On Saturday in Brooklyn, a few hundred women gathered to celebrate their shared passion: romance novels. It was the inaugural Rom Con, hosted by 831 Stories, the small romance publisher that is building worlds around books, with merch, online epilogues and fan fiction, and now events. 831 Stories is founded by Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo, and has raised at least $4 million in funding from Female Founders Fund and Sara and Erin Foster, the sisters behind Netflix’s Nobody Wants This.
Many brands are realizing the power of events to reach their most engaged customers and even more on social media, whether that’s through a pop-up or an invite-only fan experience. In publishing, “cons” are already big, so audiences are primed to show up in person. I went to Brooklyn’s Industry City to see just what convinced readers to shell out $150 to spend their Saturday getting books signed by authors; listening to panels about everything from the politics of romance to the craft of writing sex scenes; and shopping for merch and, of course, more books.
I also wanted to see a phenomenon in action—the power of the romance consumer. Between fall 2024 and fall 2025, romance print sales increased by 24%. That reader helped overall publishing sales increase by 0.4% in 2025, moving into the black from a 2.5% decline the year before.
And this event didn’t even get into that other corner of the publishing world: romantasy, the romance-fantasy hybrid, where mega-authors Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros are driving the genre’s growth. Romantasy sales were up 7% in fall 2025 from a year earlier; though they’ve been down so far this year, Maas’s latest sequel in her A Court of Thorns and Roses series drops on Tuesday.
The new interest in the romance consumer is a question that was raised onstage, to mixed reactions. Authors pointed out that the romance consumer has long been a voracious reader. “Romance has been propping up the publishing industry forever,” said Alexandra Romanoff, who publishes books with 831 Stories. “There was a quieter movement, and then it became a public thing. … In this moment of deep fear [in publishing] around, ‘How do we get people interested in anything?,’ it was like, ‘Here’s something we can tap into.'”
Only after the success of Netflix’s Bridgerton have more pure romance novels—rather than romantic dramas or comedies, with additional plot beyond the central two characters and without a guaranteed happily-ever-after—started to get adapted into film and television. “There is such cynicism around, ‘We can’t have an entire show and devote it to a relationship,'” says author Regina Black. Plus, “there’s this idea that they’re cheap and easy to make.”
Tressie McMillan Cottom, the New York Times columnist, argues that romance is an answer to an unpredictable real world. “We are so deeply terrified about what is happening to women in the real world that we escape into this place to try to figure out, what do we do?” she says.
This weekend, a lot of women were, consciously or not, trying to answer that question—to the benefit of the publishers meeting their demand.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world.
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PARTING WORDS
"I know I’m the one who did it, but there are parts of me where I feel like I’m along with the audience, watching this thing happen. I think I’m still trying to grasp what I’ve done."
— Catherine Breed, who just became the first person to swim the entire coast of California