The Bookseller - Spotlight - Love is in the air as sales surge

Like something from a second-chance romance, the category, which has fairly consistently hovered around the £20m mark for the best part of two decades, leaped to £53.2m in 2022 and grew a further 17% last year, largely on the back of BookTok.

And that BookTok bump seems more sustainable than the Fifty Shades surge. Yes there were a handful of other authors in the erotica boom, but E L James' three novels accounted for 67% of total volume sales for the category in 2012 (nearly 10.6 million of the 15.4 million units). To put this in perspective, James' trilogy in 2012 alone outsold the entire Romance & Sagas volume output (10.3 million copies) of 2023.