For the past few decades romance has been the popular genre par excellence in the English-speaking world. With sales figures that average around $1.36 billion a year, a readership of nearly 75 million people in the United States alone, and a 13.4 percent share of the American consumer book market in 2011, the popular romance novel is by far the best-selling genre in America. In 2010 a staggering 8,240 new romance titles were released in the United States, and 469 of these novels became national or international bestsellers. Harlequin, the most important romance publisher in the world, “publishes more than 100 titles a month, in both print and digital formats, in 17 countries and 16 languages,” and since its inception in the mid-twentieth century an astounding total of over 6.8 billion popular romance novels have been sold by this publisher alone.

While these impressive numbers indisputably establish the widespread popularity of romance, the genre has been studied very sparsely. Even though the scholarly examination of popular culture has become a respectable and well-established academic pursuit, few scholars turn their critical gaze toward this most popular (and feminine) of genres. Studies of the popular romance novel are consequently few and far between, and within this relatively small body of work attention to the material aspects of the genre has been very limited despite the fact that the material conditions of popular novels are of major importance since they function as sites of intense debate concerning the status, meaning, and identity of the books.

This lack of critical attention paid to the romance novel in general and its material characteristics in particular may be a consequence of the widespread cultural prejudice that all romance novels are essentially the same. Although academics are generally taught to be critical of cultural stereotypes, in the case of the popular romance novel the academy seems to overwhelmingly buy into—and frequently even be at the origin of—the ingrained stereotypes of conventionality, formula, and simplicity that surround the genre. As a result, the popular romance genre is largely ignored by academics, who deem books that are supposedly all the same unworthy of their critical attention. Somewhat surprisingly, a similar mechanism plays out within the developing field of popular romance studies with regard to the genre's materiality.