Stop dissing romance novels already - The Washington Post

The economic power of reading women was on full display Friday night at Politics and Prose, one of the nation's premier independent bookstores, in Washington. For the first time, the store held a romance event, dubbed "Passion and Prose." The panel of four authors was moderated by Diane Gaston, a writer of Regency romances and a member of the Washington Romance Writers Association. The event was a welcome if late acknowledgment that romance accounts for a full third of all the fiction sold in the United States. If that doesn't get your heart racing, you may be dead.