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. Her quick agreement is typical of the tight-knit but open-armed community that surrounds romance writing. The pair’s book club, Really Reading Romance, has thrived since it started (even during COVID, when it went remote). The year after their fateful encounter, Held also began writing a weekly romance-recommendation newsletter that now has more than 9,000 subscribers. Held estimates that she reads something like a book a week.

Held may seem to be an outlier at a time when, according to an NPR/Ipsos poll from earlier this year, only 51 percent of Americans had read a book in the past month. But there are millions of people who are just like Held; an industry survey found that nearly half of contemporary fans of romance fiction also read at least a book a week.