Under the Covers: Colorado Romantasy Readers Are Getting Hot

On a Monday night in Park Hill, readers gather in the taproom at Fiction Beer Company to talk about Kiss of the Basilisk: A Split Or Swallow Novel, a wildly popular yet controversial romantasy novel. The Smutty Book Club meets here on the first Monday of every month, attracting fans who settle in with pints and a shared enthusiasm for romance novels.

“On average, it’s about 25 people at each meeting,” says Anna Bromberg, one of the brewery’s co-owners and an organizer of the club. “We try to be very widely read. This last year, we’ve done contemporary romance, romantasy and monster smut.”

The crowd skews mostly women, ranging from people in their twenties to readers in their fifties and sixties, but the appeal cuts across ages and backgrounds. Some members have advanced degrees; others come simply because they enjoy reading and want to talk about it. What unites them is an understanding that the genre they’re discussing — once regarded as a guilty pleasure — is now recognized as one of the most powerful forces in publishing.

The numbers back that up. According to research firm Circana, romance is currently the fastest-growing category in the U.S. print book market. Year-to-date sales are up 24 percent, and the category has more than doubled in size over the past four years. From May 2024 to May 2025, romance titles sold more than 51 million print copies.

The genre that once lived quietly on the back shelves of bookstores is now driving the industry. That surge has helped transform romance from something quietly consumed into a cultural phenomenon, spawning bestselling book series, television adaptations like Heated Rivalry, and thriving online communities on TikTok’s “BookTok.”

In Colorado, that boom is increasingly visible offline as well. Dedicated romance bookstores have opened across the Front Range, readers are organizing meetups, and the genre has evolved into a social hub in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

“Romance is having a moment for a few reasons,” says Ali Hoskins, co-owner of Fiction Beer Company and another organizer of its Smutty Book Club. “One: everything else sucks, but romance novels are cute, sweet and dirty, and they’re not awful like the news. Two: people are now allowing themselves to pleasure read. People admit to reading dirty books; it’s not a bad or embarrassing thing.”

Colorado has also produced one of the genre’s biggest stars. Colorado Springs author Rebecca Yarros became a publishing breakout sensation with Fourth Wing, the dragon-riding romantasy novel that topped the New York Times bestseller list in 2023 and helped push the genre even further into the mainstream. Its sequel, Onyx Storm, became the fastest-selling adult title in the twenty-year history of Circana’s BookScan tracking.

When Yarros announced Fourth Wing nights with the Colorado Avalanche and then the Denver Nuggets last year, tickets sold out immediately.

At the center of Denver’s scene is the Spicy Librarian, a romance-focused bookstore that opened in January 2025 in a brick-walled building at 3040 Blake Street. Owner Sydney Ivey says the store grew out of her own long-standing love of the genre.

“I’ve always read romance,” she says. “But several years ago, I got really into romantasy through reading Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series. I had never been a fantasy reader before, and then I read her books and fell in love.”

As she returned to reading more regularly, Ivey says she noticed something else: a gap in Denver’s bookstore landscape.

“We have some small indie bookstores, but several of them are very child-focused,” Ivey says. “I saw this gap in what people were reading. Romance is the highest-selling genre and has been for a long time, but it’s been ignored. I just saw this need for a very female-focused space that celebrates what women read and love.”

The store now carries nearly 10,000 titles spanning the full range of the genre, from sweet contemporary love stories to darker fantasy epics. The clientele reflects the audience that romance has always attracted.

“It’s definitely a majority of women who come by the store,” Ivey says. “Romance is written almost exclusively by women, so it leans toward women. But we also see a mix of people coming in, especially because we have a large queer section. We are also seeing more men starting to read it, since it’s becoming so talked-about and well-known in general society.”

Denver isn’t alone in embracing the romance genre. In February, Superior resident Hannah Morgan opened Sugar and Spice Books in Boulder; the romance bookstore caters to the same growing audience. And Fort Collins now has its own romance-only shop, Cherry On Top Bookshop.

The influx of new shops has raised another question: how many romance bookstores can the Front Range support? Ivey says she expected other stores to follow once the Spicy Librarian proved the concept could work, but she admits she sometimes wonders how crowded the market might become.

