The first thing people notice when they walk into Lovestruck in Seattle: Everything is pink.
“It’s the same thing every time, and it makes me feel like, ‘Okay, it’s validating,’” said McKenna Martin. “People come in and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so cute, it’s so pink, and I love it!’”
Martin’s main project is a print shop that produces what she calls “girly and bookish designs.” Lovestruck, Seattle’s first brick-and-mortar romance bookstore, is her newest venture. It’s currently a pop-up on Lake City Way.
Until recently, the romance genre was dismissed by literary critics as low-brow and smutty. More than 80% of romance readers are women, and these judgments sometimes made them feel isolated.
“A lot of people do look down on the genre,” said Martin, a lifelong romance reader. “It was hard to jump into talking about what you’re reading when it immediately gets a negative reaction.”
Lauren Roux is the president of Emerald City Romance Writers, a support group for local writers. She remembers being ashamed to read romance in public.
“You generally had a book cover over it,” she said. “You weren’t sure who else was reading romance, unless you also found them in a romance section in a bookstore, but even then you didn’t really make eye contact.”
Many older romance novels had “bodice-ripper” covers, featuring busty women and bare-chested men embracing. The Italian model Fabio Lanzoni became ubiquitous on these covers. But today, there’s not a Fabio in sight. Around 2018, cartoon-style drawings and bright colors began to dominate bookstore shelves.
“It’s now discreet enough that literally unless you’re reading the book, you won’t really know,” Martin said.
She believes that this shift is just one of the factors that pushed romance into the mainstream. Social media has also driven romance’s public acceptance. Subgenres like romantasy and hockey romance have blown up on TikTok, leading to ballooning sales and bookstore displays.
During the past year alone, over 51 million romance novels were sold in the U.S. And as romance has grown, so has the number of bookstores catering to it. Reading Kickstarter success stories online inspired Martin to start her own store.
“I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I could do that,’” she said.
So in January, Martin applied for a program called Seattle Restored. A partnership between the Seattle Good Business Network and the city’s Office of Economic Development, the program matches small business owners and artists with empty storefronts throughout the city.
In May, Martin learned she had made it off Seattle Restored’s waitlist. The caveat: She’d been matched with a cramped, triangular space on the corner of Lake City Way.
Martin and her husband, Eli Porkka, had only two weeks to turn the space into a bookish wonderland. With the help of Porkka’s family, they painted the walls pink, installed bookshelves, and teased Lovestruck on social media. By the time the grand opening rolled around, Martin didn’t expect it to be a big deal.
“The week before, I did a poll on Instagram and said, ‘Who’s coming?’” she said. “And it was like 100 people.” The night before the opening, she ran another poll. This time, 500 people replied.
“I didn’t know what to do!” she said. “Because I was like — tomorrow! That’s tomorrow!”
The next day, customers started lining up at 8:45 a.m. The store didn’t open until 11 a.m.
Almost two months later, the flood of excited fans hasn’t slowed. Martin and Porkka now spend their days manning Lovestruck’s front counter, processing inventory, and lugging shipments of books from their Capitol Hill apartment to the store.
Amanda Finn is a Seattle resident who’s particularly thrilled about Lovestruck’s well-stocked queer romance section.
“I think [Lovestruck’s opening] highlights something that has been kind of maligned in the broader book community for such a long time,” she said. “This is just such a celebration of love and joy and hope and friendship and family that it warms my heart every time we get more romance bookstores.”
Like the novels she sells, Martin’s own story has a happy ending. Lovestruck’s success, along with a series of Kickstarter campaigns, allowed her and Porkka to lease a permanent storefront in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood. The new, larger space will open in late October, joining other permanent romance-focused stores across the region, such as Tacoma’s Shelf Indulgence and Mill Creek’s Hardcovers.
For now, Martin is so busy selling books designed for indulgence and escape that she barely has time to read them. She hopes that Lovestruck’s Wedgwood expansion will let her — like her customers — carve out a little space for herself.
