First there was the romance genre boom. Then there was the romance/genre boom.
A great hook for your book in 2025 is picking any genre and blending it with romance—it helps that the word romantacy flows nicely off the tongue.
It’s easy to feel cranky and resentful about trends in publishing. Who is Rebecca Yarros, and why does her Fourth Wing series get to have so many hungry fans when you’re still struggling to sign with an agent? Who are these kids on TikTok, and why do they suddenly have so much sway over the publishing industry? Is there some secret person who gets to decide what the next book trend will be, or are we seriously supposed to believe it’s all random?
If you take your frustrations out of the question, publishing trends actually make a lot of sense.
An Old Favorite Made New
To use the current romance / any genre craze as a reference, this isn’t actually anything new. Think of the Aragorn and Arwen plot in The Lord of the Rings or about the enormous fervor of mystery fans who search for proof of unrequited love between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
It’s extremely normal for the relatively underplayed romantic elements in any book to be the thing everyone loves and remembers about it. It’s nothing more than good business sense to take what readers love about a classic book and make it bigger in a new one. As a writer, if you’ve ever gotten the advice to “write the book you’d want to read” and you loved fantasy but always wanted more than a paragraph here and there of a love story, romantacy is your mash-up genre!
Whether it’s makeup, movies, books, or even slang, trends don’t spring up out of nowhere; they’re always building on threads from the past, slowly gaining momentum before exploding into huge popularity.
Welcoming to Women, the LGBTQ+ Community, and People of Color
Think back to the older publishing trend of female-led domestic thrillers, often thought of as starting with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Thrillers have always been big moneymakers, but many of the classic writers are men writing stories about men. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar books are all sterling classics about men by men.
But Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo prove that there was an audience hungry for sleuthing and/or scheming women long before Amy Dunne came on the scene. Female characters navigating complex and deadly situations are always popular because women read books, too!
If you look a little deeper, you can often find strains of misogyny in the backlash of these trends. If a man wrote a doorstopper fantasy novel with dragons, magic, and lots of spicy romance scenes, would we call that frivolous? Would we sideline it into a different category than other fantasy books?
Many of these so-called trendy books are also especially inclusive to people of color and the queer community. Big fantasy casts in modern books often have characters with a wide variety of skin tones, and there are lots of different romantic gender pairings. Again, these aspects are simply reacting to an audience and a demand that has always existed despite being largely ignored.
Character Driven
The thing about romance plots is that they are inherently character driven. It’s hard to be passive when you’re swooning for the handsome captain of the guard and finding every moment of time with him that you can despite the fact that he is off-limits to you, a lowly maid.
Just like with a splash of romance already existing in fantasy classics and other genres, romance plots are just another vehicle to write a solid, character-driven plot. And recalling the tendency for misogyny and other prejudices woven into dismissing romance-heavy books, it’s not that the books are so very different from their peers, it’s that the character motivation in romance books is derided because women like it.
Another reason why romance works so well as a character motivator is that it puts roadblocks in the way of what your character wants and gives their choices real stakes. If your knight wants only to overthrow the evil sorcerer king, it’s a no-brainer for him to poison the king’s wine. But if he’s in love with the evil king’s daughter? That makes his choices a lot more interesting and complicated.
Write the Book You Want to Read
Chasing trends is never a good idea. Writing a novel takes too long for anyone to jump in on a trend they’re already seeing on shelves. And more importantly than making money with a splashy debut, guessing what people might want to buy is no way to make art.
Even if romantacy, or whatever we’re blending romance with tomorrow, isn’t for you, take a lesson from those authors and readers. If there’s an element of your favorite book that you wish was a bigger part of the story? Write that book yourself! If you create from a place of enthusiasm, chances are you’ll find plenty of people excited to read it.
Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.
