In August last year, the UK’s first ever romance book shop - a store dedicated to love stories - opened close to the Meadows in Marchmont. The opening of Book Lovers Bookshop was surrounded by intrigue - in a digital era when book sales are going down and bookstores struggle to survive, can such a niche business succeed?
I caught up with Caden Armstrong, owner of Book Lovers, after its first year of operation, to see how the small business has fared. Even while the number of chain and independent book shops in the UK fell last year, the UK’s first romance book shop has been a tremendous success. The store has attracted audiences of nearly 300 for author events, draws 30-40 people every fortnight to its regular book club, and has grown from a staff of 1 to 3. During our visit on a grey Thursday afternoon, the compact shop was busy with browsers, and Armstrong tells me that in its first year the shop has welcomed customers from every continent of the globe.
What’s behind the romance fiction craze?
In the last few years, sales in romance literature have gone through the roof. The industry which had been worth £20 million for decades leapt to £53.2 million in 2022, and sat at £69 million last year. For many of us, conversations around romance books have been unavoidable - personally, my summer was full of comments on the fantasy romances Forth Wing and A Court of Thorns and Roses (often abbreviated to ACOTAR). What is most interesting is that many of these titles are decidedly spicy romance; smut, for lack of a better word.
However the romance genre is not all “smut”; and Armstrong’s shop contains books with a wide variety of love stories, from totally plain to scotch bonnet level spicy. However, Armstrong believes that rising sales in romance has been largely down to a cultural shift, where we no longer feel embarrassed to read romantic, and perhaps erotic, literature. “We have readers who are over 65, they come in and they’re like I have been reading this for decades, and I used to be told that I shouldn’t openly talk about this, but your space makes me so excited.” She says that while there are plenty of new romance readers wandering into Book Lovers, the majority of customers are people who are already into the genre, and who were dissatisfied with the tiny corners or singular tables of other book shops which stocked love stories.
“There has been a huge stigma against this genre for decades… you even see a stigma against Jane Austen, who definitely wrote romance, but people didn’t like it at the time,” says Armstrong, who has a degree in literature and history. “I think it’s mainly because it is a genre that has been built by women who are talking about and celebrating women’s pleasure, right?” Armstrong’s shop isn’t only for women though; they are keen to emphasise that they want their shop to be open and inclusive to women, men, non-binary and transgender people.
What’s behind the Book Lover’s success?
“It was a whirlwind,” says Armstrong about her choice to open the bookshop. “It was looking at something and saying a lot of people don’t believe it’s going to be successful but I do, and I understand the market and there’s a gap in the market.”
Armstrong may be young, but this mid-twenties romance enthusiast has entered the bookselling game with an impressive amount of knowledge and experience. For starters, Armstrong is a huge romance fan. She grew up listening to her mother’s (slightly redacted) romance audiobooks in the car, and was a regular customer at the Ripped Bodice, possibly the world’s first romance book shop, which opened in her home town of Los Angeles in 2016. She had a successful online book blogging account, started in her teens, with 45,000 followers across all platforms. After a masters in publishing at Napier University, Armstrong worked at fellow independent book shop The Edinburgh Bookshop, and wrote her own romance novel, Truthfully, Yours.
This knowledge of the genre and the industry means Armstrong can curate an excellent collection of books for the small store. Armstrong assures me that she could fill all three floors of the Princes Street Waterstones with romance books; but with a much smaller space, she tries to offer something new to those who have already been to the bigger bookshops. “We also want to bring in titles for the romance reader who feels like they’ve read everything. I want them to walk into our space and go I’ve never seen this book before.”
The second key to Armstrong’s success is running her shop as more than just a retail business. “Yes, we are a business, but we are a community space first,” she says. The Book Lovers team run regular events of all kinds; some are obviously book-themed like conversations with authors, but others are simply craft evenings. Their book club is in reality an informal meet up in a cafe with some loose discussion prompts around a book.
Finally, Armstrong has harnessed the newest phenomenon driving book sales; Book Tok, or book reviews posted onto TikTok, have had a huge influence over book sales in recent years. For Armstrong, this is a no-brainer; book blogging is a deeply personal review, which creates a personal connection with the blogger and with the book they’ve read, “that is the most effective way of selling content, so I’m not surprised that it has massively impacted publishing,” she says. With a marketing budget of exactly zero, the shop has relied hugely on social media to grow its customer base; and obviously it has worked.
The contemporary city of literature
Armstrong is undoubtedly a smart entrepreneur; but she has also been plugged into two supportive communities. The first is the romance community, which has grown online through phenomena like booktok (book bloggers on tiktok). Plugged into this community in the virtual space, Armstrong knew, when others doubted, that there was interest in a physical home for romance literature in Edinburgh.
The other is the independent bookselling community in Edinburgh, which Armstrong speaks incredibly highly of. Not only with mentorship from The Edinburgh Bookshop, but also invitations from Lighthouse Books to co-host a romance festival, Armstrong feels that these independent businesses support each other often. There are 12 or 13 independent bookshops in Edinburgh and over 30 book shops if chains are included: “which for a city our size is a lot of book shops,” Armstrong says.
Edinburgh is a UNESCO City of Literature; and we often associate this title with the past - with writers like Sir Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson. But the success of Book Lovers, and the dozen other independent book shops in our city, demonstrates that Edinburgh’s literary prowess sits firmly in the present, with the writing which is new, controversial, and exciting.
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