Of Fables and Fantasies — Or, How I Accidentally Became a Bookseller

I want to tell you something that happened this morning, and I want you to know that I am fully aware this is not a sensible thing.

We bought a bookshop.

Here is how that happened.

I went to see the owner of a wandering bookshop — think food van, think wheels, think the ability to turn up somewhere entirely unexpected and hand people a romance novel — because I had a perfectly reasonable question. Would she be interested in stocking my books? Simple. Businesslike. In and out.

I came home having promised to buy the whole thing.

I’m not entirely sure how. These things happen to me more than they probably should. The shop is called Of Fables and Fantasies, and I suspect the name didn’t help — once I heard it, some part of my brain had already decided this was mine. The rest of the conversation was just logistics.

So here we are.

For those of you keeping score at home, the current job description reads something like: romance novelist, publisher, blogger, small-scale farmer, cat wrangler (fifteen of them, don’t ask), and now — bookseller. I genuinely do not know who I am any more, but I’m having a very good time finding out.

Now here’s the part I’m especially excited about, and I want to talk about it properly before we take over because it matters to me. Really matters.

I want Of Fables and Fantasies to champion romance. And I want it to champion Australian romance writers.

Let me start with something that might surprise you if you’ve been living under a rock, or possibly just in Australian literary circles: romance is, by a significant margin, one of the biggest-selling genres on the planet. In 2024 alone, 51 million print units sold in the US market. Romance sales were up 24% year on year. Seven of the top ten books of the year were romance or romantasy titles. At many publishing houses, up to 70% of revenue comes from romance. The genre is not just surviving — it is carrying the book industry on its back, and has been for years.

And yet.

In Australia, romance gets shat on from a great height.

I’m going to say that plainly, because it’s true and it’s been true for as long as I’ve been writing, and I am tired of dancing around it. Romance authors are not considered writers. We are considered purveyors of smut. Our books are not shelved respectfully in literary fiction. They’re not reviewed seriously in the broadsheets. They don’t win the Miles Franklin. We are, at best, tolerated. At worst, openly mocked.

I know this from experience. When I did the first subject of my Bachelor of Creative Writing — which I completed in 2021, in my forties, surrounded by twenty-somethings — the professor asked each of us what we wanted to do with what we’d learn in the class. I listened to them all go around the room. They wanted to write poetry. Speculative fiction. Literary fiction. They were going to be the next Shakespeare. The next James Patterson. Grand ambitions, every one of them.

When it was my turn, I said I wanted to write romance.

The whole class laughed at me.

Not a polite chuckle. Actual laughter. Because I didn’t want to write real books, did I — I wanted to write those silly Mills and Boon things you buy at the supermarket. I sat there and I felt the embarrassment of it, that particular heat that comes from being the odd one out in a room full of people who think they know what good writing looks like.

And then my professor shut them up.

I don’t know why you laughed, she said. She’s the only one with realistic aims and knows where the money is.

I have never forgotten that. Not the laughter — or not only the laughter — but the fact that it took someone with authority in the room to make them stop. That says everything, doesn’t it? About who gets to decide what counts.

Here’s what I want to ask, though. George R. R. Martin writes explicit sex scenes. So does Cormac McCarthy. So does virtually every celebrated male literary author you can name. Their work is considered serious, important, literature. But a romance novel — which is largely written by women and largely read by women — is smut. The genre that outsells everything else on the shelf. Smut.

You’ll forgive me if I find that a little convenient.

Romance is not smut. Romance is rural and gritty and funny and heartbreaking. It is military and sports and contemporary and historical and supernatural and everything in between. It is romantasy with magic systems so intricate they’d make a fantasy purist weep with envy. It is chick lit that makes you snort-laugh on public transport. It is second-chance love stories and slow burns and found families and grief and hope and, yes, desire, because desire is part of being human and pretending otherwise is not literary sophistication — it is just snobbery.

I want Of Fables and Fantasies to be a place where that is understood.

I want rural romance on those shelves — stories set in the landscapes people around here actually live in. I want sports romance and military romance and contemporary romance and romantasy and chick lit and every flavour in between. And I want, wherever I possibly can, Australian authors. Writers who are here, working in this country, telling stories rooted in this place, and who deserve so much more recognition than they get.

Because here’s the thing about romance — about any fiction, really. Part of what it does, part of what it’s for, is letting readers feel themselves inside the story. And there is something that happens when you read a book and the landscape is yours. When the light looks right and the place names are familiar and the characters feel like people from your street, your town, your life. You’re not just reading about someone else falling in love. You’re falling in love in a place that belongs to you. Australian readers deserve that. They deserve to pick up a romance novel and find themselves in it — their country, their voice, their world — not just borrowed landscapes from somewhere else.

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know how successful I’ll be at sourcing. I don’t know how many authors will want to be involved, whether logistics will cooperate, whether the universe will smile on me or laugh at me. But we are absolutely ready to give it a red hot shot, as we say in this part of the world.

If you’re an Australian romance author, or you know one, or you are one and you’re reading this with a slightly raised eyebrow — come find me. I want your books on my shelves. I want your stories rolling down Tasmanian roads in a little van with a beautiful name.

And if you just want to follow along and watch me figure out how to run a mobile bookshop while also writing novels and wrangling fifteen cats and growing vegetables and generally attempting to do everything at once — well. You’re very welcome here too.

Of Fables and Fantasies. Watch this space.