Who’s Reading Romance Novels?

~ Laura

I was just poking around at book sales statistics and came across some interesting numbers from the Romance Writers of America website. 

  • Romance fiction sales remained relatively steady in 2010, though dipping slightly to $1.358 billion from $1.36 billion in 2009. And romance fiction continued its dominance of the consumer market at 13.4 percent (in terms of revenue of market categories), beating out mystery, science fiction/fantasy, and religion/inspirational titles.
  • Across the board, women were important to the publishing industry in 2010. Experian Simmons data shows women are “far more likely to be buyers to begin with (62 percent of all women nationwide compared to 44 percent of men) and are more than twice as likely to buy 10 or more units in a given year: 9.7 percent of women compared to 4.4 percent of men.”5

    Women buyers were the “most dominant in mass market paperback,” accounting for 67 percent of unit purchases. Eighty percent of romance unit purchases were in paperback format in 2010, down from 84 percent in 2009. Not to be ignored, however, is the e-book format, which accounted for 7 percent of unit sales and 5 percent of spending in the romance category.6 In 2010, “women had caught up and surpassed men as [e-book] readers…the influx of women meant the group was made up of readers who were more frequent and more committed to book buying.

  • over 100 million adults did not buy a single solitary book in 2010

Published by Laura

7 thoughts on “Who’s Reading Romance Novels?”

  1. “Units” – ugh. Yet, for all the ways in which women matter to the publishing industry, note how little prestige there is attached to books that are marketed to women. There’s lots of interesting scholarship on gender and genre in reading although most of it’s been historically focused.

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  2. “over 100 million adults did not buy a single solitary book in 2010”
    Is that no books or no new books?

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  3. AmyP – I wonder how they calculation that statistic? Extrapolation? Can that really be true? Does it take into account library borrowings or lendings? And how has that stat increased/decreased over time? Are book buyers themselves buying more or less?
    You can see I have overdosed on the coffee this morning – questions, questions??!!

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  4. Well, in 2003, 93 million US adults possessed “below basic” (30 m) and “basic” (63) prose literacy skills. Basic = “can perform simple and everyday literacy activities.” http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp
    If you don’t read well enough to “perform moderately challenging literacy activities,” which is the definition of intermediate, why would you buy a book?

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  5. I’m sure everyone who didn’t buy a book in 2010 was just working down a big “to read” pile.

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