“I do worry about oversaturation,” Ivey says. “Not everyone can succeed, like not every froyo place can succeed, but I love it while it lasts, and I don’t think it’s a trend. I get that question a lot. It’s always been there; it just hasn’t been talked about, so I think it will always be popular.”

Still, booksellers opening new romance shops say the demand from readers across the Front Range remains strong.

“The Spicy Librarian has Denver covered, but it’s quite a drive to get down there for Boulder county residents,” Morgan says. “Not that I’m trying to take business away from her, but people were dying for something closer up north. The reality is, there is enough demand to support multiple romance bookstores in Colorado.”

Romance, she notes, offers something many readers are craving right now.

“It’s kind of an escape for people,” Morgan explains. “Romantasy and romance in general really picked up during COVID, when everybody was wanting a little bit of an escape from reality, and what’s better than magic and smutty fairies?”

Her store carries about 1,000 titles, most of them chosen from books she personally loved or that customers recommended. Since Sugar and Spice opened, the biggest challenge hasn’t been finding readers — it’s simply making sure they know the store exists.

“The market’s there. The readers are there,” Morgan says. “People are dying for romance bookstores, a place where they could come and just hang out and talk to other people about what they’re passionate about.”

Even though romance has grown into a publishing powerhouse, it is still one of the most dismissed genres in literature. Ivey has a blunt explanation for why.

“The short answer is the patriarchy,” she says. “But more generally, people love to bring women down. If it’s something women love and are passionate about, it gets minimized. People say, ‘Oh, it’s just silly. It’s just smut.’”

In reality, she contends, the books frequently deal with complex issues such as abusive relationships and questions about autonomy.

“These are amazing stories that are well written and about really important issues,” she says. “Look at Sarah J. Maas. She’s talked about how many people have told her that after reading her books, they left their abusive spouses. Knowledge is power.”

That freedom to explore complicated or uncomfortable ideas is one reason romance has expanded far beyond the clichés that once defined it. While the stories promise a happy ending, the road to that ending can include grief, trauma, political conflict or questions about identity and power.

“A really well-written romance makes you think, ‘Is this a new kink? Am I into this?’” Bromberg says. “I definitely think the extremism is a reason why people come to romance. It’s similar to why people read horror. It’s a way for us to explore something that isn’t necessarily viewed well.”

And for some, it is a kink. In particularly spicy books, humans get it on with dragons and other beasts. And for some readers, that curiosity goes beyond the page, as fantasy-inspired toys like tentacle dildos have quietly become a staple of Denver’s sex shops. While dragon sex might seem far-fetched, even the most fantastical books often mirror real-world struggles.

“Yes, there could be the pink dragons and the winged shadow daddies,” Bromberg says. “But a lot of romance books are still talking about very difficult things that people are dealing with.”

And at the center of many of those stories is a theme that resonates strongly with modern audiences: women claiming agency over their lives, their relationships and their bodies.

“I think a lot of it is the women’s empowerment kind of thing,” Morgan says. “The books we read, especially romantasy, are all very powerful women who are finding their voices and their power and changing the world. That draws women in. They’re just like, ‘Yeah, this woman’s a badass. I could do that.’ It’s empowering to read about other women doing that kind of thing. It’s women writing women for other women.”

Ivey sees that dynamic as part of the genre’s deeper appeal.

“Romantasy often features high-powered women changing systems that weren’t created for them,” she says. “They’re fighting for the underdog. They’re fighting for other women’s rights. They’re fighting for people to be fed. It’s all these things that relate to our own world, but because it’s happening in a fantasy land with magical powers, you can forget about our world for a little while.”

Romance promises a sense of emotional closure that many other stories — and much of real life — no longer guarantee. In a cultural moment defined by uncertainty, readers know exactly what they’re getting when they open one of these books.

“The world is shit right now, and one of the hallmarks of romance is there’s always a happy ending,” Bromberg concludes. “When you pick up a book and it’s romance, you know it’s going to end well, even if a shit ton of crap happens in the middle. It’s so comforting, especially when everything else is very not.”