Updated October 5, 2025 at 11:54 PM EDT
On a warm Thursday night, new author Erika Veurink stands on stage of a New York City karaoke bar and belts out a breakup song. She is wearing a purple baseball hat that says "road trip romance" — a nod to the trope at the heart of her first novella, Exit Lane — as friends, family and book lovers sing along.
There are touches around this room that nod to Veurink's book. There are candy cigarettes dumped on tables, as well as a list of karaoke songs that the main characters from Exit Lane, Marin and Teddy, would have sung.
And that's on purpose.
The publisher behind Exit Lane is 831 Stories, a fledgling romantic fiction company that launched a year ago this month. Co-founders Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur say they want to cultivate a world around the books they publish. And events like Veurink's karaoke party are part of their strategy, stoking fandom among ravenous readers who devour the books — searching for the promise of a happily ever after.
We were "really thinking about how do we bring these books to life in our real world? How do we think of them as this sort of augmented reality," Cerulo says. "There's a big karaoke moment in [Exit Lane] … [it] gives people a different experience with the story."
And as the genre explodes, that different experience might be what readers want.
Romance print sales are up 24% over the last year, according to market research firm Circana.
Cerulo and Mazur are capitalizing on that growth. 831 Stories has released six novellas so far and each story has specific merch, steamy epilogues and fanfiction.
Brenna Connor, books industry analyst at Circana, says 831 Stories is "differentiating themselves from existing romance publishers" by "tapping into this new generation of romance readers and what's important to them."
Their own 831 story
Mazur and Cerulo have a romance story of their own.
"We have a true meet cute," Cerulo says. The two were set up by a mutual friend at University of Chicago more than 20 years ago. "It was love at first sight," Mazur added.
Throughout their friendship they had a few different business ventures and then the pandemic hit and they became engrossed in the world of romance.
"It was like … this is all we want to read ever," Cerulo says. "Just completely devouring them in the way that hardcore romance readers do."
When Mazur and Cerulo discovered Facebook groups full of romance readers and the fanfiction they were creating, they were "so fascinated by that possibility to immerse [ourselves] in the stories of these books so far beyond the pages," Mazur added.
It "felt revelatory, but also — and this is going to sound hyperbolic — but truly revolutionary," Mazur says.
Expanding the story beyond the page
Cerulo and Mazur have also been strategic about the way 831 books look. Each cover is color blocked, with the signature cupid logo at the top.
"Aesthetics and cover designers have always played this really big and important role in romance. And whether they embrace them or they're sort of like hiding them, they do a lot of work in terms of signaling. And so as we knew that the covers had to feel distinctive and they had to do something," Mazur says.
The founders were also inspired by a rich history of distinctive romance covers. "The color palette, which is so important to the covers, is very much inspired by the blockbuster era of Judith Krantz and Danielle Steel," she says.
And those covers are getting noticed by readers, too.
Rachel Benchimol first learned about the company at her local bookstore. The sales associate gave her four books from 831 Stories. "Didn't even take that much convincing," she says.
"It might sound a little silly, but you love holding a book that almost feels like an accessory, like a fashion piece and statement," Benchimol says.
Benchimol also says another selling point for her was the size of the books. All 831 Stories are novella length — roughly 200 pages.
"Quick, easy, delightful and just such a good feel good type of read," she says. "This is exactly what I need in my busy day to day."
The merch is also part of their business model.
For Exit Lane, there's a $125 rugby shirt reminiscent of the book's male main character, Teddy, and $35 baseball cap both in purple and marigold, to match the cover of the book.
"For us, the fun of getting to wear the rugby shirt that the male main character wears in the book is that way of continuing to exist in the universe," Mazur says. "And it feels like world building tasks. It feels like expanding the story beyond the page."
"I think it's also fun for a lot of readers, even just to know that the merch is there reading the book and being like, 'wait, I wonder if that sweatshirt — if they've made it,'" Cerulo adds.
'Holding my hand'
Before Veurink hit the stage at Manhattan karaoke bar, she had an event at the Strand Book Store and shared what it was like working with 831 Stories. Veurink, who has a popular Substack, wrote a short essay in 2021 that she worked from to create Exit Lane.
"Honestly, they [Mazur and Cerulo] made it so easy. I always knew what was next," Veurink said. "It's not like I dove into a draft and sort of hoped for the best. We worked together on the outline and the logline … I felt like they were holding my hand through the process."
Cerulo, who oversees editorial, says before they launched, they were cold-emailing authors "who we thought might have an 831 Stories novella in them."
"People who wrote really compellingly about relationships and love," she says. Writers "we thought that they could write sex on the page because that is core to our lane of romance."
Now, a year later and six books in, authors are reaching out to them.
Copyright 2025 NPR
