The UK's publishing income reached a record high of £7.4bn in 2025, the Publishers Association has reported. This growth was attributed to the nation's "increasing appetite" for fiction, children's books, and audiobooks.
Social media movements like BookTok and Bookstagram are influencing reading habits, with a BookTok chart launched earlier this year combining traditional bestseller data with UK sales and hashtag analysis. This chart was initially dominated by romance and romantasy books.
NielsenIQ BookData found that sci-fi and fantasy books, which include the romantasy subgenre, experienced record sales in 2025, increasing by 42% year-on-year to 8.8m units. This represents a 183% increase compared to 2019.
Conversely, romance and saga book sales declined by 15% in 2025, with 10.1m units sold. Despite this decline, sales in the genre remained twice as high as they were in 2019.
Holly Irwin, 20, who opened a bookshop specialising in romance novels in Cirencester in August, noted that specific titles and subgenres, such as hockey romance and cowboy romance, have been selling out quickly, which she attributes to BookTok's influence.