IST 605: Contemporary Romance Literature

     Romance fiction is an incredibly popular literary genre. In fact, romance sales have been the highest in the past few years than they've been for over a decade. Romance is an old and well-trodden genre with a thousand-and-one subgenres; however, for this LibGuide, we'll be focusing on contemporary romance only. But what does contemporary romance mean? Put simply: Contemporary romance is romance that takes place in modern times--"modern" being defined as the era in which the author wrote it--with none to very limited speculative elements. Other than taking place in our modern world and focusing on a couple, there is only one requirement for any book to be a contemporary romance novel: it must have a Happily Ever After (HEA) or a Happily For Now (HFN) ending. 

     This guide, then, addresses the following: a brief history of the genre, why diversity in romance is important, recommendations for a beginner reader, and why you should read romance. 

• Google - Whether you're looking for more information on a book, recommendations, or anything else contemporary-romance related, Google is the best place to start. Here is where you'll likely have the best luck with the phrase searching technique below, as well as using other commands; for example adding "-ai" to the end of your search will exclude Google's AI from answering your query.
• romance.io - A romance database that covers romance by genre; it has new releases, older releases, books yet to come out, etc. It has both a star rating and a "flame rating", meaning you are able to see how sexual or not a book is (closed-door = no sex on page, open door = sex on the page). 
• Goodreads - Owned by Amazon, this is a database for readers to log and rate books they've read. Home to a variety of "lists" curated by Goodreads workers and readers alike, this site is full of recommendations; because it's made for readers, searching by genre is easy. 
• Storygraph - Similar to Goodreads, it's a database where readers can log and rate the books they've read. However, Storygraph has an AI recommendation feature, as well as other features like trigger warnings. 
• WorldCat - Resource for finding books and their availability in libraries. If possible, search by book title or author rather than general keywords like "contemporary romance" for best results. 
• Internet Archive - A library with a variety of resources, including ebooks. Excellent for finding academic sources on romance, older romance books, and other resources like podcast episodes on contemporary romance and Harlequin category romances. 
• JSTOR - Contains a lot of academic sources on romance/contemporary romance. Useful if looking into romance theory and romance as a genre. 

Search Engine Strategies

Phrase Searching: This can be quite helpful, as search engines and databases will often take a search like 'contemporary romance' and look for the words contemporary or romance. By using quotation marks to surround your phrase, you will show you are trying to find resources that contain that whole phrase. Some examples are: "contemporary romance", "contemporary romance novel", "romance book".