2022 was a slightly negative year for publishing in Italy, but there is one part of the market that is clearly bucking the trend: romance novels. The figures shown in a recent article of Il Giornale della Libreria speak for themselves. While the sales of books of various kinds decreased by 2.3%, the sales of romance books grew by 84%. When you break it down, this figure tells us something that is even more interesting: foreign romances recorded +47%, while Italian romances tripled their sales (+196%).

Overall, romance novels account for about 9% of all fiction books in Italy and represent the second most important genre, with crime fiction firmly leading the sales. Similar numbers might remind us of the last big romance boom, the Harmony boom of the 1980s and 1990s, but that would be an inappropriate comparison for reasons worth analyzing. The privileged vantage point can only be the 2022 romance bestseller list.

Top 10 best-selling romances in Italy in 2022

One thing is immediately clear: the love story book in Italy is first and foremost a romance. As we have seen, this is not a guilty pleasure or a type of product on which the publisher is betting, but rather a parallel to its identity offer (as was the case with Harmony, i.e. books sold on newsstands that did not have the publisher’s name, Mondadori, on the cover): romance has become a read that our Gen Z is proudly claiming as their own, a genre that has managed to explode thanks to TikTok.

The transformation of the general love story book into romance novel also means the emergence of a new audience and a new set of authors to represent it: with the exception of Sveva Casati Modigliani and Nicholas Sparks, the ranking of the top ten romance books in Italy is dominated by young female authors with whom the public can more easily identify.

Until a few years ago, these writers had great difficulty making their way in the publishing world, due to the mistaken belief that there was no similar interest on the part of the public they were addressing. The situation, however, has radically changed. On one hand, publishers have been able to showcase Italian authors (often with English-speaking pseudonyms), and on the other hand, they have been carefully scouting for major foreign phenomena, purely editorial or otherwise (as is the case with Wattpad’s stories).

The importance of social media for romances

The combination of these two elements, with bookbloggers sharing their reads on TikTok, has meant that books that had been published several years ago saw a sudden boom in 2022. This was the case for The Song of Achilles, as well as for Tillie Cole’s romance A Thousand Boy Kisses (Dammi mille baci in the Italian edition), that saw its first release in Italian in 2018.

That said, it’s worth taking a closer look at this type of reading. To think that romance readers are weak readers would be a stereotype that is not only simplistic, but also false. The simplest refutation comes from the explosion in sales over the past two years. Young adults, while more avid readers than a more mature audience, are a minority of the population in absolute terms, which means that the increase in sales has probably meant an expansion of consumption within the age group. However, since it is a limited group, this phase must have been accompanied by an intensification of consumption. Romance is therefore a way of building readers’ loyalty to reading (and to bookstores).

How the romance market is evolving

If you compare the bestseller ranking of 2022 with that of 2021, you can see that 2022 was the year of romance and, more generally, that the cultural consumption of Generation Z was decisive in keeping the market at a more than positive level compared to 2019. Two years ago, although the top 10 was more diverse overall than last year (we find a children’s book, general non-fiction, Christmas bestsellers, family sagas, #BookTok phenomena), the presence of younger readers was less pronounced, with the possible exception of the publication of The Song of Achilles.

On the other hand, the top ten best-selling romance novels of 2022 in Italy include Erin Doom and Colleen Hoover, the spearheads of romance, in first and third place respectively. The scale of the phenomenon is such that the claim that Generation Z has rewritten the rules of romance by cannibalizing other types of novels is not exaggerated. The best-selling books include very few titles by authors who have not established themselves in recent years by adapting to a modern adaptation of the genre.

If you are a romance author, this is the right time to venture in Italian translations and take advantage of the positive trend in sales. If you’d like to know how much it would cost to translate your book into Italian, feel free to contact us.