In the pre-digital publishing era, paperback romance novels lured readers with the same kind of titillating cover art: a woman in period clothing swooning in the arms of a bare-chested hunk — perhaps a lusty pirate, brooding noble, or mighty warrior — his hair flowing, his muscles rippling. For better or worse, the genre has, in recent years, adopted cover art with less explicit illustrations of fully clothed figures with featureless faces, achieving a look that’s more cute than alluring.
While this new trend plays it safe, meaning that books can be displayed openly without fear of upsetting conservative shoppers or parents of young kids, it leaves Pittsburgh romance author Lainey Davis wanting.
“It’s a great nipple purge,” she tells Pittsburgh City Paper, relaying how there “wasn’t a single male nipple” at a bookstore she visited in New York City. She explains that large chains like Barnes & Noble have justified the choice by saying they have “issues with getting in covers that have models.”
Thankfully, Davis, who releases her books independently, can have her male nipples and publish, too.
“I love a man-chest cover, but I also am in this to earn money,” she explains, adding that the ebook version of her soccer-themed Forging series features male shirtlessness while the “paperbacks are just going to have soccer balls and flowers on them.”
Davis represents one of many local authors cashing in on romance fiction’s mainstream growth following the success of Fifty Shades of Grey and so-called “romantasy” series like A Court of Thorns and Roses. The boom has allowed her and others to make a career or, at least, a side hustle out of producing what fans affectionately call smut (the authors City Paper interviewed would rather not use that term). In many cases, their steamy stories are also set against the backdrop of Pittsburgh.
Besides being able to make money while being fulfilled creatively, Davis and others are showing that the romance genre serves a larger purpose than turning on readers — by honestly depicting the full spectrum of the human sexual experience, centering the voices of women and the LGBTQ community, and challenging the growing, conservative-leaning censorship that, as the “great nipple purge” demonstrates, has taken hold of media.
In the beginning, though, penning romance was a necessity for Davis.
“I have always worked as a writer,” says Davis, who earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh and previously held a communications job. “I don’t have any other marketable skills … And I came home one day [in 2017] and it was raining in my children’s bedroom … So we needed more money to replace the roof. I was whining about this and my friend said, ‘You should publish erotica and sell it on Amazon.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ And I didn’t have a good answer, so I did.”
What started as self-publishing to cover repair costs took off as Davis saw a desire for her stories, particularly the Pittsburgh-set Stag Brothers series.
“People, I think, were hungry for feel-good fiction, and I was able to leave my day job in June of 2021,” she says. Since then, she has put out around four books, each totaling approximately 220 pages, per year.
The choice, however, went against everything Davis learned in school, as genre fiction — an umbrella term under which romance, horror, and science-fiction fall — was “largely frowned upon” by her MFA peers.
“I had one guy from the program who was doing well in genre fiction after graduating and … I felt people judging him,” she says. “I had carried those attitudes too about it.”
Her views changed after her mother died in 2015, a loss that left Davis unable to enjoy reading.
“I just couldn’t access that concentration area of my brain,” she explains. “And she was a huge romance reader, and I started reading some of her old novels. I was burning through these novels and I loved how, even though I knew everything was going to work out in the end, it was also very gripping. And I just loved that experience. I needed that at that time in my life and I continue to inhale a lot of romance.”
She agrees that the “bad rap” romance gets from academia could be attributed to sexism, as women writers dominate the genre.
Still, rejection by the serious literary community has not impeded the genre’s popularity or success. On Jan. 30, the New York Times reported that Onyx Storm, a romantasy work by Rebecca Yarros, became the fastest-selling adult novel in two decades. The latest in the author’s Empyrean series, described as being set at a “military academy for dragon riders,” sold 2.7 million copies in its first week of release.
As the article points out, Onyx Storm highlights the ever-increasing appetite for romantasy, a subgenre that “blends spicy sex scenes and romance tropes with supernatural elements” — by NYT’s number, romantasy accounted for an estimated 30 million print sales in 2024, a rise of 50% over the previous year.
Local author Anna Zabo is a self-described writer of “contemporary and paranormal romance for all colors of the rainbow.” Zabo tells CP they “kind of fell into writing romance sideways” while attending Seton Hill Univerrsity’s Writing Popular Fiction Masters of Fine Arts program.
“I went into the program with the notion of writing fantasy and science fiction, which was what I grew up reading, and, while the program had us reading in our own genre, it also wanted everyone to have a broader understanding of popular fiction, so we read outside our specific genre, too,” they explain. Zabo decided to write a paranormal romance because they “wanted to write something different and fun.”
