By Zoe Perzo
Eden Books is an online bookstore, based out of Florida, that focuses on romance and women’s fiction. Founded by Robyn Crawford in direct response to censorship efforts, Eden Books has grown tremendously in its six years of operation and primarily specializes in e-books. 
I sat down with Crawford to learn more about the incident that sparked Eden’s creation, and how Crawford has built and maintained such a unique bookstore.
Like many innovators, Crawford saw a problem and decided if no one else would tackle it, then she would.
“In 2017, K. Webster wrote a book, put it on Amazon, and it created quite the uproar in the romance community. And because people were so upset, Amazon banned the book. It just felt really wrong. I had never heard of Amazon banning a book up until that point,” Crawford recalled.
“Amazon carries things like Game of Thrones and the Bible, both of which have [content] that people could be deeply offended by, but those are books predominantly read by men and written by men. This felt like an attack on a genre that's predominantly read by women. It just felt like we were being told by a male-dominated industry that we were too stupid to make decisions about what we wanted to read.”
Crawford said that although she was upset about the incident, she initially tried to move past it. But then it happened again, and many self-published romance authors were worried about their writing careers and income. Amazon is the go-to distribution option for many self-published authors. Where else could they go?
“I kept thinking, ‘oh, someone is going to do something,’ ” Crawford explained, “but by March of 2018, no one had. So, I got to work.”
Crawford works full-time at the University of Florida, so she went down to the college’s center for entrepreneurship and said, “How do I do this?”
Eden Books launched in 2019, and while the store does carry physical books and popular romance titles, its primary focus is on e-books.
Crawford explained that a lot of thought and research went into the decision to focus on e-books, but it easily came down to what was best for the authors and the readers.
“I realized very quickly that romance readers are primarily reading e-books. For a lot of reasons, but I think the big one is that there’s still a stigma around the genre. There are also readers who are parents, and having those titles around could be potentially uncomfortable. Not to mention, e-books are less expensive and easier to access, and romance readers have a voracious appetite,” Crawford said. “It became pretty obvious to me that I needed to meet the authors and readers where they were.”
Eden’s e-book authors go through an approval process — things like verifying the work is their original piece and applying the appropriate genres and tags — then their work is available for readers to purchase and download to their preferred e-reader.
“We carry a lot of indie authors within the romance genre. We’re really known for carrying the books that other retailers don’t carry. That’s our big reputation. And after six and a half years, I am genuinely still amazed at the response that we get from authors and readers,” Crawford said. 
Eden’s initial growth was slow but steady, but shortly before COVID it experienced an alarming but exciting spike in popularity.
“We had a very popular writing duo upload their entire backlog to our site, and they created a bundle with 99 of their books for one phenomenal price. They had a massive following, and we went from getting 4,000 hits per day to 12,000 hits in an hour. They hit our site so hard and we were not prepared for that push. They crashed the site,” she laughed. “I remember having a meltdown, then laughing because that was actually a good thing.”
Crawford mentioned that Eden has grown almost entirely by word of mouth, but the romance community is a dedicated one, and the store has continued to thrive.
Today, Eden also offers a membership program — the Orchard Program — that is designed to complement the buying and reading habits of its customers. Members can choose between a one month membership, three months, six months, or a year, and during that time they will receive a discount on all their purchases.
“I love the idea of an annual membership,” Crawford explained, “but I have those memberships and I know I don’t always take full advantage of them. So it’s easy for members to adjust their tier based on their budget and we do not automatically renew our members. I never want our readers to feel taken advantage of. I want to make sure that readers are getting the most out of the benefit and that it fits their budgetary needs.”
Though Crawford has already built this unique and successful venture from scratch, she’s still looking for ways to innovate in the future.
“I’d love to offer audiobooks,” she said. “Currently, the cost of making those available is astronomical. But I would love to have an audiobook production company or under the Eden umbrella because audiobooks are my favorite. And I think this may be many booksellers’ dream, but to have my own imprint and be able to support more authors and get more books out into the hands of readers…that would just be the coolest to me.”
“Those are really big goals,” she laughed, “but I think they are actually doable.”
For Crawford, the romance community — the authors and readers — makes this all worth it. And she’s thrilled that in the past few years more romance bookstores have popped up and the genre is becoming less stigmatized.
“This is a community of really good people, and they just want to be able to read and get a little bit of hope and love into their lives. And I love that these books are very reflective of what we as women are experiencing in our own lives, and that these books always give us a little hope and a little reminder that we should be loved for who we are. We should be accepted for exactly who we are and we should never change for anyone unless it's ourselves,” she said.
Crawford says she and Eden Books will be around for as long as possible to support and advocate for the romance community.
We can’t wait to see how Eden Books expands in the future. You can visit Eden Books’ website to learn more, or follow them on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok