Walk into almost any bookshop in Ireland or the UK right now and there will be a table near the front covered in black and gold covers with sprayed edges. Five years ago that table did not exist. Today it is frequently the best-performing square metre in the shop.
Romantasy did that. And the more interesting part of the story is what happened outside publishing.
Where it came from
The boom has a reasonably clear lineage. Sarah J. Maas built an enormous readership through the 2010s. Rebecca Yarros hit escape velocity with Fourth Wing in 2023. Underneath both sat a self-published dark romance ecosystem that traditional publishing had spent years not paying attention to, where authors were selling extraordinary volumes directly to readers who had found each other on TikTok.
BookTok is the usual explanation and it is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Recommendation algorithms had existed for years without producing anything on this scale. What made the difference was that the recommendations came from readers who were visibly, unembarrassedly enthusiastic, in a format that rewarded exactly that. The genre’s defining characteristic was not its content. It was that its readers stopped being quiet about it.
That matters more than it sounds, because the shame was the bottleneck. Romance has been the best-selling fiction genre for decades while being the least publicly discussed. Readers bought it and did not mention it. The moment that flipped, the demand that had always been there became visible, and the trade responded within about eighteen months.
What the trade actually changed
The physical book changed first, and deliberately. Sprayed edges. Foil. Reversible dust jackets. Character art on the endpapers. Special editions with a genuine collector’s premium.
This is a considered response to a specific reality: these readers already own the ebook. Many have listened to the audiobook as well. Selling them a physical copy therefore requires selling them an object rather than a text. Publishers worked this out quickly and the production budgets followed.
For independent bookshops the effect has been substantial. A genre where the customer wants the beautiful physical edition, wants to be seen with it, and buys the next one in the series the week it lands is close to an ideal proposition for a shop that cannot compete with online retailers on price. Romantasy readers buy in series, buy the special edition, and come back.
The part that happened outside publishing
Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, and where the trend press mostly stopped following.
A genre boom on this scale does not stay inside its category. Readers who spend two years working through dark romance develop curiosity about what they are reading, and a proportion of that curiosity turns into purchases that have nothing to do with books.
British and Irish retailers in adjacent categories reported the shift clearly. The most common version of it: enquiries from complete beginners, frequently couples in their thirties and forties, arriving with a specific vocabulary they had picked up from fiction and no practical knowledge whatsoever. Not the established scene. People whose entire frame of reference was a novel.
That produced a market gap that barely existed before. Historically, equipment in this category was built for people who already knew what they wanted and had somewhere to put it. The new customer knew neither. They wanted something approachable, something that did not require a dedicated room, and something that arrived in packaging that would not humiliate them in front of a neighbour.
Manufacturers adapted. My Dungeon, a workshop in Lincolnshire, built its entire product line around exactly that customer: equipment that folds flat and stores out of sight, priced for people trying something rather than committing to a lifestyle, shipped in plain packaging. Its most-read content is not aimed at enthusiasts. It is beginners’ guides. That tells you precisely who arrived.
The parallel with the books is neat. The publishers worked out that the reader wanted a beautiful object rather than just a story. The makers worked out that the new customer wanted something approachable rather than something serious. Both were responding to the same influx.
Why the snobbery is misplaced
There is a familiar literary complaint about all this, and it follows the pattern of every previous one. The books are formulaic. The prose is functional. The covers are marketing rather than design.
The counter-argument is simply the numbers. This genre brought an enormous number of people, disproportionately young and disproportionately women, into the habit of reading for pleasure and buying physical books from actual shops during a decade when nearly every other indicator was heading the wrong way. Any bookseller who has watched a nineteen-year-old come in for the fourth time in a month knows exactly what that is worth.
Genres that get dismissed as formulaic have a long history of turning out to be where the readers were all along. This one just had the advantage of readers who were willing to say so out loud.
Related: how alternative spaces moved out of the clubs and into people’s homes.
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