Totally not surprised to see this little factoid: Romance novels are extremely popular in the eBook market. The Economist speculates that the reason for the popularity of romance novels in the eBook format is that no one wants anyone else to actually see that they are reading a romance novel in public. 

I totally agree. No self-respecting woman wants the world (or the man sitting across from her on the subway) to know that she is secretly fantasizing about being kidnapped by a lonely cowboy on the prairie. 

Harlequin was quick to pick to up on the romance novel eBook trend and surging popularity. Apparently, Harlequin, the great Grandmama of all romance publishers, has just digitized 13,000 of its romance novels and now has its own eBook Harlequin romance novel website for eBook readers with the taste for slightly trashy romances. Prices on the Harlequin eBook website range from $4-5.

Amazon offers many first time authors the right to publish their books in an eBook format and then distributes many of the Kindle books at a very low price or for free. Most of the books I’ve seen that are available for free on the Kindle are romance novels--I’ve only tried two so far and neither one was anywhere near as satisfying as my memories of reading romance novels in high school. That said, since many new authors write romances, this is one way for new writers to gain attention for their “work.”

Romance novelist Nora Roberts is one of a small group of writers who has sold more than one million digital copies of her novels; the other writers (with the exception of Kathryn Stockett who wrote The Help) were thriller writers. In this way, the sales of digital novels seem to mirror the sales of hard copy books--both thrillers and romances are featured prominently and often in the New York Times best-seller lists and on the Amazon best-seller lists. For whatever reason, people can’t seem to get enough of potboiler fiction written from formulas. 

Amazon’s prices for their eBooks have raised quite a bit in recent years after pressure from Apple and the publishing industry, so it will be interesting to see if romance fans turn directly to Amazon for their romance fiction needs or start shopping on the Harlequin website.