Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Courtesy of the subjects
Did you know there are 30 million romance readers in the U. S., and that 50 percent of them read a book a week? Meanwhile, 50 percent of Americans don’t finish a single book in a year. So in addition to being sexist and snobbish, it’s bad business to dismiss smut. Friends and business partners Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo recognized that and decided they wanted a piece of the action. So they launched 831 Stories, a “modern romantic fiction company.” In their own words, think Marvel or Bravo for romance. They published their first book, Big Fan, by Alexandra Romanoff, in September. There are five more to come this year alone, not to mention the events, the merch, and the community fanfic they commission. On the In Her Shoes podcast this week, they join host Samhita Mukhopadhyay (former Teen Vogue executive editor, current Cut contributor, and author of The Myth of Making It) to discuss their new venture and making it work as business partners and best friends — no small feat. To hear more, listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can also read highlights from the interview below.
On their meet-cute:
We met at a dining hall in college at the University of Chicago in 2002. A mutual — we say frenemy, as shorthand — introduced us. He definitely tried to be a little bit like, “You two are different than most of the people at this school. You care about fashion and shopping and, you know, stuff like that. You should get to know each other.” And he was right. We loved each other immediately and just had a very fast friendship that, despite everything he said, did have a lot of intellectual underpinnings and a lot of shared interests.
On the appeal of romance novels in this moment:
I think just the dire state of the world made romance novels especially satisfying. And it was like, What is this masterful content? Where you always get a happily ever after, where the formula is the feature, and when we were getting stories about women’s love lives and sex lives that we just weren’t getting anywhere else in culture.
On the book that sparked the flame:
One of the first books that sort of kicked off this process and that really captured our minds and our hearts was The Idea of You … it had been recommended to us, and we both read it more or less in one sitting, like pulled all-nighters to finish it. And that story had so much in it that we didn’t necessarily expect to find in a romance, like an older protagonist whose career was really fully realized and whose career was not, you know, determined by the success of the relationship. This woman who felt very self-possessed and had incredible taste and just felt really aspirational in ways that I think a lot of the romantic heroines that we had grown up with — not necessarily in romantic fiction, but in movies — felt relatable, but not necessarily aspirational. Think of Bridget Jones, for example, and the hot-mess idea of a romantic lead, a female romantic lead who needs to be rescued in some capacity. And The Idea of You was really revelatory to us for a lot of reasons because it was like, Oh, I either see myself in parts of this character or wish I could see myself in parts of this character. Where can we find more of this?
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