“Why isn’t there a Marvel for romance?” Erica Cerulo says. “A Bravo for romance? An A24 for romance?”
It’s a good question. Romance literature is a billion-dollar industry, with the genre’s novels accounting for 25% of all books purchased. And yet, so often relegated to the status of guilty pleasure. “There was a quote that we read somewhere that was like, romance books are the only books you can read and people think you’re dumber for reading them,” Cerulo says.
But she and her best friend, business partner, and A Few Things podcast co-host Claire Mazur believe they have a solution in 831 Stories, their new entertainment company that launched September 10 with the publishing of its first book, Big Fan by Alexandra Romanoff.
831 Stories doesn’t start and stop with publishing. The company aims to create a loyal, active fan community around their content and expand the universe of each book through in-person events and multimedia, merch, and more. Take Big Fan, for example. After reading, you’ll be able to stream the fictional single from the book on Spotify, read an epilogue about the characters online, buy the same necklace the love interest gives the main character in the third act, and attend events in Los Angeles and New York City with the author.
“We want to be hip, horny Hallmark,” Mazur says. “We really believe that there’s room for a big mainstream romance book household brand that people recognize but also broadens the audience for love stories.”
A lofty goal—but one Cerulo and Mazur seem poised to meet. After all, they’ve built a loyal fanbase before through their popular artisanal retailer Of A Kind, which was eventually bought by Bed Bath & Beyond and then shut down after the parent company experienced its own financial troubles. By 2019, they were taking a break and, as Mazur puts it, “trying to recover from startup life.” Then the pandemic happened and both found themselves turning to romance novels and audiobooks to pass the time.
One in particular captured their attention: The Idea of You, the Robinne Lee novel that was recently adapted into a movie starring Anne Hathaway. “We were so excited about that main character and what it represented,” Mazur says. Here was a woman in her 40s who isn’t experiencing a mid-life crisis—she’s confident, fulfilled, and, yeah, enjoys sex with the younger lead singer of the most popular boy band in the world. More importantly, they saw how books like The Idea of You were inspiring women, themselves included, to have more open conversations about sex in person and on mainstream social media accounts in a way they’d never seen before.
“We weren’t really talking about sex drive and desires that these books were talking about explicitly and openly and without any caveat before,” Mazur says. “The sex positivity that we grew up with as women, now in our 40s, was Samantha Jones… It was really exciting to read this stuff that was like, no, women are horny too.”
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