Novel Grounds, a romance bookstore in Chesapeake, has an unexpected set-up. The owner, Megan Gallt, doesn’t shelve books like Barnes and Noble would.
Mafia, motorcycle club and dark romance reads are on one side of the store. Sports, small town and billionaire selections on the other. Readers who like romantasy, a portmanteau of romance and fantasy, can find their werewolves, vampires, monsters and fae along a different wall.
The store is organized around romance tropes, shorthand for subcategories or specific story elements that draw people in. The reason behind this shelving system is simple: People tend to already know what they’re looking for in their next read, Gallt said.
“I'm not going to throw a small-town cowboy at you if you're over here looking for whips and chains,” she said.
To help readers find their next literary crush, Gallt put together a catalog of romance books sorted the same way as her shelves. The Novel Trope Guide features more than 800 titles organized under tropes like “But do they have wings?” and “bodice rippers.”
It’s like an adult Scholastic Book Fair Flyer — emphasis on adult.
The free guide highlights books written by authors of color, stories that are LGBTQ+-oriented and titles available as audiobooks. Instead of ads, she recruited local small business owners to come up with games, like word scrambles, crossword puzzles and coloring activities.
She ordered 11,000 copies from the printer, which came in shortly before Black Friday.
“I was like, surely that will be plenty,” Gallt said. “We'll have enough for events next year. It'll last us six months.”
She was wrong. Requests for the guide kept rolling in. Novel Grounds ended up shipping boxes to more than 40 romance bookstores in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Locally, copies flew off the shelves.
“It just exploded,” Gallt said.
Demand for the locally made guide reflects a global trend. Romance fiction is hot. It brings in more than $1 billion every year, making it the publishing industry’s highest-grossing genre.
And it’s growing.
General fiction sales have increased by 16% since 2020, while sales of romance fiction have more than doubled, according to Bloomberg.
Local communities are getting a piece of the action.
Jane Nunnikhoven runs the website Romancing the Data, where she tracks trends in the global romance fiction industry.
The number of brick-and-mortar romance bookstores in the United States more than tripled in 2023 and again in 2024, she said. Things slowed down in 2025, but barely. The number of romance bookstores still more than doubled last year, bringing the total number in the U.S. to 150, as of Dec. 31, 2025.
“Seeing it continue at a pretty high rate has been pretty surprising to me,” Nunnikhoven said.
The rapid pace of growth makes her wonder if it's sustainable, but she’s optimistic.
“Because they're really building those community networks and roots, it makes me hopeful that the stores can have longevity,” Nunnikhoven said.
When Gallt opened Novel Grounds in Chesapeake in 2023, it was the first physical indie romance bookstore in Virginia. Now, there are three, two of which are based in Hampton Roads. Flourish is a mobile romance book truck based in Virginia Beach that opened in 2025.
“Hampton Roads loves romance,” Gallt said, noting the region’s outsized military population might contribute to romance’s appeal.
“We have a lot of people, like myself, who spend a lot of time without our spouses,” she said.
'Real books'
The popularity of romance fiction isn’t new.
Hampton Roads romance author Jana Sun said romance has been the backbone of the publishing industry for decades, but people weren’t vocal about reading it.
“It used to be, ‘Oh, you’re reading a romance. You’re not reading a ‘real book,’’” she said.
Romance fiction, most associated with and read by women, is still often dismissed by critics, according to The Guardian. The genre experienced notable spikes in visibility when the Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray series came out, Gallt said, and then again during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were stuck in our houses, we were stressed, we were tired, and I think we just wanted to feel something that wasn't fear,” Gallt said.
Local romance reader Dawna Stowers said she resisted the genre for a long time because of the stigma.
“I was like, nobody can know I’m into reading those kinds of books,” she said.
But social media, like BookTok channels on TikTok, has reduced the shame around reading romance, she said. Now, she reads what she wants, proudly.
“It's a nice little escape from everything else in real life,” Stowers said.
As attitudes towards the genre shift and sales skyrocket, local communities are responding. Sun published her first book, “Visions of Snapdragon,” in 2023. She said Hampton Roads is “welcoming and supportive” of indie authors, something she wasn’t expecting when she first started writing.
The experience was much different a decade ago, said Corinne Michaels, a bestselling romance author who got her start in Virginia Beach. She published the first books in her Salvation series in 2014. Back then, she said there wasn’t much of a support system in Hampton Roads for romance writers – or romance readers, for that matter.
Michaels said local romance bookstores, like Novel Grounds, have made a big difference, adding they’ve become hubs for romance writers and readers
“It's really cool to see the evolution of it,” she said. “But back then it was very lonely. It was very isolating.”
Michaels is thrilled to see more book signing and author events at local bookshops scheduled for 2026.
Gallt has a few already lined up at Novel Grounds.
Both the author and the bookshop owner said they hope the events and the trope guide invite more readers into the local romance community.