Everyone's Reading Romance, but Who Are They Leaving Behind?

Nora Roberts: The Queen that Never Gets her Due

It is not exactly controversial to say the romance market exploded after COVID.

Whatever the forces—the tedium of Covid lockdowns, to be endured with startlingly little fresh TV; the need for a dopamine hit amidst a punishing news cycle; or just the BookTok and Bookstagram of it all—the causes interest me less than the place at which we’ve arrived: romance has never been bigger.

From 2021 to 2023, U.S. print sales of romance novels more than doubled, from 18 to 39 million copies. The boom has been so seismic it’s reshaped the retail landscape, giving rise to a wholly new kind of space: the romance-only bookstore. According to the always-excellent

Lady Jane

of

Romancing the Data

, the number of these stores has jumped from just four to ninety-one across the U.S. since 2022.

In short, more women are reading romance than ever. But many have vaulted straight into the present moment, bypassing the very giants who built the genre they now celebrate.

Exhibit A: Nora Roberts. Her sales have dipped since Covid—even as the genre around her reached new heights.

While writing my Emily Henry piece, I cut a line comparing Henry’s latest to Roberts’ Genuine Lies. Not because the line wasn’t apt, but because I wasn’t sure the reference would land:

Readers may clock this as criticism, but Great Big Beautiful Life reads, in some ways like Nora Roberts’ Genuine Lies—a novel written by a Goliath at the height of her powers, brushing up against the limits of the genre she dominates.

And it’s true. In many ways, Henry’s winding career has brought her right back to the genre’s roots: La Nora herself. Her latest, Great Big Beautiful Life, reminded me deeply of Genuine Lies—a glitzy, gossipy novel about a biographer and a legendary actress with a secret-laden past.

Remarkably, of the 60,000 Goodreads reviews of Henry’s novel, nary a single one references Roberts. (To be fair, there’s one comment buried on r/RomanceBooks that makes the connection.) Instead, the comparisons lean heavily toward Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Which, okay, fair. But to me, the ghost in the room was Roberts.

This isn’t about originality. Romance has always been an iterative genre: boy meets girl, they fall in love. What interests me is what happens when a generation of readers skips over the woman who built the house they’re now partying in.

Because here’s the thing: Henry readers aren’t reading Roberts. And I’m here to suggest that, well, maybe they should.

Roberts’ influence isn’t just present in the genre. In many ways, it is the genre. Her books taught a generation of writers how to balance commercial pacing with emotional depth, how to make love feel both earned and inevitable. These days, people talk about how writers like Henry and Carley Fortune are elevating romance. But it was never flat to begin with. Roberts (and others) built it in 3D.

And yet, it’s hard to find a bookstagram image of her work. So much so that this week’s cover photo comes from my own Kindle, which holds 182 of Roberts’ titles. Including one I bought just last week, having somehow missed her May release despite being freshly steeped in Romancelandia discourse. Point, perhaps, proven. 

My entry into romance came the way it did for so many '80s babies: stealing my mom’s Roberts’ novels from under the bed. They weren’t forbidden, exactly—but they were private. Glossy paperbacks with cracked spines and titles like Public Secrets and Carnal Innocence, tucked beneath Good Housekeeping magazines and the odd Victoria’s Secret catalog. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be reading them. Which only made me read faster.

I devoured them: trilogies about brothers, thrillers set on vineyards, standalones with chefs, contractors, house restorers. The men were steady and capable. The women, competent and independent. They were—unapologetically—love stories about ordinary adults. For my preteen self, it felt like peeking through a curtain into a world I wasn’t quite ready to enter but couldn’t stop wanting.

Which is perhaps the most radical thing about Roberts: she doesn’t write high-concept romance. She writes compulsively readable, everyday love stories.

These days, we’re in a golden age of trope-forward storytelling. You can practically hear the pitch decks: fake dating, enemies-to-lovers, second chance at the beach. And I like those books. I even loved the one I reviewed last week. But Roberts never needed a hook. She had stakes.

Her couples fall in love the way people actually do: in proximity. At work. As neighbors. While renovating a house or launching a business. While trying—quietly, imperfectly–to build a life that can hold more than just one person’s weight. 

And those day-to-day lives are also notable because Roberts’ heroes and heroines spend many of the pages doing something quietly revolutionary in a romance novel: working.

