As a young reader (probably too young, she admits), Ana Huang scouted her favorite romance books at the supermarket.
Her journey with the genre started, like many others, with Harlequin trade paperbacks. Here, Huang could find a guaranteed happy ending and arcs that made her favorite fictional characters feel real. But as a Chinese American reader, she rarely read any with characters who looked like her.
Now, Huang is dominating the romance genre herself, even solidifying a place on the Top 5 bestselling BookTok authors with over 1.47 million copies sold in 2024, according to Forbes. Publishing is still a largely white industry. Four out of those top five bestselling authors are white women – Huang is the only Asian author and author of color represented in the entire Top 10.
As we kick off Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, USA TODAY talked with Huang about the representation she wants to see in the romance genre and how she crafted her new dark, steamy novel “King of Envy,” out now from Bloom Books.
King of Envy is a ‘return to form’ for Huang
“King of Envy” is Huang’s 14th book and the fifth in her “Kings of Sin” series, each of which focuses on one of the seven deadly sins. The series uses the beloved billionaire romance trope – thank you “Fifty Shades of Grey” – often combining glitz and wealth with high-stakes action. In “King of Envy,” our pair is the tortured billionaire Vuk Markovic and renowned supermodel Ayana Kidane. When the novel opens, Ayana is engaged to Jordan, one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, but you quickly learn it’s a sham so that he can get his inheritance and she can get paid off enough to leave her abusive agency.
It’s a perfect plan, except for when she finds herself falling for his best man – Vuk. The story is teeming with tension and morally gray love interests and a healthy dose of the “touch her and you die” trope. While her recent projects have had “softer” leading men and themes, Huang calls “King of Envy” and its palm-sweating suspense a “return to form.” She listened to angsty songs like “Let the World Burn” by Chris Grey and “Moth to a Flame” by The Weeknd and Swedish House Mafia to set the tone for “King of Envy.”
‘King of Envy’ – like any Ana Huang book – has plenty of spice
Having written many “spicy” scenes across 14 books, Huang knows a thing or two about how to convey sex on the page. It starts with the emotion, she says. Rather than structuring a bedroom scene on mechanics alone, she asks the characters what they need to get emotionally out of a sexual encounter.
But how do you keep it from being formulaic? She admits it’s harder to write steamy scenes the more books she writes.
“I tend not to be as liberal with the spice scenes as maybe my earlier stuff, just because I want to make sure they all serve a purpose. But also, I’ll be honest, sometimes I get a little bit tired,” she says, laughing. “I still love them, but it just takes a little bit more out of me.”
Still, there’s plenty of spice in “King of Envy.” Though romance is often dismissed as “fluff” or “guilty pleasure reads,” Huang says she’s proud to offer a safe space for readers (especially women) to explore their sexuality. Readers told USA TODAY earlier this year that spicy romance is empowering and even translates off the page into developing healthy sex lives. The genre is booming and driving the publishing industry. It’s so big, it’s crossing over to the silver screen with adaptations like “It Ends With Us” and Huang’s own “Twisted” series coming to Netflix.
“It’s a place for play and exploration,” Huang says. “And I love that romance is a genre that centers female desire and pleasure. They can take agency over that. You can’t really say that of a lot of other genres.”
In a video she made for Audible in 2023, Huang told the story of the time she told an Uber driver she wrote romance. He gave her a pamphlet of religious teachings. It’s an attitude many readers and non-readers alike have – that romance has no substance. But most of that is coming from people who don’t read the genre at all.
“It’s so frustrating, as an author, to see those conversations play out from people outside of the genre,” she tells USA TODAY. “Obviously, a lot of it is rooted in misogyny … but I think the romance community is strong. It’s been here for so long, and the umbrella is growing every day.”
Huang’s books prioritize diversity. She wants publishing to be the same.
A hallmark of Huang’s work is her diverse cast of characters across race, ethnicity and life experience. In “King of Envy,” Vuk is selectively non-verbal and uses American Sign Language, which Huang included because it’s a demographic she doesn’t often see represented in the romance genre. Because the Kings of Sin series is set largely in New York City, one of the most diverse major cities in the U.S., not creating a diverse cast of characters would be a “disservice,” she says.
She hopes to see the same reflected in publishing, at every level.
“At the end of the day, publishing is always about the bottom line,” Huang says. “But sometimes I find it a little frustrating because they’ll say, … ‘We published this book and it just didn’t sell that well and it just happened to be a diverse book by a diverse author.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, did you put as many marketing resources into this book?’
“This is something that needs to be at every level,” she continues. “You need to have BIPOC acquiring editors. You need that type of representation on the marketing team. It can’t just be like, ‘We acquired this book to say that we did it.’”
Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at [email protected].
