According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the romantic-fantasy (romantasy) genre is one of the fastest growing genres for print book sales in the US. Through the first half of 2024, sales eclipsed 25 million copies. That article had me thinking, with all of that print media, could there be a connection to more and more PFAS sites popping up across the country? After all, there has to be PFAS involved in printing and distributing all of those books, right?
To see if steamy books are to blame for more PFAS, I gathered data from the Wall Street Journal on year-over-year romantasy print book sales. Then I gathered data from the Environmental Working Group on the detection of PFAS in water systems across the country year-over-year for the same time period. Finally, I overlaid the data to see if there was any correlation. Here are the results:
As you can see, steamy book sales and the number of PFAS sites have both increased in almost perfect lockstep between 2019 and 2024. What do you think? Are romantasy novels causing this trend? Did I just uncover a major breakthrough, or is it simply a lack of site sampling in prior years?
Sources:
Environmental Working Group
Wall Street Journal
How Dragons, Magic and Steamy Sex Took Over the Book World – WSJ
