Episode 12 | Romance isn’t a trend. But are romance bookshops?: Cassie Simmons, Main Character Books (London)
Bookshop Stories
Tom Idle interviews Cassie Simmons, founder of Main Character Books, a romance-specialist shop in London's Spitalfields Market. They explore
Key takeaways
- Cassie Simmons transitioned from a successful corporate patent lawyer to opening Main Character Books after realizing her legal career no longer aligned with her identity or passions.
- Romance readership has shifted from private consumption to public community building, with events like the sold-out 'Smut Club' open mic nights fostering supportive environments.
Main topics
- Romance genre evolution and stigma
- BookTok's impact on bookselling
Notable quotes
Romance isn't a trend. People, particularly women, have been reading these books for a very long time.
Conclusion
The episode highlights how romance has evolved from a stigmatized, private hobby into a
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Before we do anything else, I'm going to get all Stephen Bartlett on you and ask a favour. If you enjoy Bookshop Stories, please hit the follow or subscribe button right now, wherever you're listening to this. Seriously, it takes a couple of seconds and it costs you absolutely nothing. And at this stage of my podcast, it does make an enormous difference. Every new subscriber helps more people. discover the show and of course it means each new episode should land automatically in your device in your feed so if you've listened before and haven't quite got around to it please do it now that'd be great thank you Speaker 2 (0:41) Right, episode 12. And this one took me into a corner of book selling that before this conversation I had, I knew very little about. It's absolutely outside of my comfort zone. And that's because Main Character Books, which sits in the bustling Spitalfields Market of London, is dedicated almost entirely to romance. It was founded by Cassie Simmons. She's an American former patent lawyer. who moved to the UK with her family. She retrained as an English solicitor. She got as far as interviewing to return to the legal profession and then decided she'd rather open a bookshop instead. And that in itself would be quite the story. But Cassie's opened her shop at what is an absolutely fascinating moment for romance. Romance is everywhere. You've got BookTok that's helped bring books and authors enormous audiences. Romantasy has become this publishing phenomenon. Readers who might once have quietly downloaded books onto their Kindle, maybe, well, they're now events. They're talking about them online. And in Cassie's case, they're getting up in front of a room full of strangers to read their favorite passages out loud. We'll have more on that later. And romance bookshops are opening up all over the country. When Cassie opened Main Character, she says it was the eighth bricks and mortar romance specialist in the UK. Six months later, she's counting 23 of them. So I wanted to know exactly what is going on in this space because Cassie makes a really important argument during our conversation that romance isn't a trend. People, I mean, particularly women, have been reading these books for a very long time. But what's changed is the visibility around them, the willingness to talk about them, and of course the physical spaces being created to serve that audience. But it raises another question. Are all these romance bookshops here to stay? Cassie wonders whether there's a danger of oversaturation, something I absolutely thought about as well. And she talks really openly about the difference between the headlines proclaiming this. billion dollar romance industry and well the much less glamorous economics of running an independent bookshop especially in central london and that's what i really loved about this conversation you're going to hear there's a huge enthusiasm for romance and for the community around it but there's also with cassie a business owner underneath all of that asking difficult questions about stock and events and competition and rent and business rates, all the usual stuff. And yeah, and what happens when the rest of the book selling industry notices the opportunity that she spotted and then goes with it as well. So there's loads of stuff to explore in this episode. I hope you really enjoy the conversation. Obviously, you can find more from Bookshop Stories over on Instagram and Substack. where I share more from every conversation that we have each week. And you can find the books recommended by my guests through our Bookshop Stories storefront over on bookshop.org. All the links are in the show notes as ever. But first, here's Cassie Simmons, founder and owner of Main Character Books. Speaker 1 (4:10) you Speaker 1 (4:13) My name's Cassie Simmons and I am the proprietor, bookshop owner, founder of Main Character Books in Spitalfields Market, London. Speaker 