Two substantial data: Italian romance readers and authors have created impressive communities right on TikTok to discuss their favorite titles (a social book club, for example), while from 2019 to the end of 2023 romance marked a +120.5 % of sales between physical and web bookstores
There’s little to turn up your nose at. The lifeblood of enthusiasm, passion, and physical presence under 18 at Turin Book Fair 2024 the world of romance and romance readers has massively pumped it into him TikTok. We were there and we saw it. For goodness sake, it felt like attending an Elvis or the Beatles concert. Ninety-nine percent female adolescent presence. Screams, shouts, hours-long queues for the signing of copies. But what a bomb. Having an audience that goes into raptures like this for two hundred typed pages. Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed. AND the Italian publishing phenomena of romance are a concrete reality which every publishing house, which does not want to live in snobbish isolation, must now deal with.
A bit like when Checco Zalone it injected billions into the coffers of Italian cinemas which were constantly suffering from numbers and independents continued to take refuge in the dining rooms. We’re over there. And at the Salone have TikTok as “official entertainer partner” complete with book awards (Speaking of which author of the year is Felicia Kingsleyto which we return) and open a Romance section entrusting it to the superstar Erin Doom it was like undergoing an instant dose of phosphorus and vitamins. An example? While in the Red Room of the Book Fair around Antonio Scuratiwho complained of illiberal outbursts against Italian democracy, a handful of around eighty arditi were feasting (and a few more dozen remained outside), at the same time There were a thousand girls at the Auditorium to follow Erin Doom, Rokia and Hazel Riley (we counted just 4 “dads” and half a dozen boyfriends) to interrupt every look, every smile, every question or word of their literary deities. Yet the hiatus, the distance between “high” and “low” writing, marks the critical and receptive watershed of the literary world towards “romance”, the light genre of romantic love which often seeks a happy ending and which intertwines and mixes characters, as well as echoes and references to other genres (fantasy or historical novel, for example) referring in its most refined examples to the novels of Austen or Bronte. So much so that if Doom asks a Hazel Riley – pseudonym behind which hides a twenty-six year old of Sardinian origin with a degree in Communication, Wattpad first then at the top of sales with Ascent to paradise. Game of titans (Sperling&Kupfer) – if she feels discriminated against because she writes romance, the question is sent back to the sender: “So much for it! I pull back the arrows I would like to throw” (thunderous applause from the audience ed.).
Rokia, another crazy editorial phenomenon, 23 years old, Moroccan origin, first also exploited on Wattpad and then at the top of sales with The truth untold And Guilty (Salani), takes it broader but the concept is identical: “When I started out I felt small, I saw my name among the big names in Italian publishing and I asked myself ‘what am I doing here?’. I hadn’t yet understood that we are all creating something and I’m trying to understand now how to be in this world without feeling less than others. I’m sorry that romance is belittled and undervalueddoesn’t just talk about love stories, but touches on different themes and can help kids survive difficult situations. Many parents thank me for this.”
And if from the Doom lounge, more formal and exploratory, we move on to the one set up in the Bookstock Arena by Felicia Kingsley (born Serena Artioli, architect from Carpi, published by Newton Compton) here we arrive at the essence of philia for romance which is directly grafted onto the knowledge of the structural mechanisms of creation. In a psychedelic blue purple space with over three hundred seats, assisted by another romance author and influencer like Vale Ghetti, Kingsley ventured into none other than the theme: what if the classics also had “tropes”? A meeting full of anglicisms (trope should be translated as topos, therefore the recurring motif in a work or in the poetics of an author), where the crowd, still strictly all female, by a show of hands acclaimed the most loved tropes (friends to lovers) and the most controversial (grump and sunshine) with an expertise worthy of Pietro Citati who talks about Homer or Leopardi. We close with two substantial facts: Italian romance readers and authors have created massive communities right on TikTok to discuss their favorite titles (a social Book Club, for example), while from 2019 to the end of 2023 romance marked a +120.5% in sales between physical and web bookstores.
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