Minneapolis' Tropes and Trifles aims to bring more bodice-ripping romance to your life

Love sells. And a soon-to-open store in Minneapolis wants to capitalize on that.

Romance bookstore Tropes and Trifles, which operated a pop-up for the last seven weeks of 2023, did so well that it's temporarily closing to create more sales space. The plan is to reopen in March at the same location, 2709 E. 38th St.

The Twin Cities' first bookstore devoted to the genre is well-timed. Romance is the top-selling genre in publishing, with sales nearing 20 million copies a year and $1.44 billion in revenue for 2022, according to the most recent data.

A lot of that success has to do with writers such as prolific Colleen Hoover, who frequently has multiple titles on bestseller lists at once and who has attracted new readers.

"It's not just boy-falls-in-love-with-girl," said Lauren Richards, 39, co-owner of Tropes and Trifles, who says titles featuring LGBTQ or neurodivergent characters (and authors) of color are among her favorites. "Sometimes, people want to read stories about people who look like them and share similar experiences and sometimes they want to read stories about people who are different from them."

The store's footprint will remain 1,000 square feet but co-owner Caitlin O'Neil, 35, said one of the lessons of the pop-up was that "we need a lot more room and a lot more shelves in order to fit a lot more books, in order to meet demand."

Part of the expansion plan is to reconfigure the store, which now has 500 square feet of shelving, so there's 700-800 square feet of sales space. That will allow Tropes and Trifles to triple the 1,500 titles they stocked in the pop-up.

Although the store will be shuttered until construction is completed sometime in March, the plan is for pop-ups to appear at other Twin Cities locations in the meantime. To keep track of those, visit tropesandtrifles.com.