The Nibbies just validated everything indie romance authors have been doing for years
Things I wish I'd done differently as an indie writer...
I’m writing this the morning after the British Book Awards, watching the news ripple out across Bluesky and Substack with a cup of tea and a slowly dawning sense of vindication.
For thirty-five years, the Nibbies has handed out gold-painted nibs for fiction without ever quite admitting romance is a category. Last night, they finally did.
The news
Emily Henry won the inaugural Romantic Fiction Book of the Year for Great Big Beautiful Life. The first time in the awards’ history that a romance novel was honoured for being a romance novel, rather than smuggled in under “fiction” or “page-turner” or whatever euphemism the trade preferred that year.
Alongside that, the ceremony paid tribute to Dame Jilly Cooper, who died last October aged 88. Sophie Kinsella and Joanna Trollope were honoured beside her as the writers who built a genre the industry has spent decades pretending wasn’t really there, or didn’t truly matter as much as the more weighty words of (often) older men. Three women who between them sold tens of millions of books and got patted on the head for it instead of taken seriously.
The room at Grosvenor House finally said it out loud. These writers matter. Romance matters. The readers who buy it matter.
The numbers
Here’s what made the new category inevitable.
Romance and Sagas hit £69.1 million in UK sales in 2024, according to Nielsen BookScan. That edges out the previous record set in 2012, the year Fifty Shades of Grey single-handedly inflated the chart. Last year wasn’t a one-book spike. It was the third straight year the category cleared £50 million. In 2019, before lockdown rewired everyone’s reading habits, the same category sat at £24 million.
Women under 35 are driving the latest boom. They buy most of the romance and romantasy on the chart. They talk about it on their socials and WhatsApp. They make book recommendations the way I used to make mixtapes. And while traditional publishing was busy worrying about literary prestige, those readers built a market the trade can no longer pretend isn’t really there.
That’s what the new category at the Nibbies actually represents. Not a benevolent gesture from on high. Money. Plain, blunt, undeniable money.
The lesson for indie authors
The trade didn’t discover romance last night. Indie authors have been writing for these readers for over a decade, and selling to them, and listening to them. We knew where they shopped. We knew what they wanted. We didn’t need a category at an awards dinner to validate the genre.
What we got last night was the ever-slow-moving establishment quietly admitting it might have got things ever-so-slightly wrong. That those in charge of lofty sponsored-table awards ceremonies were wrong to dismiss it. Wrong to file it under that quaint little category that makes my piss boil… guilty pleasure. Wrong to assume that fiction by women (or occasionally men), for everyone (women and men), about feelings was somehow a lesser form than fiction by big strapping lads, for men who know how to strip down a lawn mower. Books about war or crime or the (not my fault) slow decline of a marriage in Hampstead.
If you’ve been writing romance and apologising for it, stop. Stop trying to rebrand yourself as writing Uplit or Book Club Fiction. The market doesn’t need you to apologise. The market is the largest it has ever been.
The mistake I made
I wrote rom-coms and refused to call them rom-coms.
Husbands is a fake-marriage farce set partly in Vegas, with a darker undercurrent around abuse. Ghosted is a meet-cute on a Christmas cruise. Rebuilding Alexandra Small is a book about moving on from alcoholism into a new relationship. Three books that any honest reader would shelve under romantic comedy without thinking twice.
And what did I put on the back covers? “Character-driven fiction exploring identity, belonging and the search for connection.” Which is true. It was also me dressing my books up in a tweed jacket so they’d be allowed into the literary fiction party. I positioned them as something more serious than what they were, because “serious” felt safer than “commercial.”
It was snobbery. My own. Internalised from years of book reviewers treating romance as a punchline.
The cost wasn’t reviews or awards. The cost was readers. Readers who would have loved my books, but couldn’t find them… because I was hiding them in the wrong aisle.
What I’d do differently
Own the genre. Clearly. Without hedging.
If the book is a rom-com, the cover should suggest rom-com. The blurb should promise the thing rom-com readers want. The comp authors should be the ones those readers already love. The Amazon categories should be the ones those readers already browse.
This isn’t about dumbing anything down. Emily Henry is a careful, observant, brilliant writer. So is Beth O’Leary. So is Marian Keyes. The craft is there. The depth is there. What romance asks of a writer is empathy, pace, and a refusal to be embarrassed about the emotions on the page.
The Nibbies just proved there’s no ceiling on commercial romance in 2026. The ceiling was always the snobbery, and the snobbery has cracked.
The pivot
Lisa Doyle is Absolutely Fine is my first dare-to-be-deliberate move into this space. And it feels a lot like coming out, all over again. “Mum, Dad… there’s something I need to tell you!”
The title of my new book says romcom. The cover, when it lands in the spring, is very much pitched at romcom readers. The pitch is fake engagement, Manchester, social performance, the messiness of pretending you have your life together when you very much do not. The comp authors are Beth O’Leary, Mhairi McFarlane and Marian Keyes, because that’s who Lisa’s readers already love.
I’m putting this book where the readers are, instead of where I once wished the critics would notice me. I accept it’s unlikely to spawn a Guardian Weekend two-page in-depth piece on how an aging gay man (with a great skincare regime) fills his days writing frothy romcoms. I’d rather the right readers found the right book.
If you’ve been quietly writing romance and quietly hoping someone will tell you it’s allowed, this is me telling you it’s allowed. The biggest awards night in British publishing said it last night. We were always right. They just took thirty-five years to catch up.
