It is starting to feel like anyone can walk up to a publisher these days and get a book published if it follows the current trends. The books don’t need to be high quality, have realistic characters, or have a plotline that makes sense. Just make sure the checks are marked and it will make it into stores. Let’s talk about publishing companies focusing on quantity over quality.
Quantity and Trends
Publishers started to follow trends that are being pushed by readers, usually found on Tiktok, to influence what comes to our shelves. Which means the trends that are super loved have become a checkmark on the list to get published. What are some of these trends?
- Romantasy
- Thriller
- Enemies to Lovers
- One bed
- Friends to Lovers
- Rivalry
- Smut
- Dark Romance
- Found Family
- “Who Did This to You” (My favorite)
- Cozy Fantasy
- Weird Girl
This is only scraping the top and some of the most popular trends in booktok. Unfortunately, this will also be a large number of books you will grab in new releases being pushed by publishers. It almost feels like we are losing original ideas, where the only new ideas are the unique character names made by generators.
I have found that readers are becoming more avoidant of booktok recommendations because they are usually “the same book” without any sustenance that you could find in quality books.
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas was the stepping stone and the foundation of romantasy, and a lot of authors are inspired by the series. It is okay to be inspired and take a page from the story and writing. There is nothing wrong with writing and creating your own story that you feel like is good work. The issue lies in the publishers popping out these books like it’s nothing, making these authors fall into a pool of generic.
It hits the marks of the trends, of the thing that booktok pushes, but it’s throwing the bar into a certain direction and into the ground.
If you watch a booktok review as of recently, you will usually see trending qualities like: “spice level”, it’s most trending tope like “enemies to lovers”, a male main character to die for, and a “twist you won’t see coming”. However, these reviews will be another post topic for me to talk about later.
Quality
Quality books usually come from a select few authors these days. You should know books from the author and their work, versus the trends.
There are a lot of authors out there that are getting pushed by publishers because people like their work: Sarah J Mass, Brandon Sanderson, Pierce Brown, John Gwynne, Samantha Shannon, Robin Hobb, V.E. Schwab, S.A Cosby, Frieda McFadden, etc.
But these authors don’t need a push from publishers because their work spoke for themselves.
It seems like I am pushing for more “quality” work to be published, and yes I am. My point that I am making is publishers are not pushing quality, but pushing something new that will satisfy a single party. We are only satisfying some people versus a bigger crowd that is looking for some variety. Chicken for dinner will get boring after so long.
What are your thoughts?
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