“I would give up my manicure and pedicure,” says a fan who drops a century note on romance books every month. “I have my priority list, and books are pretty high on my priority list.”

That statement, quoted by Motoko Rich in the New York Times, explains in a nutshell why romance fiction sales are up when everything else is down. Rich reports that “While sales of adult fiction overall were basically flat last year, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, the romance category was up 7 percent after holding fairly steady for the previous four years.” Harlequin’s 2008 fourth quarter sales were a booming 32% higher than the same period of 2007! The lusty sales dominate e-books as well as print. Fictionwise’s Steve Pendergrast says fifty percent of its downloads are romances.

Rich gives the impression that the phenomenon is of recent vintage and the result of the current recession. There’s some truth in saying that hard times drive people to cheap pleasures and escapist pursuits like romance fiction. But the fact is that romance has been carrying the trade hardcover and mass market paperback industry for years – carrying it for as much as 25% of the revenues generated.

Though the genre is an easy target for ridicule, we do well to remember that the profits they generate finance acquisition of serious fiction and nonfiction and investment in new authors. As I wrote in these pages a while ago,

It is vital for the writing establishment to realize that literature is far more than a ladder with junk at the bottom and art at the top. Rather, it is an ecosystem in which the esoteric and the popular commingle, fertilize one another, and interdepend. Principally, if it were not for the immense revenues generated by science fiction, romance, male action-adventure, and other types of popular fiction at which so many literary authors and critics look down their noses, there would be no money for publishers to risk on first novels, experimental fiction, and other types of serious but commercially marginal literary enterprises.

Richard Curtis