As we gain more and more bloggers to the romance community, I’ve noticed something interesting. There seems to be a shift in reading tastes. I’m outside the blogging demographics – something I take pride in  . I’m older than many of my blogging friends. And I’ve been reading romance much longer than many of them. When I started reading romance, the vast majority of romance books were historicals. Thus, that makes up the vast majority of my past reading history. I’ve taken too much of the current romance genres like a duck to water, paranormal – lovin’ it, urban fantasy – I’ve surprised myself with how much I’m liking it. And so on.

But in a recent exchange with a new blogger, I was shocked when she mentioned she didn’t know that many bloggers who hadn’t read Lisa Kleypas’ historicals. And despite my ‘urging’ of a couple of years ago, there are still some who haven’t read Dreaming of You!! Imagine that! I find it hard to believe.

And I read a few blogs where said blogger has said they don’t read historicals.

Not long ago I was having a chat with another blogger who is fairly new to the romance genre. She has only been reading it for a year or two. She started with YA and then moved to paranormal and only now is she slowly venturing into historicals.

And I was trying to figure out why we are so vastly different in where we have come from. And I’ve come to some conclusions.

I’ve heard rumours from various sources that the ‘historical’ isn’t the hot genre right now, that it’s not selling the way it did when I first started reading. And that seems to be true in some sense. There is no question that paranormal is what’s hot these days. You can tell that by the fact that even some ‘famous’ historical writers such as Christina Dodd, who I’ve been reading since way back in the 1990’s when she wrote Medievals and Teresa Medeiros who again I’ve been reading since the 1990’s have been writing paranormals. So new converts to the romance world don’t have the same background because it just hasn’t been the in vogue genre lately.

In researching this post from my own source – my wonderful excel spreadsheet, paranormals really started hitting their stride in 2004. That is where they started taking off. So if a reader started reading romance somewhere in that time frame, then that is the genre they are probably most familiar with.

I think new romance readers are a savvier too. I don’t think they can identify with innocent young misses of the historical genre as much as we did when the historical had its heyday.

And there is also no question that today’s paranormals, urban fantasy and romantic suspense are more exciting then historicals. They are often thrill-a-minute reads and you aren’t sure where the action will take you! I think that also holds a great deal of appeal to the newer converts to romance.

But still, with all those reasons listed above, there is still a lot to love about historicals. I’ve read a number of excellent ones this year and I do encourage those who haven’t read historicals or are fairly new to the genre to take a read. Try a few out. Hopefully you will like what you read and be willing to try more. They were my first love and I’ll always love a good one!

This entry was posted by Kristie(J) on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 11:58 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.