Readers’ increasingly vocal partiality for first-person perspective over third person amounts to a profound shift in taste. Even while publishing is in dire straits elsewhere, the romance genre is in the midst of an unprecedented boom period. Sales in the genre have doubled since 2020, almost single-handedly rehabilitating an industry that had been ailing for decades. (Of America’s 10 best-selling books in 2024, six of them were romance.) But the readers buying those titles often demand that authors render them to their precise specifications: first person, with a fixed perspective, no omniscient lapses allowed. It’s a minor aesthetic preference, but it also might be transforming literary culture as a whole.