By M the Bookdragon, Reader
Hi everyone, M the Bookdragon here! I’ve been a bookstagrammer since 2023 and have built so many great relationships with authors and other bookstagrammers across Canada and around the world. I’m a pretty eclectic reader, enjoying non-fiction, comic books, children’s and YA, but I especially love romance!
I post almost exclusively reviews of books by Canadian authors and try to feature as many Canadian small businesses as possible. And recently I was accepted to be part of the influencer team for the Rose City Romance Conference that will bring together some amazing authors, many of them Canadian, in Windsor this June. When I was invited to write a guest blog post, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about. Despite my years of being a reader, dreams of being a writer, and the opportunities I’ve had because of my account, I’m not exactly an expert in anything. That being said, I am very passionate about Canadian romance books being set in Canada, so while I’m no expert and I have no statistics to back me up on any of this, here are my thoughts on the matter.
In Canada we are so heavily influenced by American media that I feel like sometimes we get lost finding our own identity. Music, movies, and books have such a huge role in shaping our view of the world without us even noticing it. So much of what I read growing up was set in the States and those stories continue to be the ones that get hyped up these days by publishers, reviewers and the power of BookTok. Even Canadian authors tend to set their books in American cities, sometimes with Canadian characters who have moved there, to cater to the market or get publishing deals with bigger publishers who can make their writing careers more successful.
And I get it. There are a lot more people on that side of the border and much bigger publishers with much greater reach. But Canada is a beautiful country with its own iconic landmarks and unique contexts that deserve to be represented in romance books. We’ve got mountains and oceans, big cities and small towns, farmland and forests, glaciers and hot springs, more lakes than I can count, and weather of all kinds.
We have professional sports teams (sports romances), tons of movies are filmed here (celebrity romances), tourist destinations and roadtrip routes (travel romances), companies of all sizes (workplace romance), post-secondary institutions (college romances), and, you know, people (every other kind of romance), all of which lend themselves to romantic meet-cutes.
Across Canada you can find different accents and languages, historic locations, unique celebrations and traditions, and so much more. And of course, there’s pretty much everything you could want for spicy or sweet scenarios and settings!
I know I can’t be the only one who gets ridiculously excited when I recognize the locations in books as somewhere I’ve been in Canada. I lost my ever-loving mind reading Pucked Over by Helena Hunting which has a huge portion of the book set in my hometown. Even without explicitly naming places, I had so much fun knowing exactly where she was talking about, and knowing I’d been to many hockey games in that rink.
Even the fictional town of Mosquito Bay from the Holidays with the Wongs series by Jackie Lau references real places you can kind of triangulate from, and I have concluded that I’ve definitely been there. That series also starts off with a Thanksgiving romance and…wait for it…it’s Canadian Thanksgiving…in October! How often do we get to see that?
If you’ve read It Happened One Christmas by Chantel Guertin, you know that our heroine is scouting locations for her movie in Chelsea, Quebec where she ends up taking part in many Quebecois Christmas traditions and has the pleasure of being snowed in with the grumpy local mayor.
And in Out on a Limb by Hannah Bonam-Young, our strong female lead can consider her surprise pregnancy without the fear of safe care or legal implications if she decides it isn’t something she can go through, and she does decide to have the baby without being forced into that decision by the government.
The rise in popularity of indie published books is fantastic for Canadian romance authors. As previously mentioned, I know many authors whose editors/publishers told them to change the setting of their books because they think readers will like it more. It seems like such a small thing, since the city/country of the book is rarely mentioned that many times, but to some of us it is a big deal.
Canadian indie authors don’t always have this sort of pressure imposed on them. They can set their books here at home, find their audience and, from there, superfans are born. Stephanie Archer, Kelsey Woods, and Tori Samuels are auto-buy authors for me, and all of their books are set in beautiful Canadian locations, either real or fictional. Elsie Silver, Hannah Bonam-Young, Bailey Hannah, and others started as indie authors with the freedom to base their books wherever worked best for the story they wanted to tell, and when publishers realized how popular their books are, and that they have dedicated fanbases, they got offers to move to traditional publishing with their books exactly the way they became so popular.
The rising popularity of authors like Elsie Silver, Helena Hunting and Carley Fortune, who unapologetically set their books in Canada yet still reach readers around the world, give me hope that things are changing and I’ll get to see more and more proudly Canadian books getting the hype they deserve in reader spaces.
I do want to note that I also hold nothing against Canadian authors who write books not set in Canada. Sometimes the story calls for a specific place, or the author has a place in mind that they love and making it the setting is like a love letter to that location. I am still going to read and love their books.
I just don’t want Canadian authors to feel like they can’t set their books in Canada because no one will read it. *frantically waves arm around in the air* I WILL!!!! I will always read your books that are set in this beautiful country and deal with the issues it has. It’s not a utopia, far from it, but we need to show that, too, instead of just being sucked into other countries’ drama and pretending ours doesn’t exist.
Finding sites like this one and accounts like mine that actively promote Canadian romance authors makes my heart so happy, whether or not the books are set in Canada. When I first discovered the CanLit Romance Index, I immediately went through and started searching all the authors to follow them on social media. I knew a lot of them, but there are so many new (to me) authors the index helped me discover.
I’ve had so many Canadian bookstagrammers get so excited when I mention the books are #SetInCanada or that I almost only post Canadian books because, whether they realized it or not, they have also been missing them.
And while not always complete, I have noticed libraries and Canadian bookstores tagging books written by Canadian authors in some way to help people have those “ah ha!” moments while browsing. Personally, my home library is more than 60% Canadian because over the last few years it has become a major priority for me. I still read books by non-Canadian authors, but they come second to my Canadian TBR. I love slipping Canadian romance books into book club voting (especially online book clubs that have non-Canadians in them), and when I one day work in a library setting, I will 100% be promoting Canadian romance in any way possible.
The more of us who actively seek out and promote Canadian authors, the more likely Canadian readers (and others of course) will start to passively discover them too!
HEA Canada: A CanLit Romance Hub 