What the End of Mass Market Paperbacks in 2025 Means for Romance Readers

If you’ve ever tucked a $7.99 paperback into your purse, cracked open a clinch cover in secret, or binged six historical romances in a weekend… you might want to sit down.

Mass market paperbacks: the compact, affordable format that carried genre fiction for decades, are being phased out. By the end of 2025, major distributor Readerlink will no longer carry them, and publishers are quietly shifting priorities away from the format that made romance the powerhouse it is today.

And if you’re a romance reader? This is going to hit different.

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The Rise of Mass Market Paperbacks

Mass market paperbacks began making waves in the 1940s. Affordable, portable, and printed on pulpier paper, they were designed for the everyday reader. You didn’t need a fancy bookstore or a big budget, you could grab a book at the drugstore on your lunch break and be swept away by chapter three.

When romance started booming in the ’80s and ’90s, it did so through the MMPB format. Entire shelves were filled with them, from lush historicals and spicy contemporaries to romantic suspense and time-traveling Highlanders. If you were lucky, you had a stack of them hidden under your bed, maybe borrowed from a family member or picked up for $2 at a thrift store.

It wasn’t just that they were cheap. They were bingeable. They made it easy, and affordable, to read entire series. You could fall in love with a family of brothers, a team of Navy SEALs, a group of stubborn debutantes… and then keep going without worrying about your bank account.

Romance and the MMPB

Some genres flirted with mass market, but romance? Romance married it.

Historical romance, in particular, found its stride in this format. Authors like Johanna Lindsey, Beverly Jenkins, Lisa Kleypas, and Julia Quinn became household names thanks to those jewel-toned spines lined up in grocery stores and Walmart aisles. Avon, Berkley, Zebra, these were the imprints you trusted. You knew exactly what kind of story you were getting, just from the cover.

And oh, the covers. The stepbacks. The drama. The satin gowns and shirtless rakes caught mid-clinch. For many of us, those images are as burned into memory as the stories themselves.

There was a rhythm to it. You’d finish one book, start the next. You didn’t overthink it. You didn’t curate an aesthetic. You just read.

If you want to travel back in time, check our complete series of the romance genre evolution through the decades over on Substack.

So What Happened?

The shift away from mass market paperbacks didn’t happen all at once. It started gradually. Fewer titles, smaller print runs, a shrinking footprint in stores. Then in early 2025, the announcement from Readerlink made it official: distribution would stop by year’s end. And just like that, the format that built romance started slipping through our fingers.

Behind the scenes, publishers pointed to the same issues: high return rates, rising costs, razor-thin margins. MMPBs were cheap for readers, yes, but they weren’t always sustainable for the industry.

And then something else happened. Romance got a glow-up.

The Romcom Boom and the BookTok Effect

Around the mid-2010s, illustrated romcoms started taking off. Books like The Hating Game, The Kiss Quotient, and Red, White & Royal Blue brought romance back into indie bookstores and onto bestseller lists. These titles had fresh cover designs, flirty taglines, and they were printed in trade paperback — that larger, more expensive format you now see everywhere.

Then came BookTok. TikTok made romance cool again, but the books that went viral were almost all trade paperbacks. Publishers paid attention, and started shifting more titles, including historicals, into trade to match that BookTok buyer expectation. Suddenly, the compact, no-frills MMPB felt invisible.

BookTok didn’t kill mass market, but it did help solidify the next phase of romance publishing. One where covers are curated for aesthetics, not always built for speed or volume. One where price points edge out binge readers and backlist collectors.

Why This Matters (Especially for Romance Readers)

This shift wouldn’t be such a big deal if romance readers read the way other genre readers do, one book every month or two, maybe three a year.

But we don’t. We read a lot.

That’s part of what makes romance special, the comfort, the joy, the emotional escape. For many of us, a romance book isn’t a once-in-a-while indulgence. It’s a daily ritual.

So when the cost of each book doubles or triples, it doesn’t just change your budget. It changes your entire relationship with reading.

And it’s not just historical romance that’s at risk here. Romantic suspense, cozy mystery, paranormal romance, all the binge-friendly, series-driven subgenres that relied on fast, affordable releases, are now being squeezed out of the print ecosystem.

These are genres that thrive on discovery and loyalty. They don’t always translate to TikTok trends or collector’s editions. And without a format that supports them… they may quietly vanish from shelves.

What Comes Next?

So what do we do, as readers who grew up with mass market paperbacks and still crave that same pace, that same feeling?

We adapt, like we always do.

Some of us will shift to digital. Ebooks and Kindle Unlimited have made it easier to keep up, especially for indie releases. Others will hunt for MMPBs in used bookstores or build their collections secondhand. Some will hold onto their favorites and reread them, treating them like the treasures they are.

And some of us will hope, maybe quietly, maybe not, that publishers are still listening. That they’ll keep offering affordable formats, even if the margins are thinner. That they’ll find ways to support the genres and readers that helped build this industry.

Because romance has always been about more than just the love story on the page. It’s about belonging. And we want formats that let more readers belong.

FAQs About Mass Market Paperbacks in 2025

Final Thoughts

The end of mass market paperbacks isn’t just the end of a publishing model. It’s the end of a reading experience so many of us grew up with. The good news? The stories aren’t going anywhere. But the way we access them, and who gets to access them, is changing fast.

So tell me, what’s your favorite mass market paperback? Which cover still lives rent-free in your brain? Drop your memories in the comments. Let’s give this format the send-off it deserves.

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