Leeds bookseller on how a New Year's Resolution led to her starting up her award-winning romance novels business

Words & Kisses was recently named as the Romantic Bookseller of the Year by the Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) – almost exactly a year after Amy Richards quit her job in digital marketing to focus on the enterprise full time.

The business was set up as a subscription service in 2019 but when interest in escapist and romantic fiction piqued during the pandemic, Amy began selling books as well.

As Amy’s home in Meanwood became more and more cluttered, her and her husband decided to knock down the garage and build a workspace, which has since been nicknamed The Smut Hut.

Amy, 32, explained how she fell in love with romantic fiction after setting herself the target of reading 100 books in 2015. She said her passion for literature had waned after relentlessly reading books for her university studies.

She said: “I realised how much I missed it.”

Amy began consuming “anything I could get my hands on”, but it was the romantic novel A Rogue By Any Other Name by Sarah MacLean that, she said, “changed my life”.

She said: “I started reading as much romance as I could. I forgot that reading could be so fun.

"I think there’s a safety and catharsis of knowing that if bad things happen there’s always a happy ending.”

Amy said discovered a community of equally voracious romance readers in the UK but said it was hard to come across novels in mainstream bookstores like Waterstones.