Dear friends,Our second podcast episode is out! And it’s a treat. In this conversation with superb sisters Leah and Bea Koch, co-owners and founders of Los Angeles romance-only bookstore The Ripped Bodice, we get into the questions about what Jane Austen has to do with romance (a lot, friends), diversity and equity in the romance business from representation to pay, and real women of the Regency era. (Spoiler alert: They’re mad and bad! ) In next week’s conversation we’ll get Leah and Bea’s favorite romance tropes and themes … not to mention some of their favorite Austen retellings. So stay tuned! Those of us who are romance readers know that the romance industry is a billion-dollar industry with a huge demand in readers - including many of us in the Austen world, and also including Leah and Bea Koch themselves. The sisters say they have always loved romance novels. They also have serious academic degrees in their fields, and they work with Sony Pictures to find books that can be adapted for the screen. So for these sisters, as for the industry itself, romance is serious business.Bea and Leah have also noticed that like much else in our culture, the romance industry has a diversity problem - so they have produced an annual State of Racial Diversity in Romance Publishing Report - gauging the numbers of books being published by BIPOC authors in traditional romance publishing.Besides running a business through the pandemic, Bea Koch also published a book exploring little-known Regency women from marginalized backgrounds in her book Mad & Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency. I caught up with Leah and Bea Koch by Zoom a while back. We talked about how the Regency era has been whitewashed not only in romance storytelling but in so much of our cultural discourse. And when it comes to Regency stories, history, romance, how these stories are presented historically and how they might more accurately reflect the actual racial diversity of the era - they have some thoughts!They began by talking about how challenging the pandemic year had been. But there was an upside - people from all over the world were joining their bookstore events, virtually. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation. Plain Jane  So, Leah, it sounds like ups and downs, as you say [during the pandemic]. But one positive might be the community - people are searching out community, people are searching out books. Have you found increased interest or just sort of connecting?Leah Koch  Yeah, well, and I think possibly one of the only silver linings is the real sort of expansion of our community on a global sense. Because I think before people were still excited about the store, but it was sort of like, “Oh, maybe when I go on vacation to California someday, I would get to come.” And I think we every once in a while did a live streaming event if the author really wanted to, but it just wasn't something that we did a lot. So now anyone can come to a Ripped Bodice event because they're all virtual. So if you live in Singapore, you can attend the virtual Ripped Bodice.Bea Koch  And I think we're excited about - now that we've learned all that - using that to make us more inclusive, moving forward so that more people can attend our events in different ways and figuring out ways to make that exciting.Leah Koch I agree, I don't see virtual events just completely going away. I mean, we will return to some amount of in-person because it's fun. But yeah, that's been really nice to sort of include more people that way. And you know, make make them feel like they're at the store, sort of from people's living rooms.Plain JaneYeah, that's great. I know, as a reader, I've really appreciated those kinds of events. Bea, you also, in addition to getting married during the pandemic, you've also published a book during the pandemic: Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency. And you explore Regency romance, actual heroines, actual Regency women. And you find that they're more radical and lively