Days before a mid-January flight to Antigua, Guatemala, the Dallas lifestyle blogger hovered over her suitcase like Regina George over a Burn Book and feverishly scribbled inside the cover of a romance novel.
“You deserve to read a fun book by the pool,” read the inscription. The five-star resort’s dry reading library wouldn’t do. Moldovan made it her mission to provide the women of the resort with sexy reads filled with happily-ever-afters; heaving kissing, light choking and a hair tug or two were more like it.
Moldovan and her 222,000 Instagram followers are some of a growing number of women who are wearing their love of romance novels as a badge of honor. Dallas and its skyrocketing romance readership is in on the genre's resurgence.
Over the last year, romance has strutted out of Dallas' literary shadows. North Texas women are banging down the doors and filling their “to be read” lists with toe-curling titles. Local authors, social media personalities and romance bookstores are shamelessly leading the genre’s renaissance.
Busy Reading Smut
“Romance books were the first time I saw sex without shame and that was so eye-opening to me,” says Dallas author Rachel Lewis, founder of the Get Lit: Grown-Up Book Fair.Lewis, who was raised in Bible Belt, Texas, and Moldovan are co-hosts of Dallas’ leading romance novel podcast, Welcome to the Smut Show, where guests and the well-read duo talk all things smut.
“The first book that I really remember reading was called The Good Luck Charm by Helena Hunting, and it was the first book that I ever read that I remember having explicit spice,” Lewis says.
“What is this? This is amazing. Whose idea was this? This is genius,” Lewis recalls thinking.
Purity culture be damned.
The hosts define "smut" as on-page, detailed sexual activity. “Spice” refers to the amount of sexual content of a book. The higher the spice level, the naughtier the read, but don’t confuse smut with erotica. Sex is a fraction of the story.
“Erotica, it can be beautifully written, it can be romantic, it can be a great read, but if the majority of that story is taking place in the bedroom with their clothes off, with things happening, it's probably erotica,” says North Texas romance author Thea Claire. “Smut, to me, is an open-door romance that has a certain level of storytelling that makes you care about the characters before they start doing stuff.”
Smut’s fandom is booming. Welcome to the Smut Show enjoyed a 111% growth in 2024. The top-100 arts podcast has listeners in over 42 countries, with 120,000 downloads and counting.
For women like Lewis, romance novels are lifting the veil of shame surrounding sex. Romance’s explicit content, written mostly by women, normalizes female sexual prowess through the female gaze.
“Talking about your sex life and your sexuality has always been kind of taboo,” says Denton Square romance bookbar co-owner Dawn Conner. “You weren't supposed to want it, desire it, need it. In my mind, growing up when I did, that's kind of what it was about. It was like, ‘Gosh, you don't talk about that,’ but I think it's important that it's part of who we are.”
Conner and her daughter, Darci Middleton, are co-owners of The Plot Twist romance bookstore and bar. The romance-exclusive bookbar located at 227 W. Oak St. in Denton opened Jan. 18. The Plot Twist is part of a wave of romance-only bookstores hitting North Texas, following Kansas-transplant Blush Bookstore.
Money Talks
Blush Bookstore, at 432 W. Eighth St., was enthusiastically welcomed to the Bishop Arts District. The frilly romance bookstore broke molds in Dallas. Despite being neighbor to a handful of bookstores, Blush is the first local bookstore dedicated solely to romance. Dallas’ excitement for such a space was unprecedented.“We thought we were prepared,” says Blush Bookstore owner Jaclyn Wooten. “What was the surprise is that we did well, but we did probably at least three times our expectations.”
The Eighth Street addition isn’t Wooten’s first rodeo. The cozy girl-coded bookstore is Blush’s second iteration. Wooten’s first entrepreneurial endeavor is House of Jupiter, an online bookish merch store.
On Oct. 5, 2024, Dallas readers rushed Blush. Customers lined Eighth Street and waited upwards of 90 minutes to be one of the first to set foot in the romance-dedicated bungalow. The line held steady all weekend long.
“Romance is just now being taken seriously,” says New Leaf Literary and Media agent Patrice Caldwell.
