Skip to main content
While romance itself generally takes place between two people—or more, this is Portland—reading romance novels tends to be a solitary activity. Not so at Romancing Portland, a new boutique book convention at the downtown Sentinel Hotel on Sept. 11–13.
The weekend-long event is designed to make every romance fan’s main character dreams come true. There will be a pajama movie night. There will be ballroom dancing lessons. Ben Barnes, the actor who plays Prince Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia and the Darkling in Netflix’s Shadow and Bone, will be there.
The centerpiece event, though, is the Amberleaf Masquerade Ball, which comes with its own lore created just for this event. It’s a fall equinox celebration in the Autumn Kingdom of Hallowshade. Attendees are encouraged to wear formal dress—fae or human, bourgeoisie or peasant, to taste—and enjoy traditional dance lessons and perhaps some interactive drama of princes from warring kingdoms.
It’s a little bit book fair, a little bit Renaissance faire, and all silly, sexy fun for people who are into this type of stuff.
“When people walk through these doors, we want them to feel like they have stepped into a romance book,” says Heather Barnes, senior marketing manager at LeftField Media, the event’s producer.
LeftField Media is the Connecticut-based company that also puts on Rose City Comic Con, the comic book and pop culture convention taking place that same weekend; most tickets to Romancing Portland come with Comic Con passes. This is LeftField’s first romance book convention, and it’s betting that Portland is just the right place to try it out.
A few factors went into deciding to create Romancing Portland and not, say, Romancing New York or Romancing Washington, D.C., two of the other cities where the company hosts events. One factor was Grand Gesture Books, downtown Portland’s romance-only bookstore that opened in 2024. The other is the way Portlanders treat their beloved niche events—not just showing up but showing out in elaborate, handmade original costumes and such.
“We know from Rose City Comic Con that you have a ton of artists, a ton of comic creators, a ton of writers—way more than we do at any of our other shows,” says Barnes, who is based in Chicago.
Romancing Portland grew out of the popular book fair portion of Rose City Comic Con, where authors have been doing readings and signings for the past few years. That plus the explosion of RomanceTok (the romance-focused subculture of TikTok’s BookTok) convinced LeftField Media that the time was right to launch the event.
The days of romance novels being surreptitious paperback purchases at the grocery store are long gone; the genre’s been big business for a while. Romance rakes in $1.4 billion a year, outpacing its nearest competition (crime and mystery) by double, according to Writer’s Digest and other outlets. A glance at a recent New York Times bestseller list for paperback trade fiction sees two romance books in the top 10: the suspense romance Verity by Colleen Hoover and the blockbuster romantasy A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. Those titles have both been on the list for dozens of weeks longer than their competition, at 158 and 84 weeks, respectively. Romance readers tend to read quickly and be loyal to their favorite authors, inhaling everything they write. Both qualities translate to dollars.
Grand Gesture will be the official bookseller at Romancing Portland. According to Katherine Morgan, owner of the bookstore, Portland is a big literary town in general, with a lot of love for romance, too. “Authors are excited to come here,” Morgan says. Events like Romancing Portland and Bookstore Romance Day, which Grand Gesture hosted in August, prove to publishers and publicists that Portland is a worthy book tour stop.
“There is a big expectation that romance can happen in Portland,” Morgan says, speaking in the business sense.
While romantasy—romance and fantasy genre crossovers—has blown up so big on BookTok that it threatens to overshadow the rest of the genre, Romancing Portland organizers were careful to book a diverse lineup of authors, both in the traditional sense of the word and in the genres they write. Contemporary romance author Jasmine Guillory (The Wedding Date, The Proposal) is coming, as is historical romance writer Alexandra Vasti (Scandal of the Summer). Emily Rath (Pucking Strong) will represent hockey romance, “which is very in vogue right now,” Barnes says, putting it mildly in a post–Heated Rivalry world. Local mother-daughter romance writing duo P.C. and Kristin Cast (House of Night series) will hold it down with dark romance.
That’s only half of the featured authors, plus there will be 22 indie authors and vendors, many of whom are local, in the “author alley” for attendees to meet. Unlike in regular life, where romance fans might not want to broadcast their enchantment with the latest bodice-ripper (it is often softcore porn, after all), Romancing Portland will be designed for fans to connect.
“We’re hoping we can break the stigma a little bit for some people,” Barnes says. “It’s fun. If something brings you joy in a world where there’s so many unjoyful things, you shouldn’t feel ashamed to embrace that.”
GO: Romancing Portland at the Sentinel Hotel, 614 SW 11th Ave., romancingportland.com. Sept. 11–13. $31–$355. 18+.
