The Damned Mob of Scribbling Women

A virgin maiden abandons her ceremonial role to hunt vampires with her immortal bodyguard. A woman falls for her faerie kidnapper and goes on a quest to save his kingdom. A war college misfit has eyes for the son of a rival family—and their dragons are mates. The most popular romances today aren’t simple love stories. And as absurd as the plots come, these books are mainstream: romantasy, a term popularized in the last five years to describe the longstanding blend of fantasy and romance, is drawing tens of millions of readers. In 2023, Amazon offered millions of romantasy e-books, up from 600,000 in 2014. The #romantasy hashtag has over 800 million views on TikTok. The books spend months on New York Times bestseller lists, and the Goodreads Choice Awards gave romantasy its own category in 2023 to stop the books from competing with traditional fantasy novels. In the last two years, the number of romance-only bookstores across the country grew from two to more than twenty. In 2020, 18 million print romance novels sold; in 2022, romance sales in the US shot up by 52.4%, compared with an increase of just 8.5% for adult fiction overall. 2023 saw the sale of more than 39 million romance novels, and in 2024 the Oxford English Dictionary shortlisted romantasy as their Word of the Year.