It’s no question that the romance novel industry is booming like crazy. I am certainly no stranger to reading a few myself, but I find that I cannot read a lot of them and here’s why:
- They all have the same basic story line
- Boy meets girl, someone has a problem, they fall in love
- Too much mushy emotion starts to exhaust my brain
Here are a few interesting statistics about the industry:
- >$1.08 billion per year
- >84% of readers are women
- Most common age of reader is 30-54
- On average less than 10% of the published novels each year are written by nonwhite authors
Source Articles: the balance careers | New York Times
I want to take a moment to focus on this last point. This industry is raking in billions of dollars with repeated and overused story lines and there are very few authors that are NONWHITE.
Interesting, huh?
What does that mean exactly? Does that mean that nonwhite authors aren’t really interested in writing romance novels? Possibly.
OR is it likely that nonwhite authors might take a romance novel in a very different direction than our modern day books are written? Maybe they’re more likely to break the mold and write thought provoking romantic encounters that change the romance novel paradigm.
Just some information to toss around and think about. Share your thoughts below!
This article was inspired by a post from Kajal Dhamija titled “Why contemporary Indian literature is in danger“.
Adventures in Literature 
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