Looking for a lucrative market that you would have never thought of in a million years? Amish romance novels! Oh it was so obvious! A bizarre feature about this trend was in this morning’s Wall Street Journal and it is SPECTACULAR.

Rachel Esh, owner of an Amish dry-goods store here, was giddy as customers kept arriving. Cars spilled out of the dirt parking lot onto the hay and potato fields, crushing a few of her neighbor’s potatoes.

She ushered the crowd of 40 people swarming in front of her cash register into a line that snaked out the door of Rachel’s Country Store. The cause of the commotion: novelist Cindy Woodsmall, who had stopped by to autograph books.

Ms. Woodsmall writes “bonnet books,” or Amish love stories, which are a booming new subcategory of the romance genre. The books, written by non-Amish writers, are aimed at a mainstream audience. But Ms. Woodsmall researches her stories among the Pennsylvania Amish, and she has a loyal Amish following.

The plot of her 2006 novel, “When the Heart Cries,” revolves around Hannah, a young Amish woman who falls in love with a Mennonite and hides her plans to marry him from her strict parents. The lovers struggle to overcome the cultural divide, and actually kiss a couple of times in 326 pages: “His warm, gentle lips moved over hers, and she returned the favor, until Hannah thought they might both take flight right then and there. Finally desperate for air, they parted.”

“I can’t stop reading them,” said Mary Ann Blank, an Amish woman with a wide smile and graying hair she wears neatly parted under her prayer cap. She clutched her signed copy of the third book in Ms. Woodsmall’s “Sisters of the Quilt” series, published by WaterBrook Press, a Random House imprint. “I usually better not start in the morning because then I sit around too long,” she added.

That’s just shoddy reporting. By “sit around too long,” she clearly means sitting on the butter churn, wooden phallus providing her a pleasure not often felt by a woman religiously barred from using batteries.

I also like how this article goes out of the way to point out that these books weren’t written by Amish people. No crap they weren’t. I could hardly justify carrying around a “paperback” written by some inbred who can’t even staple the pages together out of fear that the devil may leap from the staple tray and steal her soul.

[Wall Street Journal]