2 (4:23) It's great to have you on the show, Cassie. I'm genuinely excited to find out more about the shop and what you've decided to do, the direction you've decided to take with Main Character. Before we get into all that, what kind of reader were you before the bookshop existed? Was romance always your genre or did you sort of discover this a bit later? Speaker 1 (4:44) Yeah, so I discovered romance in around 2010, 2011, after I graduated from university and was, you know, doing the whole city thing in D.C., working. Speaker 1 (5:02) Ended up getting some Tessa dares on my Kindle and I just tore into, tore into those bodice rippers. Um, and it has been my main genre ever since. Is Speaker 2 (5:13) that where you grew up? You're from DC or somewhere else in the States? No, Speaker 1 (5:17) I'm actually from Michigan. Um, yep. And I ended up in DC after university. My best friend lived there. I got a job in women's health and, you know, made that my home. Speaker 2 (5:30) Right. And the bit of background reading I've done on you is that things started to kind of come to the fore during COVID. Is that right? Where you found a community of like-minded people and it sort of went from there. Is that what happened? Speaker 1 (5:46) Yeah. So the same, that is, that's right. I was reading romance before. My best friend, Ali Gammon, who is involved in the communications and the graphics of the shop. Which Speaker 2 (5:58) is splendid, by the way. Big shout out to Ali. I love all the font and the way everything looks. It's brilliant. Speaker 1 (6:05) It really is. She's done such a great job. And I think it just keeps getting more creative as we sort of find our voice. But yeah, so she started in quarantine a quarantine romance book club. of her connections and we sort of brought in our connections as well. And so there's this group of women, around 30 women that get together on a Zoom call. At the beginning, it was every other week because it was COVID and we had nothing better to do. But now it's once a month. So it's still going? Yeah, it's still going. The times don't work as well for me over here in England. Speaker 1 (6:49) A lot of the romance people in the book club actually came to our opening and really were supportive. Speaker 2 (6:57) Okay, I love that. And so what were you getting from that group that you wouldn't get from simply reading the books and just enjoying them? What do you get from that sort of group? Speaker 1 (7:07) I mean, I think romance and romance readers tend to not talk about it. Just because the issues in those books can be super personal. But from that group and those experience of reading those books, we formed some really great friendships. I mean, I think when you think of a romance book, most people think of just sort of a kissing story, right? Like, oh, boy meets girl, that's it. And sort of what the genres become is more of a... these protagonists are usually discovering themselves as love happens. So there's a lot of sort of, there's more depth to romance than a lot of people understand. Speaker 2 (7:54) Okay. Okay. We'll get into a bit more of that later, but obviously you go from, I love being part of this community to then, right, there needs to be this physical space where people can come together. So how did it change? What happened? Speaker 1 (8:11) So I'm actually a patent lawyer and a solicitor. My young family moved to England in 2022. I became a solicitor, did all of the exams, got my postgraduate diploma, an IP from Oxford, and then started interviewing. And it just didn't feel right. Speaker 1 (8:40) Going back into the firm life as, you know, a sort of a mom, a little older in my career and starting, if I was going to start a new career, I wanted it to be something that I was passionate about. Speaker 2 (8:53) Okay. Speaker 1 (8:54) So then we sort of start, I started looking at like, what is, you know, obviously what am I passionate about? And at the time there, when we started the plans. to make main character there was no romance bookshop in London And now there's now Speaker 2 (9:14) there's lots. Speaker 1 (9:16) But yeah, so that was that was sort of the plan from the beginning was like, oh, there's a need in London for a space like this. Speaker 2 (9:26) Did you surprise yourself by not wanting to go into a solicitors again? Speaker 1 (9:32) Yeah. So, I mean, I still have my registration. I'm a non-practicing solicitor, which comes in very handy when you. own a business. Yeah. But I don't think it was a surprise. I think it was more of. I felt like I had to go through a grieving process and it was a shift in my ego, right? Because I used to be a corporate solicitor, like trying huge cases and it was a part of, it was part of who I was and like my identity. So it was really difficult to sort of. come to that understanding that that's not going to be part of my life anymore. That's not going