The Dallas-based literary agent has been in publishing for 10 years as an editor, literary agent and soon-to-be published author. Caldwell’s client roster includes sapphic writer Meryl Wilsner, whose first nonbinary romance character will take the spotlight in the sexy April release, My Best Friend’s Honeymoon.
“It's [romance] been selling so healthily for so long,” Caldwell says. “In some, many ways, [it’s] probably keeping the publishing industry afloat.”
Caldwell, who was named a top honoree at the 2018 Publishers Weekly Star Watch, is part of the resurgence of vampire novels. Caldwell’s debut, Where Shadows Meet, is the first of a young adult dark romance vampire fantasy duology about sacrificial love, and is set to publish April 1.
Nationally, romance is outperforming all other genres. According to Publisher’s Weekly, print unit sales of romance titles rose 34.6% in 2023. In 2022, romance unit sales grew 52.4% over the previous year.
In romantasy, a subgenre of romance blending fantasy and romance, heavy-hitter Rebecca Yarros’ The Empyrean Series currently holds the top two slots on The New York Times best-seller list. Fourth Wing has charted for 77 weeks, holding steady at No. 1, and its sequel has 51 weeks on the list. Romance’s key to success is predictability.
All That Ends Swell
“So many people read romance, not just women, and you can see yourself in romance and you get the safety of no matter what happens in this book, I'm gonna leave it feeling good,” Caldwell says.Romance is also formulaic.
“Tropes might be different and the people might be different, and their jobs might be different, and all the circumstances might be different, but there's a formula to it,” Moldovan says.
The formula is simple. Two people (or more) meet. They fall in love. Conflict ensues. Resolution follows. Happily ever after.
“That's just what the girlies want,” Moldovan says.
Romance’s reigning tropes are enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, forced proximity, fake relationship, second chance and forbidden love. The emotion-provoking reads span a spectrum of subgenres.
“It's about the journey,” says Instagram personality Stephanie Lopez. “You know that 99.99% of the time, you're gonna get a happy ending.”
Lit and the City is both a closed book club and Lopez’s handle for her book-focused Instagram account, or "Bookstagram.” The in-demand book club reads monthly novels while exploring Dallas’ aesthetically pleasing coffee shops, bars and restaurants. Lopez says romance’s guaranteed outcome is comforting.
It’s the idyllic happy ending many Dallas romantics long for. Aside from one outlying FestishFinder survey, Dallas ranks as one of the worst cities for dating. So, Dallas women are turning to books for their dating kicks.
“When we first started building the concept of Blush, that's the thing that surprised people most,” Wooten says. “Any time we were explaining who our target audience was, they just assumed older women.”
It’s not just your mother reading clinch novels with Fabio on the cover. Blush targets women ranging from their early 20s to mid-30s.
“That's part of a stigma that's kind of stuck with romance, is that it was written for an older generation of women, and it’s been evolving behind the scenes for so many years now that it's become a lot more inclusive of a genre,” Wooten says. “It’s not just the bodice rippers.”
Romance is uplifted by a predominately female audience spanning from Gens Z to X. Social media’s influence is credited as the driving force behind a younger readership.
Like women, romance books cannot be boxed neatly. The range of subgenres, niches and steaminess is expansive. There's even a literary sector devoted to MAGA romance, unrelated to Dallas' book clubs and bookshops. Sports romances, mafia romances and STEM romances have highlighted women’s many interests. Romance novels empower them to embrace their sexual prowess, sports fandom, intellect, identity and emotions.
“The thing that I fight the most is that they try and take that multifacetedness away and boil it [romance books] down to it's either smut or it's just for girls,” Wooten says.
Blush has been able to fill the shelves with romance books ranging from contemporary to "romantasy." At The Plot Twist, the shelves are a gradient of covers. Conner’s favorites, the contemporary romances, are bright, bubbly and pink. They greet shoppers closer to the door. As you walk the shelves, the cover colors darken. Dark romances and fantasies meet you at the end.
“Even though it may not be the next To Kill a Mockingbird or Handmaid's Tale, there are very real, very important things that are discussed in romance books that hit readers in a way that they don't in those literary fiction pieces because you're getting it from a perspective of somebody, or in a story that you wouldn't expect it in,” Claire says.
