Slow Burn's Tonya Pineda
Walk up the stairs and around the corner at 604 Gallatin Ave. and you’ll find Slow Burn Bookshop, Nashville’s first all-romance bookstore. You’ll know you’ve found the right place when you see the curling vines of roses, which drape over the shop’s wide windows.
Inside, Slow Burn looks like a dark academia library, the kind you might find in one of the castles in its Romantasy section. Its walls are painted black and covered in bookshelves, usually full of novels and trinkets. On my first visit to the shop, a rainy day just after its grand opening weekend on Jan. 10 and 11, most of those shelves were empty. With an estimated 1,600 attendees, the celebration was a huge success — and Slow Burn’s owner, Tonya Pineda, had to close for a whole week afterward to restock.
“I think that Nashville was just feral for a romance bookstore,” she says.
Slow Burn began as a “smut truck,” a side hustle that “just grew out of control” in the past year, Pineda says. She built a local following through social media and pop-up appearances, and eventually decided it was time to start her “brick-and-mortar era.”
“I didn’t go into this thinking I would open up a store at all,” she says.
Slow Burn
Romance fiction, a rock for an unsteady publishing market, is on the rise. U.S. print sales have doubled over the past five years, according to The Guardian. There’s a passionate fan base behind the genre, and Nashville is no exception. Pineda credits the local romance community for Slow Burn’s success, which has surprised even her.
“When I opened this, I had no clue how big this community was,” she tells the Scene.
To strengthen that sense of community, Pineda hosts events like the upcoming Galentine’s Day Weekend and a free monthly book club, which she plans by polling Slow Burn’s Instagram followers about what subgenre they’d like to read. This month she selected Your Masked Valentine by Pru Schuyler, a dark hockey romance centering on a professional player and his coach’s daughter. Club meetings feature themed trivia, and participants can purchase a “book box,” which typically includes a signed edition and goodies.
Tonya Pineda
Pineda got into romance novels as a young mother looking for an escape from the exhaustion of raising an infant. Originally, she sold her favorites as a way of spreading the gospel of romantic fiction. Now her favorites can be found in the store’s Monster/Paranormal room in the back — “that’s my section,” she says.
Like fan fiction, which the genre is frequently in conversation with, romance relies heavily on a semiotic language of tropes and subgenres like these, which readers tend to specialize in. Alongside the books on sale at Slow Burn are copies of the The Novel Trope Guide, a catalog published by Virginia bookstore Novel Grounds that serves as a guide for new fans. Looking for a spicy, small-town “fake dating” romance? You’ll find a recommendation in its pages, with icons to let you know if it’s part of a series, has a BIPOC author or LGBTQ themes, among other categories.
A queer sports romance display at Slow Burn
Slow Burn is organized by these subgenres, from Gothic to Sports Romance and everything between — including a prominent Heated Rivalry-themed display. The surprise-hit TV show is based on the gay hockey romance book series Game Changers, and Pineda thinks its success is simple: queer representation.
LGBTQ couples are “not very represented in mainstream media, or even big book media,” she points out. “They’re seeing themselves.”
A Heated Rivalry-themed "Sex Sells" cookie at Slow Burn
In turn, the show is creating a surge of interest in romance novels, especially queer ones. Jacob Tierney, the show’s creator, told cultural commentator Evan Ross Katz he approached adapting Game Changers “as a fan” after loving the book series. The romance audience is still predominantly female — Pineda estimates 85 percent. But as she points out, “There’s men that read this too.”
“[Game Changers] has been around for a long, long time,” she says. “I think people are now getting a peek at it, and they’re like, ‘Wow, we had no idea this even existed.’”
Championing the underrepresented is a core tenet of her shop’s mission. More than any particular subgenre, Slow Burn focuses on uplifting diverse perspectives and indie authors — a personal cause for Pineda.
“I’m a Black and Puerto Rican person, so I was never represented in any mass media growing up,” she says. “I hope that people feel [represented] when they come in here.”
Pineda also has her finger to the pulse. Dire Bound by Sable Sorensen, one of last year’s Slow Burn book club picks, was picked up for distribution by a Hachette imprint in May.
“Now is the time to be in romance,” she says. “So many indie authors that I follow have been traditionally picked up ... for movies, for publishing deals. There’s just so much happening.”
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