat level of a book, but on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is vanilla and 10 is wildly pornographic, diamond says her work is a 7.

[Delaney Diamond]

Usually in the romance that I write, which is steamy romance, there's at least one sex scene. And I try to drop that somewhere around the middle because if you wait

[Zachary Crockett]

too long, people don't like that, start losing patience.

[Delaney Diamond]

Yeah, it's like, come on, do it already. It's sort of middle of the road sex. I just try to find different ways to add variety for the reader and, you know, have them do it, do it in different places, for example, not just in the bed, in the car, or something against the wall.

[Zachary Crockett]

For diamond, writing romance is much more than a study in sensuality. It's a fight for representation and identity. She grew up in the Virgin Islands and first encountered romance novels in a local library.

[Delaney Diamond]

I just fell in love with the stories and they were kind of achy and all the yearning and all of that. So I read pretty much everything that was there at the library.

[Zachary Crockett]

But diamond noticed that none of the women in these books look looked like her.

[Delaney Diamond]

All the books had only white characters. I didn't know it at the time, but I wanted something else. And when I was 14, I wrote my first romance novel and I shared it with my friends and I made the heroine black.

[Zachary Crockett]

What was the title?

[Delaney Diamond]

Captured Heart.

[Zachary Crockett]

Captured Heart. Classic.

[Delaney Diamond]

Yeah, it's very, very much in line with the types of stories that I was reading.

[Zachary Crockett]

Diamond later moved to the US Went to college and got an office job. In her spare time, she continued to write romance novels, but an editor at a traditional publisher told her there was no market for her work.

[Delaney Diamond]

The series that I wanted to work on was black romance. And black romance is when both the leads are black. And she claimed at that time that black romance doesn't sell, which I knew was not correct because I read it then. I knew that there were a lot of readers of it.

[Zachary Crockett]

People of color account for around 23% of romance readers, but less than 8% of published romance authors. Brenda Hyatt says that many black authors who did work in traditional romance publishing were constrained.

[Brenda Hyatt]

I mean, I knew black authors who were not allowed to write black characters. You know, they had to write white characters if they wanted to sell books, period. And if they did write an ethnic romance, it got shelved in the little ethnic section of the bookstore.

[Zachary Crockett]

The traditional publishing industry has made efforts to level the playing field in recent years. Harlequin has launched mentorship and scholarship programs to recruit authors with diverse backgrounds. And editors across all categories are looking for books that feature a wider representation of characters. Danielle Flores has noticed some progress.

[Danielle Flores]

Queer romance has come into its own. You've seen more of that, so that's refreshing.

[Zachary Crockett]

Much of the call for change has come from the readers themselves. The genre has found a new market on TikTok, where millions of fans search for videos with hashtags like spicy talk, forbidden love, and billionaire romance. There are Facebook groups, podcasts, YouTube channels, and dozens of conferences where fans like Flores can convene without judgment.

[Danielle Flores]

It's fun to be in a place where no one's going to snicker. Everyone's going to be like, I read that too. That was a crazy scene. And, you know, the aliens were blue and we're on an ice planet, and it's fantastic, right?

[Zachary Crockett]

That open mindedness has helped make romance novels a billion dollar industry. Even so, the genre still faces a fight for broader societal acceptance.

[Danielle Flores]

I mean, even my own school community that I love and adore, when they found out I read romance novels, the whole group laughed. And they were like, how are those sex scenes? And I was like, pretty good. You should read one. I mean, some people in the books are having better sex than people I know in real life.

[Zachary Crockett]

You know, fans of the genre know they'll always have to contend with jokes and stigmas. But like the heroines she reads about, Danielle Flores knows how to stand her ground.

[Danielle Flores]

It doesn't matter who you are. You are completely entitled to your own happy ending. I get enough of reality all day long, right? I don't need to know that life is hard. I'm looking for my reading to give me hope.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Julie Kanfer and Daniel Moritz Rapson.

[Danielle Flores]

The E reader was, you know, like sliced bread for romance readers. I can be reading a really erotic sex scene on the bus, right? And no one's gonna look at me sideways and wonder, like, what are you reading right now?

[Diane Maghi]

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