A lonely young project manager quits her tech job to pursue her life’s passion: opening a bookstore and cafe dedicated to romance novels and the people who love them. She is assisted by her husband — the sunshine to her grumpiness, (opens in new tab) the golden retriever to her black cat — a man who previously read only nonfiction. Customers become regulars, sexual inklings become awakenings, and a community of hardcore romantic lit lovers is born. 

This blurb is not pulled from the back of a bodice ripper. Veena Patel has been living out this fantasy since opening The Love Potion Library, San Francisco’s first store devoted entirely to romance fiction, last month in the Castro. Patel, 33, read her first romance-adjacent novel as a child. She was scandalized by a sex scene involving a big-city career woman and a Montana horse whisperer and passed the book around to her friends. She remembers her mother concealing her own Mills & Boon romance novels behind reusable dust jackets.

For years, Patel’s love of romance fiction was worlds away from her day job. She studied geophysics at Stanford and worked in alternative energy for nearly a decade before stepping down in February 2025 after dealing with persistent anxiety. “I realized it wasn’t something I enjoyed doing, being behind my computer all day,” she said. “I just felt really lonely.” She opened the store — funded through her and her husband’s savings — on April 25, Independent Bookstore Day. 

The reason she reads romance, she said, isn’t the unbridled sex or eroticism: “I just have always loved a happily ever after.” 

Increasingly, romance fans are proud and public about their beloved genre. “Everyone’s getting horny on main,” said Alyssa Jarrett, an Oakland-based romance novelist who visited The Love Potion Library on opening day. “People are really owning their sexuality.”  

In 2025, 44 million romance books were sold (opens in new tab), up almost 4% from the previous year and vastly outnumbering the combined sales of science fiction (6 million) and fantasy (24 million), according to Publisher’s Weekly. Last summer, BookScan reported (opens in new tab) that romance was the fastest-growing genre among all print books. 

The commercial value in the genre has extended to a nationwide explosion of brick-and-mortar stores. In 2016, two sisters in Los Angeles opened The Ripped Bodice (opens in new tab), the country’s first romance bookstore. Today, there are more than (opens in new tab) 200 in North America, including 14 in California. Sex sells, and so do stories about strangers having a one-night stand after meeting at a Napa winery (as happens in Oakland author Jasmine Guillory’s 2022 novel “Drunk on Love”).

At Love Potion on May 2, readers filled the green velvet loveseats, sipping tea from floral-patterned china and paging through stacks of novels piled high on cafe tables. Patel serves loose-leaf tea from Aroma Tea Shop in the Outer Richmond and pastries from Elaichai Co., another San Francisco pioneer that last month opened the city’s first standalone chai cafe. 

Patel’s husband, Varun Datta, a software engineer, was manning the cash register and greeting shoppers. Patel introduced him to romance with Brynne Weaver’s “Butcher & Blackbird,” a novel about two serial killers who share sensual post-murder baths, getting it on while cleaning dried blood off their bodies. “After the first chapter he was like, ‘What is this?’” Patel said, laughing. “I think he really liked it — he has been reading more romance since.” 

Romance novels offer a vision of an idyllic world, where love and pleasure triumph. For some readers, Patel said, a good one can become “an instruction manual for what you should expect out of a sexual relationship in terms of communication and consent, which is nice to have in a world where incels exist and we have to be aware of their presence.” 

That was the case for Grace Green, a 25-year-old accountant who lives in Hayes Valley and grew up in a religious community in which “sex is very taboo and a woman enjoying sex is not something that you really talk about.” Romance novels, she said, have “really helped me be able to explore myself, and not be ashamed of taboo topics, and really feel more confident and secure in my own sexuality.” She has visited Love Potion twice, once with her husband.  

In San Francisco, Green noted, “We have so many other amazing bookstores: the anarchist bookstore, the queer bookstore, vintage bookstores.” The Love Potion Library, she said, provides a beautiful, curated experience for the people who don’t want to feel judged for asking, “Where’s the romance section?” 

Frederick Smith, a romance author who lives near West Portal, writes male-male romances, largely set in the Bay Area and featuring Black men. “I think that having a romance-specific bookstore in the Castro is going to open up doors for queer readers to be a little more open to the romance genre,” he said. “It signals to the community that romance is indeed a genre to be taken seriously.” 

Smith’s early novels tended to handle sex by fading out of the scene. Fans told him they wanted more. “I ran into readers who said, ‘We like your novels, Fred, but want to see swords crossing,’” he said, laughing. His next novel, “Love Is a Contact Sport,” out June 16, is more explicit. Romance novels range from “low spice” — heavy eye contact and kissing — to lascivious. “A lot of romance readers will use the word ‘smut’ tongue-in-cheek, lovingly, reclaiming that term,” said Jarrett. 

The store is licensed to sell beer and wine, and Patel plans to host regular book clubs and game nights to facilitate friendship and community among customers. She has already had to turn people away from a “Heated Rivalry” trivia night that attracted nearly 50 and a long waitlist. She envisions speed-dating events with queer and straight options.

The Love Potion Library’s shelves are organized by tropes —“enemies to lovers,” “fated mates” — as well as subgenres like fantasy and literary fiction. The science fiction section has been particularly popular, Patel said — she had to restock “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone and “The Darkness Outside Us” by Eliot Schrefer within days of opening the store. “I get a lot of customers coming in and saying, ‘I don’t read romance,’ and then looking around and saying, ‘I read more romance than I think,’” she said. 

She has seen a diversity of customers by every metric. The only exception, she said, is straight men, who have a tendency to wander in and turn right around when they realize the store’s focus. “A lot of romance is written from a woman’s perspective on what she’s looking for in a man,” Patel pointed out. Straight men aren’t yet realizing how to leverage this intel, she said. Give them time.