Pink Couch Books to bring a touch of romance to downtown Wilmette

With the romance-book genre bursting off the page, a local woman will bring its next chapter to Wilmette.

Lora Amigo is preparing Pink Couch Books for 1161 Wilmette Ave., getting in on the genre’s wave of success with a romance-focused book shop. Amigo got into romance literature about a year ago, leading to a conversation with her hometown officials about opening an independent bookstore.

“I was toying around with the idea mainly because I love that (a bookstore) could be a community hub, a space where people can come and feel welcome, especially in a small town like this,” Amigo said. “I told the village about it.”

With the village, Amigo identified and viewed several storefronts until finding 1161 Wilmette Ave., the longtime home of John’s Shoes, a retail and repair shop that was in flux.

The limited size of the space enabled Amigo to rethink her idea for her bookstore, eventually settling on a shop focused on the romance genre.

“I thought about it, and this could actually be perfect,” she said.

As a reader, Amigo is far from alone in her pivot to romance novels. In 2022, romance sales grew 52.4% over the previous year, and they grew another 34.6% on top of that over the next six months, according to Publishers Weekly. And then in 2024, at least the first nine months of the year, seven of the top 10 selling books were either romance or romantasy (a hybrid of romance and fantasy literature), also according to Publishers Weekly.

Amigo said the books “completely changed my brain chemistry.” She said she went from a few books a year to 50 last year. Amigo is outpacing that mark this year, already finishing 20 books in the first quarter of 2025.

“There is a romance book out there for everybody,” she said. “It is such a wide, all-encompassing genre. Part of what I love is the approach, telling stories usually from a female perspective or LGTBQ perspective, which is refreshing.”

Also important to Amigo is “this wonderful community of readers” offered by the romance genre.

Amigo keeps a “bookstagram,” referring to an account she — like millions of users — opened on Instagram that is dedicated to book-related content, such as recent reads, reviews, memes and more. And she is active in that virtual community.

But she said romance readers also form a robust in-real-life community, and she hopes to nurture that at Pink Couch Books in Wilmette by hosting book clubs and other events.

While romance books will be Pink Couch Books’ primary product, Amigo said the shop will also carry some young adult titles and other books, while also being available for quick orders of whatever else a customer wants, thanks to Bookshop.org, an online retailer that supports independent bookstores and authors.

Amigo does most of her reading on, you guessed it, a pink couch in her home. Her bookstagram handle is @the.pink.couch.book.club. So when it came to naming her bookstore, the answer was right there.

That pink couch will be a centerpiece of the shop, which Amigo is hoping to open by Memorial Day.

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