| Pay a visit to a drugstore between now and Tuesday and the candy aisle will reveal one of the less romantic truths of Valentine’s Day: love, for some industries, is big business. That’s as true for book publishers as it is for chocolatiers, a fact made plain by The New Yorker’s 2009 Profile of Nora Roberts. A prolific romance novelist from a small town in Maryland, Roberts, at the time of the Profile, had written a hundred and eighty-two novels, twenty-seven copies of which were being sold every minute. Her books, published under her own name and the pseudonym J. D. Robb, were outgrossing those by John Grisham and Stephen King, and had, collectively, spent more than seven hundred weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Perhaps it’s to be expected that, in order to achieve such success, Roberts isn’t particularly starry-eyed about her craft. As the staff writer Lauren Collins recounts, Roberts wrote her first novel on a legal pad during a snowstorm, a tale about a “Spanish hero and heroine with a sprained ankle,” which Roberts herself later described as “simply dreadful.” But persistence, along with productivity, have become two of the author’s hallmarks, and her books have generally improved alongside their sales. Collins guides the reader through the history of the romance genre—simultaneously profitable and derided since its very beginnings—and illuminates Roberts’s distinctive approach. As for the frequent suggestion that Roberts’s writing might be a reflection of her own love life, the author is playfully dismissive. “Did people ever ask Agatha Christie,” she remarks, “if she was homicidal?” | 
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