The Golden Age of Smut

As a kid, I’d always peer over the shoulder of my older sister, Serena, to see what she was reading—and then I’d follow suit. When she read Twilight, so did I. Like practically every other teen in the 2000s, I was obsessed with that book. I saw myself in the main character, Bella, an angsty outsider, and it showed me how fun it was to escape into a fictional world. However subconsciously, reading Twilight also helped me confront questions I had about love and boundaries for the first time.

Once I got to university, reading for pleasure took a backseat to my midwifery studies. Helping new mothers bring their babies into the world was meaningful but all-consuming; I sometimes worked for 24 hours straight (with the odd moment to sit, if luck was on my side). Serena and I joked on our extra-bad days that we should just quit our jobs and open a bookstore—one with the dark-academia aesthetic you see on Pinterest boards. By the spring of 2024, I was regularly crashing out and crying to my therapist about resigning from my job. When she said she didn’t believe I’d really do it, I took it as a challenge. That same week, I called Serena and, knowing barely anything about retail or publishing, we decided to make our bookish fantasy a reality.

It took us six weeks to plot out a detailed business plan: I’d reduce my clinic hours to part-time, and Serena would keep her municipal-government job in Marathon, Ontario, east of Thunder Bay, and manage the online store, finances and emails remotely. Instead of leaning on a loan, we each threw in $15,000 of our personal savings to rent a shipping container in Toronto’s Stackt market as a six-month experiment. Then, we settled on a unifying concept (romance novels, because that’s what we loved most) and a name (Hopeless Romantic Books).

Elsewhere in North America, there were a handful of fun, romance-centric stores—like Calgary’s Slow Burn Books and The Ripped Bodice in Brooklyn. Toronto, shockingly, didn’t have one, and we wanted to fill that gap. The final step of planning was figuring out how to open publisher accounts and ordering whatever would arrive in time for a fall opening. Sarah J. Maas’s romantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses topped our list, along with classics like Sense and Sensibility and The Takedown by Toronto favourite Lily Chu.

There’s another more strategic reason we chose this niche. The romance genre has quietly kept publishing houses afloat forever. Roughly four Harlequin-published books are sold every second; in the ’70s and ’80s, they accounted for more than 80 per cent of all fiction sales. Still, there was a disconnect between the genre’s commercial dominance in North America and its public visibility. Romance novels were always written off as pulpy bodice-rippers with shallow plots—stories heavy on long-haired Fabio facsimiles in pirate shirts and cheesy phrases like “manhood” and “heaving bosom.” Their predominantly female readership hid their purchases under pillows and elsewhere for fear of being belittled as unintellectual.

Today’s romance readers are nowhere near as apologetic; they fan out unabashedly. Over the last decade, the genre’s sales have gone from big to bonkers, largely buoyed by BookTok, TikTok’s literary corner, which exploded in popularity when people were stuck at home during the pandemic. (Escapist narratives with guaranteed happy endings were suddenly preferable to relatably apocalyptic ones.) It’s hard to pin down precise numbers, but some experts estimate that just under half of all BookTok’s posts pertain to romance novels. And, according to BookNet Canada, about one-fifth of all Canadian readers use TikTok to inform what they choose to read.

Romance-novel revenue rose globally by 42 per cent from 2017 to 2022. Sales of LGBTQ+ romances in particular rose by 10,406 per cent in the same time period. The movement birthed Canadian “bookfluencers” like Danielle Bernardin, Johnee Pixels and Bridget Raymundo, who posted reels of their hauls and gushing, sometimes tearful reviews. The genre’s star authors are making a splash on even bigger screens: Netflix’s adaptation of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series drew 82 million viewers in its first month. Toronto’s own Carley Fortune, the bestselling author of Every Summer After, has a hotly anticipated Amazon series in the works.

I witnessed all of that industry buzz as soon as we opened our doors. The early days were exciting and also terrifying, but I quickly realized my role didn’t need to be “recommendation-filled expert” but “friend with suggestion.” The store’s sections are broken into romance subgenres—like western, queer and dark (that one features mafia members and serial killers as the lead love interests). We also adopted a “spice level” method to rank the novels’ raciness, from one chili pepper all the way up to five. One pepper is material suitable for young adults, driven by flirty plots with plenty of pining and hand-holding and zero explicit scenes. Five is full smut and next to no plot, like Lights Out by Navessa Allen, a stalker kink fantasy, and Kiss of the Basilisk by Lindsay Straube, an unhinged narrative centred on a love triangle between a woman, a human prince and a snake prince. Both have been big sellers for us.

Demand grew so quickly that sorting our stock soon involved a daily game of box Tetris, and I had to take temporary leave from midwife work to keep up. Last October, we moved to a permanent, much larger location on Queen Street West, which we covered in Barbie-pink paint. With a real home of our own, we’re now able to host proper in-person events. Our monthly book club started as a sweet little group of maybe a dozen people, and now it’s an unwieldy horde. Last month, our pick, Mate by Ali Hazelwood, received so much interest, we had to schedule three separate sessions. The mix of people is impossible to predict: locals, people who drive in from as far as Hamilton and Guelph, new Canadians and readers whose only commonality is their enthusiasm for enemies-to-lovers arcs.

A genre that once felt like a tucked-away source of shame is more liberated (and liberating) than ever. The success of Heated Rivalry has brought more people of all genders and sexual orientations—including straight men, with or without their partners—into the shop. Last November, right before the show was released, its stars, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, and Rachel Reid (the author of its source material) made an in-store appearance. We had to hire security, and at one point, the lineup to get in spanned at least two blocks. Some people told us they flew in from California just for the day. Another good thing about the huge popularity of hockey smut is how it’s spawning even more new delightfully specific romance subgenres. Like pickleball.

–As told to Lindsey King

Kearston Bergeron is the co-founder of Hopeless Romantic Books.