"The meet-cute took place in a bookstore. Around the middle of 2019, Elizabeth Held was hunting for great vacation reads at her local independent bookseller, East City Bookshop, a small store tucked below street level in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood. At checkout, Destinee Hodge, a longtime employee of the shop, told Held, a regular, that she was planning to start a book club where people could get together and swoon over romance novels. Held said she'd definitely be there."
"She was almost out the door when she spun around and told Hodge what she really wanted: to be a co-host of the new club. Hodge gave an enthusiastic yes, and they've been paired up ever since. Some people might balk at a near stranger's sudden offer to jump on their idea. But it seemed to Held that Hodge didn't mind; in fact, she was eager to collaborate with someone who valued the genre as much as she did."
Elizabeth Held and Destinee Hodge met at East City Bookshop and quickly partnered to co-host a romance book club called Really Reading Romance. The club thrived in-person and remotely during COVID. Held started a weekly romance-recommendation newsletter with over 9,000 subscribers and reads about a book a week. An NPR/Ipsos poll found 51 percent of Americans had read a book in the past month, while an industry survey found nearly half of contemporary romance fans read at least a book weekly. Visible displays on platforms like TikTok show many readers consume even more, making romance a durable profit engine for publishers.
Read at The Atlantic
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