“It’s two different audiences. Readers who are reading M/M fiction aren’t reading gay fiction. It’s two different types of books.” 

-An article discussing the M/M Romances that seems to dominate gay book categories. 

Trends in contemporary popular fiction can be as unpredictable as fashion fads. Nobody expected, for instance, that the gloomy, bespectacled Harry Potter would help resuscitate the ailing book industry any more than Lady Gaga’s bizarre looks would help motivate retail sales. Yet today’s newest publishing trend is as out in left field as Potter and Gaga once were.

Over the past year, man-on-man romantic fiction – books featuring two male protagonists engaged in a sexual or emotional relationship with each other – has taken a significant bite out of one of publishing’s biggest markets. Amazon’s Kindle has had such success with the genre that the e-book site has tripled its “m/m” stock since January, 2010. Even Harlequin – the most profitable and old-fashioned romance fiction house in the world – has recently started to publish same-sex love stories via the company’s digital imprint, Carina Press. What’s most surprising, though, are the types of readers the books have hooked: Straight, married women are among the genre’s top fans. That may be because the authors, such as Iowa’s Heidi Cullinan, a 37-year-old suburban mother of two, are frequently heterosexual females, too. Cullinan has penned such recent works as the popular gay romance Double Blind and the homoerotic fantasy Miles and The Magic Flute.