I can’t think of another contemporary author who writes so deeply about the meaningful work her characters do—or depicts such a wide swath of it with equal credibility. From chefs and innkeepers to wedding planners, social workers, cybersecurity specialists, landscapers, dog trainers, arson investigators—even thieves and serial killers—Roberts makes work feel both textured and narratively vital. Never mere backdrop, it’s a character in the relationship. In her books, work isn’t what you escape for love. It’s where love is tested, revealed, and sometimes built.

That’s not the only way Roberts diverges from the modern canon. Rereading Vision in White, the first in her Brides Quartet, I was struck by how little time we spend inside Mackenzie and Carter’s heads. In most modern romance, interiority reigns supreme: characters are known moreso by their thoughts than anything else. Roberts, instead, builds her characters through the refracted gaze of the people in their lives. 

Take Carter, the male lead. We see him not just as a boyfriend, but as son, brother, teacher, colleague, friend, ex, and as a regular at his local coffee shop. His world is so richly populated, he becomes legible through others alone.

And maybe there’s an allegory here about modern times—how much has changed since Roberts’ heyday. We have far less community than we used to.

Kathleen Donahoe

wrote this week that:

Annoyance is the price of community.

Roberts’ novels seem to agree. The depth and breadth of her secondary characters isn’t just craft—it’s a kind of reward for populating her books so fully.

Too often, contemporary romance reduces its lone side character to a prop: the quirky best friend, the sibling whose only job is to say, “You love him.” In one recent bestseller, the protagonist places no fewer than ten calls to the same offscreen confidante—each conversation a loop, beginning and ending with the heroine’s emotional arc. We never glimpse the friend’s world. No past. No present. No pulse. Just a narrative mirror, angled to flatter the lead. It’s not just lazy writing; it’s a quietly devastating portrait of what we’ve come to expect from friendship.

Not so in Roberts’ universe. Friendship matters deeply to her characters, their intimates often granted arcs of their own—sometimes even entire scenes independent of the central romance. In Vision in White, two friends have a page-long fight that contributes nothing to the love story, but everything to the fabric of the book. It’s groundwork for the next installment, yes, but more than that, it’s the kind of narrative generosity that enriches the reader's experience.

At a certain point, Roberts' prolific worldbuilding extends beyond even secondary characters. The unseen customers of the wedding business in Vision in White never appear on the page, but we hear about their tastes, their foibles, their chaos. They shape the setting, even in their absence.

Shift the point of view away from the heroine, and Roberts’ novels might well be shelved in a different section of the bookstore altogether. In Vision in White, much of the tension arises not from the central love story—it originates from Mackensie’s reckoning with her manipulative mother, and the fraught journey toward trusting in stability—of friendship, partnership, and care. You finish the book not only believing in the romance but yearning for more of the world it inhabits.

Admiration aside, it’s worth being clear about what Roberts doesn’t give us. She isn’t a prose stylist—never reaching for glory just to prove she can. Her line-level writing is, for the most part, an efficient engine, driving you straight into the heart of the story. No one is tattooing Roberts’ lines across their ribcage. But if lyricism is what’s missing, it’s worth noting what isn’t: I’ve never encountered a plot hole, a continuity error, or a character acting against their central logic. Roberts is a master of craft and narrative control. And it shows.

But form isn’t the only place where Roberts shows restraint: she’s never been one to write to the moment. While she addresses class issues adroitly—her heroines inhabit nearly every imaginable pocket of the income spectrum—she rarely engages with race or identity in the ways we expect from today’s authors. Roberts once managed to write an entire novel about a mass shooting without so much as a passing nod to gun control. Some might call that a feature; others, a bug. Whereas much of today’s romance dialogues with the ever-present discourse of the moment, Roberts’ novels exist in deliberate isolation. Which is, in part, what makes them so utterly transportive.

And yet, despite all this, Roberts’ sales continue to decline—even as the romance market hits historic highs.

I spoke with Laura Kroeger, a filmmaker and part-time bookseller at Alexandria, Virginia’s Friends to Lovers Bookstore, about how Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ backlist stubbornly refuses to move. Her quote felt relevant to Roberts as well:

It drives me crazy, because the more I read of the older stuff (and not even that old—early 2000s, maybe?), the more I find what I've been looking for in modern romance. Adventure, tons of plot, people behaving badly. But it's a hard sell to get folks over the hump of what doesn't look 'new.'