to be my identity. And Speaker 2 (10:18) you'd spent many years building up to that point to go into that profession, lots of studying. Speaker 1 (10:25) Yeah. I mean, in the States, right, that's an undergraduate degree and a law degree. So that's seven years of degrees. And I was, you know, I was top of my class at my law school. I was editor-in-chief of the Law Review. I really enjoyed going to trial. That was one of my favorite things to do. And so just, yeah, uncoupling myself from that was a big step. Speaker 2 (10:56) Not easy, I'd imagine. So you decide that's not for you. You then decide a bookshop. Why a bookshop? Because I guess you could have done lots of other things. You could have created events. You could have, you know, built a subscription business. You could have, you know, done all different sorts of things. So, you know, opening a physical retail space in London is not an easy decision, is it? Talk me through it. Speaker 1 (11:22) I mean, I think everyone that opens a bookshop, I think that the idea is a bookshop. And like once it gets... seeded in your head it's hard to let go of that idea. Speaker 1 (11:37) I think, you know, there's a lot of noise on the internet about romance. And I wanted to sort of cut through that noise and make a physical space that's always there for readers and bring them in person. I thought there was an opportunity to bring people in person to find their community, you know, just as the community from the Quarantine Robots book club. like became such a part of my life. I wanted to sort of bring that to other readers. And Speaker 2 (12:11) you have this kind of slogan, this read for pleasure slogan, which is on your website. And I guess this is not about encouraging people to read more or to read romance, but I guess this is about helping people to enjoy whatever book they're wanting to enjoy without the judgment. Who do you think is doing the judging? I know you've spoken about this before. in various places i've read what you've said but who do you think's doing the judging Speaker 1 (12:38) I mean, I think most romance readers have had the instance where they go into a big box store and they're like, oh, where's this spicy novel? Or like bringing that spicy novel up to the till and, you know, encountering someone that kind of gives them the side eye. Or, you know, even the publishing industry, sometimes it feels like they're not backing the romance. as much as they should be for how much money it seems to be making or what they're saying it's making. You know, I think we get a lot of people that sort of judge what a romance, the stereotypical romance reader they think is, has never read a romance. Speaker 2 (13:27) Yeah, I'll be honest. I'm one of them. I'm not one to judge at all, but I've never read the types of books that you're describing. Give me a sense of what we're talking about here. These, you say spicy, but like, yeah, tell me what a typical romance book is that's really trending right now. Speaker 1 (13:45) Well, so there's a Romance Novelist Association and they actually have a definition of a romance. Okay. A traditional romance. Speaker 1 (13:57) has loved driving the plot and a happily ever after. Speaker 1 (14:03) A traditional romance and sort of what I like about romance is that it ends on the happy. We don't see these characters 20 years down the line. We see them when they fall in love and when they have that happily ever after. So that's sort of what a classic definition is. We take a sort of a broader view here. We have some romance adjacent books. We have some classics that may not exactly have a happily ever after, but there is love driving the plot. Or books that also have a romance subplot. Speaker 2 (14:41) Okay. And then you have romantasy as well, which I know is a big genre. So what's the difference? Speaker 1 (14:48) Yeah, there's not a difference. So romantasy would just be, there would be love driving a plot in a fantasy world. Speaker 2 (14:57) And do you think that these types of books, still carry a bit of a stigma because the readership is predominantly female? Would you say that's the case? Speaker 1 (15:06) I would say 100%. Yes. Yes. And we kind of, we wanted to provide an environment where that stigma wasn't there and that. we're also excited about these books and we'll talk to you about them. So Speaker 2 (15:21) when I walk into your bookshop, do I know that this is the place to come for romance? Is it quite obvious? Or do you get customers just, you know, wandering in, you're in Spitalfields Market in London, very busy part of the city. Are you getting customers just coming, not knowing what to expect? Speaker 1 (15:37) Yes, 100%. So what happens? What usually happens? It depends on the customer. So we obviously didn't choose, a lot of the romance bookstores will choose a sort of more love-focused branding. So it'll be like book lovers or books in love, those