Main Character Energy
Dallas’ brightest romance trailblazers once hid in plain sight. The relatability offered by romance books busted their shells.“Sometimes we're very self-conscious and we don't want to say something to offend somebody else, or don't want to say anything and feel a rejection, and being able to blossom in this community was the safest space for me to do that in,” Middleton says.
Middleton is a self-proclaimed introvert. She struggles with social anxiety but has come to terms with the idea that perhaps she was simply in the wrong space.
“When you're passionate about something that you have no outlet to discuss it and talk about it with somebody, and you're just kind of trapped, and sometimes almost lose the moment, and you lose the memory of why you love that book,” Middleton says. “When I could talk about the books that I love, I can remember how they made me feel, and I can express that to other people.”
At The Plot Twist, she’s a beaming face lighting up at the mention of a trope-busting heroine. Storylines centered on inner love resonate with her the most.
“Readers sometimes are recluses,” Lopez says.
Bookstagrammers have chiseled at those walls through event curation.
“We made it to where if you're a reader and consider yourself a reader, you should come and meet these people, because there are other people like you,” Lopez says.
In 2023, Lopez hosted a reader mixer that attracted around 35 attendees. The 2024 mixer had 20. By that point, Dallas readers were confidently meeting each other and creating communities from their shared love of romantic prose. Blush and The Plot Twist are transforming into community incubators.
“We're seeing the first pieces of what Los Angeles and New York have seen with [bookstore] The Ripped Bodice,” says Claire. “Blush is becoming that staple, and The Plot Twist is going to become one of those staples of the romance community.”
Reflection
In 2016, Los Angeles’ The Ripped Bodice disrupted the book publishing industry. For many readers, this was the first time they saw themselves reflected on the shelves.“Not only did I feel accepted as a romance reader, but I felt accepted as a Black, queer, chronically ill woman,” Caldwell says of her first experience at the pioneering romance bookstore. “I felt the same way about Blush.”
Caldwell reacquainted herself with romance through novelist Jasmine Guillory, whose main characters are African-American professionals.
“For the first time in a long time, I had read a story about a young woman, a young Black woman, who was trying to fall in love and going through things dating that me and all my friends were going through, but also was dealing with stuff and hurt in a different capacity like job, family, friends — and I loved it,” Caldwell says. “It got me reading romance again, voraciously.”
For Lopez, being one of the faces of the Dallas romance boom came with responsibility.
“There's a lot more authors that you can read, other than Colleen Hoover, Tessa Bailey, even Katherine Center, Abby Jimenez and all that and they're not being marketed,” says Lopez, whose now-defunct virtual book club called Wine Down centered on Hispanic and Latin romance authors like Priscilla Oliveras, Jocelyne Soto and Alana Quintana Albertson.
“Diversity is so important,” Caldwell says. “You're getting something fresh, and it keeps the genre alive. You're getting to read different things."
Lopez and Caldwell praise Whose Books in Oak Cliff for its advocacy for diverse voices. The bookstore has nine book clubs, including the romance book club “Oak Cliff is for Lovers.”
Readers are pushing publishers into new, inclusive territories, Caldwell says. Within the romance community, acceptance is crucial.
“We don't yuck people's yum,” Lewis says. The catchy phrase is a steadfast rule she and Moldovan read by.
In 2023, Claire read 115 romance novels while writing her debut romance novel Go Find Less. She found pieces of herself in the pages.
“Reading queer stories really confirmed for me my identity in part as part of the community,” the pansexual author says.
Her debut is a therapy-exercise-turned-novel that has Claire’s life experiences woven into it. The book features a widowed, sober lingerie designer with a cancer-diagnosed male romance interest.
Claire’s second book releases Feb. 7. Four Letter Words highlights disability through its sober female main character, who is also a sexual assault survivor, and a multicultural male main character. It’s a romance speaking to the realization that you can't shut down or shut out everyone, because eventually somebody is going to break down those walls, Claire says.
Her third book will tell of a polyamorous male-male-female relationship.
“Reading those stories and being a part of the [reading] community that told me it was safe to be who I was,” Claire says. “That's something that I will always tell people. If they're interested in being a part of this community, whether that's on Instagram or on Tiktok or whatever platform, you will find your community and your niche. It's a matter of being yourself and letting those people come to you.”