“And I never stopped writing romance after that,” says Zabo. “I love writing relationships and characters and having people interact with each other, and romance has a ton of that.”
Zabo says their writing focuses mainly on “found family” or “discovering your people, essentially, especially through falling in love.”
“While all of my novels focus on a developing relationship, they’re not in isolation to the friends and community around them, whether it’s in an office setting, or a rock band, or a hockey team. Or even fae or shapeshifters. Sometimes people are isolated, but they’re drawn into communities.”
Like Zabo, other local authors are doing their part to center LGBTQ voices in a genre once reserved for heterosexual desire and relationships. Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick, a Pittsburgh-based married couple who occasionally co-write novels, have found success producing young LGBTQ love stories. These include Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh, the NYT bestseller The Lucky List, and Five Feet Apart, adapted into a 2019 film. She and Derrick also co-authored She Gets the Girl, described in a CP review as a “bouncy young adult romantic comedy” about two teenage girls attending the University of Pittsburgh.
Zabo says authors not having to rely on traditional publishing means readers can “now find romances for just about everyone in the LGBTQIA spectrum,” including “aromantic characters that are structured similarly to romances that explore queer platonic relationships.”
“I think the shift came partially from being able to self-publish easily, that self-publishing is accepted as a legitimate avenue for success in the book industry, and from the advent of online places to share fanfiction,” they explain.
Zabo says that, while they have been published by “small presses and imprints of large publishers,” most of their books are now self-published.
Even in the relatively small Pittsburgh literary community, writers have shown that romance has grown to represent a broader, more inclusive array of identities and desires, meaning that readers can find the offbeat, wholesome, or erotic.
In terms of the latter, Davis believes focusing on sex does not have to come at the expense of character-building or plot. This especially applies to “open-door romance,” or romance containing detailed sex scenes.
“I feel like I don’t have time to read a book that’s not going to display the full spectrum of the human experience, and I like to feel like the sex scenes are integral to the character development,” she says. “If you just pulled the sex scenes out of my book, there would be a lot of plot development missing.”
Davis believes depicting sex honestly avoids some of the pitfalls that negatively stereotype the romance genre — she never uses euphemisms such as calling a penis a “member.” She learned that this approach better serves the reader — last year, she appeared on a podcast that also featured a sexual wellness expert who revealed that, with the state of sex education in schools, a lot of teenagers are “turning to romance novels as their only source of sex education.”
“And that really stuck with me,” says Davis. She adds that, while she is “not qualified in any way to provide sex education,” she finds it important to have consent and “discussions of contraceptives” on the page. “And that’s been a fun challenge to make those conversations sexy. And I like to write what I call green flag heroes … The heroes in my book are having explicitly consensual intercourse.”
Like Davis, Zabo says their work is “very much open-door,” and that some of their books “delve into kink/BDSM.”
“I think sex can be powerful emotionally, and I like to show that,” they add. “No shade on closed-door books. There’s absolutely a place and need for them, too.”
Even so, Davis says readers still find aspects of her books to appreciate beyond the sexual content.
“I had a reader early on write to me and say the sexiest part of my book was when my heroine spoke up at a meeting and everybody listened to her,” she says. “And that really stuck with me because I try in my books for the female characters to be successful in their career aspirations and in their interpersonal relationships, as well as their romantic pursuits.”
However, as the romance industry grows, so do the pearl-clutching tactics of publishers and booksellers to impede the voices of writers in the genre.
“I think there’s a lot of censorship that targets pornography and obscene things, which, fuck that,” says Davis. She says online retailers like Amazon ask authors to click on a box indicating if there is “inappropriate” or mature content in a book. “And I never check it because who the hell are you to decide what is inappropriate? And as long as it’s phrased that way, I’ll never check it.”
Davis believes aspiring romance authors should connect with those already working in the genre. Local storytellers can do this by attending events like Talking Flirty: Romance Authors Tell All, a panel featuring Davis and fellow authors Christina Bunner, Beck Grey, Kimberly Miller, Liz Milliron, and Linda Rettstatt, taking place on Sat., Feb. 15 at the Northland Public Library.
Zabo believes there is no wrong way for developing romance authors to hone their craft, whether it’s producing fanfiction or original stories, taking classes, or using how-to guides on writing fiction.
“As someone with two degrees in writing, you absolutely don’t need a degree in writing to write,” they add. “You just need a story in your head that you want to share with someone else.”
This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2025.
