Navigating the Decline in Historical Romance Readership
Romance is often praised as the backbone of book publishing. In 2009, Publishers Weekly deemed the Romance genre recession-proof. The same outlet reported in 2024 that Romance and Romantasy pushed print sales into the positive. In June, the Circana mid-year report said the volume for Romance books has more than doubled compared with four years ago. Screen adaptations, books flying off the shelves, and stores dedicated solely to Romance—the appetite for Romance is seemingly unending.
Unlike Dark Romance, Sports Romance, and Romantasy, however, one subset of the Romance genre is seeing a decline in readership. Even with fans eager to devour TV adaptations of Historical Romance titles such as Netflix’s Bridgerton or spin-offs like Outlander: Blood of My Blood, Historical Romance, also known as HistRom, is not experiencing the same rise in readership as other Romance subgenres, according to authors who write in the genre.
Data collected by Elizabeth Held, co-host of Really Reading Romance, found that just seven of more than eighty Romances acquired by leading publishers in 2024 were historicals. She connected the data to statements from popular traditional publishing authors Harper St. George, Liana De La Rosa, and Elizabeth Everett announcing their respective publishers’ refusal to accept additional Historical Romances.
The decline has reached independently published authors, too. HistRom author Celeste Barclay says that after COVID-19, she noticed a drop in the number of older longtime readers picking up books in the genre, and the numbers haven’t bounced back. Authors need to tackle marketing to a younger audience; the trouble, Barclay says, is the stigma attached to the genre.
“There’s sort of this assumption that all they’re going to get is women as chattel, misogyny, patriarchy, and bodice rippers,” Barclay says. “They’re not realizing that there’s an entire generation of authors writing what they want because that is what we want.”
Susie Dumond, a senior contributor at Book Riot and bookseller at Loyalty Books in Washington, DC, says she’s noticed fewer customers asking for historicals.
A Romance reader herself, Dumond is drawn to diverse storytelling. Heavily associated with Regency England, she says Historical Romance books often pigeonhole instead of exploring other eras and regions of the world.
“Even if authors are trying to do things to subvert it, especially if they’re just not confronting it at all, I can’t really put that aside in my head when I’m reading it,” Dumond says. “It’s hard for me to relax into the story. I would rather them confront the realities of the time period.”
Andrea Martucci on her Substack, Shelf Love, published a blog post exploring the conflict between historicals and inconvenient truths. She writes that the reshaping of the Regency period by Historical Romance fans is disingenuous. The sanitization of the Regency period shields readers from the truth of how closely colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy enable the lifestyles of the dukes, earls, and barons the heroine inevitably falls for.
“Regency England as presented in a romance, via collective and evolving world-building across romance texts, is a colonial project that displaces the original inconvenient histories by occupying the space with sanitized fantasies that can be exploited for modern audiences’ comfort,” Martucci writes. She states that Regencies focus on gender inequality as a substitute for an intersectional understanding of oppression.
“So many suffragettes, so few abolitionists,” she writes.
Despite the criticism of the genre, there are voices in Historical Romance centering BIPOC and LGBTQ+ stories. Author Beverly Jenkins is known for historical Black Romances. Her books create space for Black joy instead of reducing the Black experience to enslavement. Meanwhile, Abigail Aaronson debuted Lavender & Gin: A Sapphic Historical Romance in July. In the Prohibition-era Romance, the period-typical homophobia doesn’t overshadow a thriving queer community.
Bringing Readers Back
To strengthen her Historical Romance readership, Barclay plans on marketing her historicals to her Mafia Romance fans. Cross-pollinating her genres by reminding them of her author alter egos will mean posting more short-form content to entice readers from other Romance subgenres—“changing the aesthetic of my posts to move them toward what you see on the contemporary side.”
“I do write very steamy Historicals, so they do lend themselves to the same sorts of tones as my Mafia,” Barclay says.
Dumond theorizes readers were embarrassed reading in public when the book cover art aligned with traditional Historical Romances. Readers and publishers prefer the illustrated cover art because it’s tamer in a public setting.
“The decline in Historical Romance is less about what readers want and more about what the book world thinks readers want and is pushing them towards other things,” Dumond says. “I think if they packaged Historical Romances in a way that felt contemporary and fresh like that, that they would probably also do well.”
Dumond encourages independent Historical Romance authors to rely on local bookstores. As a bookseller, she is enthusiastic to recommend local authors to customers seeking to broaden their reading list.
Barclay advocates for Historical Romance authors to intentionally incorporate new periods and experiences into their writing. She is certain there will always be readers interested in Historical Romance as long as they’re ready to seek historicals outside of the classics.
“Nowadays we have more information readily available, societal norms and expectations have changed, and authors are meeting that,” Barclay says. “It would be great if readers were more open minded to exploring Historical Romance with a copyright after 2000. Even if they see the nostalgia throwback covers, that doesn’t mean the stories are what their grandmothers and mothers read. The stories are what they want.”
Samantha Margot
