Sales have more than doubled since 2019, new authors (especially Italian) are the darlings of a dynamic and communicative audience of readers – and above all female readers, who use social word of mouth and create communities on social platforms, especially TikTok. These are the outlines of a phenomenon, the boom in romance fiction, which emerges from the new data that Aie (Italian Publishers Association) presented during the meeting Fifty Shades of Romanceand, as part of Più libri liberi, the small and medium publishing fair underway in Rome until tomorrow.
The number of Italians who read is increasing: in 2023 they will be 74 percent. The new Aie data at “More books, more books”
edited by the Cultura editorial team
A phenomenon that Robinson – present at the fair with the meeting and debate space of the Robinson Arena – has intercepted from the beginning, giving space to the voice, tastes and proposals of bookmakers in its Pages dedicated to TikTok and interviewing, week after week, the young writers protagonists of this editorial advance.
But let’s get to the figures: romance books have more than doubled their sales from 2019 to today (+120.5%), a performance that places them second only to comics (+225.5%) as a publishing phenomenon in post-Italy pandemic: titles that initially make themselves known on social media then go on to climb the top ten of the bookshop sales charts.
In detail, in 2019 the romance genre had a value of sales at cover price in trade channels (physical and online bookshops and supermarkets) of 22.215 million euros. After a decline in 2020, in the following three years growth has always been double-digit, up to 48,900 million in 2023. Values to which Christmas sales must be added, obviously still to be counted. If we consider the shares of the total trade market, romance accounted for 2% of the total variety (fiction and non-fiction) in 2019 and now accounts for 3.8%.
Another important factor is therise of Italian female authors; if some foreign writers have paved the way (think of the British EL James and her followers Fifty Shadesor the American Collen Hoover by It ends with us) now it’s time for the Italians: Felicia Kingsley, Erin Doom, Kira Shell.
As has happened to other genres, from detective stories to thrillers, local talents are growing and sometimes surpassing the great successes arriving abroad in the rankings. In 2019, over 84% of the segment’s sales were made up of books written by foreign authors (market share in terms of cover price). In 2023, however, Italian female authors account for 40%, for a total of 19.601 million. If we look at the growth from 2019 to today, Italian romance has grown by 462.5%, foreign romance “only” by 56.9%.
And it’s not just the big publishing houses that act as godmothers to new talents; sometimes it’s the small acronyms that discover names that then break the charts. A case for everyone: Always Publishing, created by Alessandra Friuli and Simona Natale, born – as we said on Robinson – in 2017 to publish women’s fiction, which brought the Tillie Cole case and her bestseller Dammi mille baci to bookstores.
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– 2024-05-02 14:31:21
