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‘We left Warrington at 5.15am this morning to get here,” Emma tells me, standing in a queue that stretches down Walton Street. It is just after 9am on a Saturday in Oxford, the students are still in bed and the tourists have yet to descend on the city, but this corner of Jericho is already buzzing.
Oxford is rarely short of literary pilgrims. Every year, visitors flock to the colleges and libraries that shaped writers including JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Iris Murdoch. But this crowd is here for something a little different. Instead of queueing for the Bodleian, they’re swapping recommendations for dragon riders and faerie kingdoms. Women clutch tote bags emblazoned with quotes like “hot girls read smut”, and compare their favourite “morally grey” heroes.
The bright pink doors they’re waiting outside belong to Bad Girl Books, the UK’s first romantasy bookshop. The subgenre, blending fantasy and romance, has gone from niche online obsession to one of publishing’s biggest commercial success stories. Sarah J Maas, author of the famous A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) series, has sold more than 75 million books worldwide, while Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm recorded the biggest opening week for a hardback fiction title in the UK since Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman a decade ago.
“My husband thinks it’s just pornography,” Emma says. “But it’s about much more than that.”
Readers are immersing themselves in sprawling fantasy worlds of “enemies-to-lovers” storylines, where “fated mates” discover they were destined for each other all along, and brooding “shadow daddies” – dark, morally ambiguous male protagonists with supernatural powers – inspire devoted online fandoms. A novel’s “spice level” (how much sex it contains) is also a major point of discussion.
“Last year I read about 100 romantasy books, and I’ve already read 60 this year,” says 22-year-old Izzy, who has been waiting in the queue with her friend since 7.30am. “I used to hate reading when I was in school, but then I discovered romantasy, and realised that there is a whole world of books out there that I really enjoy. It’s an escape from reality.”
Traditionally, male readers have dominated fantasy fiction fandoms, but the rise of romantasy has been driven largely by a young female audience – the protagonists are often women and they centre on women’s romantic relationships. Almost everyone in the 100-strong queue outside Bad Girl Books is a woman: I spot a grand total of two men, waiting patiently with their girlfriends.
“It’s mostly women who read romantasy, but I think there’s something for everyone,” says 31-year-old Jono, who has come to the opening with his girlfriend, Ro. “I’ve started reading a couple, and I’m enjoying them!”
The shop’s founder is 30-year-old Starlin Marot. “I didn’t really used to be a reader,” she tells me. “A friend recommended a romantasy book she’d found on TikTok, and it completely changed everything. It became my whole personality.”
As her obsession grew, she found there was nowhere offline to indulge it. “I’d go into bookshops and they’d only have the mainstream titles I was already reading,” she says. “I also felt there wasn’t anywhere I could go to meet other people who loved these books. I found that community online – on BookTok, Instagram and Reddit – but I wanted somewhere people could come together in person to talk about books.”
Last year, she posted a TikTok floating the idea of a dedicated romantasy pop-up. About 40,000 people watched the video, and more than 1,000 signed up within two days. She took the enthusiasm on board, and went on to host a series of pop-ups around the country, maxing out her credit card to buy stock. “It was incredibly hard work. I was working 12-hour days. But people flew from Ireland, Norway and Italy to come to the pop-ups, bringing empty suitcases to fill with books.”
The pop-ups snowballed, and within six months she had raised £30,000 to open a permanent shop. Inside, shelves are divided into categories including “Monster Smut”, “Unhinged” and “LGBTQ+”. T-shirts and caps proclaim “I Heart Fictional Men” and “Dibs on the Villain”; tote bags read: “I Like My Books Like I Like My Margaritas – Spicy”, and “My Favourite Colour Is Morally Grey.” Women fill pink shopping baskets with lavishly illustrated editions of ACOTAR novels. Alongside bestselling titles sit independently published novels and elaborate special editions sourced directly from authors around the world.
“I wanted people to be able to discover books they’d never heard of before, not just the ones with the biggest marketing campaigns,” Marot says.
But for all its commercial success, romantasy still carries a stigma.
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Petra, 26, who is first in the queue, says people often wrongly dismiss the genre as “just fairy smut”. “People think it’s vapid, but it’s not,” she says. “There are good stories, there are life lessons in there. It’s relatable.”
Peach, another customer in the queue, thinks that there is an element of sexism involved. “Because it’s predominantly women who enjoy it, it’s not taken very seriously, or seen as a real genre,” she says. “But it’s popular for a reason.”
Marot believes the fixation on the genre’s explicit scenes obscures what draws readers to it in the first place. “People reduce it to the spice, but most books have a few explicit chapters in a 500-page novel,” she says. “It’s a safe space to explore relationships and female pleasure from a woman’s perspective – I think that’s really empowering.”
Rebeka Finch, a literary agent at Darley Anderson, argues that the genre has long been diminished because it sits at the intersection of two forms of fiction that have historically struggled for critical respect: romance and commercial fantasy. “Readers who might previously have hidden their enthusiasm now have a forum to gush about characters, swap recommendations and celebrate these books without the reductive messaging attached to reading romance and commercial fiction,” she says.
TikTok has been key to the genre’s success. Videos tagged #BookTok have amassed hundreds of billions of views, turning little-known authors into international bestsellers almost overnight. The influence of the platform has become so significant that in April this year, the UK’s first official #BookTok bestseller list was launched, which combines UK sales with social media engagement data. Unsurprisingly, romantasy has dominated the charts so far.
“The ‘findability’ of these books has never been easier,” says Calah Singleton, commissioning editor at HarperVoyager and HarperMagpie. “Social media has allowed the traditional word-of-mouth recommendation to travel further and to more people than ever.”
But while BookTok may have fuelled romantasy’s rise, readers insist its appeal runs much deeper than a viral trend. “There’s yearning, there’s longing, there’s love, there’s pure whimsy and magic,” says Cat, another woman in the queue. “And yeah, there’s a bit of smut involved, too!”