At this point, Roberts has been snubbed by the industry so often it’s practically tradition. She’s appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list more than 200 times—under both her name and her pseudonym, J.D. Robb, adopted purely because she was too prolific to publish under a single identity.

And yet, her only presence in the paper of record comes in interviews that marvel at her success, as though it’s something that requires explanation.

Imagine a man with this output. He would be canonized. Profiled. Given a podcast season and a New Yorker spread.

Roberts received none of that. So no, being left out of the current market boom probably doesn’t faze her. But it does faze me. Because I’ve read every single book she’s ever written.

Her stories have shaped me. Over decades of reading, they’ve whispered truths about love as high drama—not a rescue, but the place you return to. Again and again. Through the glare of day, the shifting weather, the chaos of the world.

And I am not alone in this inheritance.

My mother, an immigrant, stepped into the United States with rhythms strange and unfamiliar, worlds away from the steady pulse of her Indian homeland. By the time Roberts penned The Witness, my mother had long mastered her own recipe for berry pie. Yet still, each time I read that pie scene—four times now—I see her there.

In that novel, Abigail Lowery has lived most of her life apart. Off the grid, outside the fold. When she moves into a small town, a neighbor arrives bearing pie. Abigail is “baffled”. Then she understands: this is what normal people do.

That moment reminds me of my mother as a young newcomer in a foreign land. How, in reading this book, she would have seen that interaction and noted it as part of her assimilation. In America, you bring pie to new neighbors.

Roberts taught my mother—and, through her, taught me—what it means to weave oneself into the fabric of an American community.

This may not be the lesson most see in Nora Roberts’ work. But her books hold multitudes—rich tapestries of human experience, enough for each of us to carry away a thread of our own. So here’s to hoping more find their way to her stories—and discover their own piece of romance’s history, whatever shape that takes.

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Below are some of my favorite Nora’s. I’d love to hear yours in the comments.

If you haven’t read Roberts before - throw some preferences into the comments below and I’ll chime in with reccs or let others readers do so as well. There’s much to mine in her backlist.

And speaking of backlist—one of the joys of reading Nora is that her catalog is available for a song via the used book market (and available without competition via Libby). They aren’t a sponsor (yet!) but I’ve pointed all the booklinks in this post to Thriftbooks, my personal favorite retailer for used books. I find their rewards program to be quickly accretive and their book condition reports to be accurate.

My Favorite Noras:

• The Brides Quartet: Four childhood best friends set up house and run a wedding planning empire in wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut. A photographer, a florist, a baker and the wedding planner herself all find love in intersecting stories that center entrepreneurship and the joy of female friendship. A great “found family” story.

• The Chesapeake Bay Saga: Actually the epitome of a “found family” story, the series centers around the four Quinn brothers: Cameron, Ethan, Phillip and Seth who were all adopted as troubled youths by Ray and Stella Quinn, a couple living on the Maryland shore. Philip’s story is probably my favorite, but read them all (in order) ideally. There’s a wonderful suspense element threaded through as well. I personally prefer this quartet to the MacKade Brothers series, but plenty will disagree and, honestly, both are fantastic.

• The Dream Trilogy: Follows three women who grew up together at Templeton House, a grand estate in Monterey, California, as they embark upon a new business venture, setting up a store on Cannery Row. I think Laura’s story is my favorite (I’m a sucker for a wounded single mom tale) but I’ve read them each at least twice.

• The MacGregor Series: I’m honestly not sure how many books there are in total as there are prequels and spinoff novellas galore. The series follows the large, boisterous Scottish-American MacGregor family, primarily focusing on patriarch Daniel MacGregor and his wife Anna. The series spans multiple generations, with Daniel's meddling matchmaking efforts driving much of the romantic plot as he orchestrates meetings between his family members and their future spouses. I love each and every one of these stories and the dynastic family manages to touch, art, politics, casino running, comic strip writing, criminal law and a plethora of other careers across the spectrum.

• The Villa: The second generation of a great wine dynasty is comprised of two characters who couldn’t be more different if they tried. Sophia and Tyler must work together to uncover who is behind the deadly sabotage of their families’ storied brand and stop the damage before it destroys their legacies. Excellent romantic suspense (more on this sub-genre from Nora another time).

• Some others:

  • High Noon (romantic suspense)

  • The Liar (romantic suspense)

  • Under Currents (romantic suspense) - maybe one of my top picks

  • Hideway (romantic suspense + family dynasty)

  • The O’Hurleys (family quartet)