2017 Romantasy film The Shape of Water won the Oscar for Best Picture. Credit: IMDB
In an opening chapter of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville captures the American scene in the whaling village of New Bedford, Mass. There are “savages outright, many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh”; “Green Vermonters and New Hampshire men”; lunks and hicks and “bumpkin dandies” in beaver hats and swallow-tailed coats “girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath knife”. Polite society may have responded with horror to these sights, but Melville understood that this wild diversity, ferment and lawlessness was the essence of his country.
New Bedford has come for the publishing industry — for its “Big Five” publishers and its MFA-trained fiction writers — in the form of Romantasy, a new genre rewriting all the rules, perhaps for the better. The portmanteau term, for the uninitiated, means “any fantasy novel that has romance as the main plot or a strong side-plot”, according to Katie Cunningham, owner of Kiss & Tale books in Collingswood, NJ. The books also tend to be hashtag-friendly, include explicit sex scenes, and wildly sample from the folkloric palate of tropes and subgenres established by previous narratives: Hades and Persephone, love triangles, friends-to-enemies, shapeshifters, slavery, Greek Gods, dragons, and vampires, to name just a few.
The combination of romance and fantasy isn’t new, of course. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, published in 2005, was a breakout success that mainstream publishing has strived in vain to replicate ever since. But it wasn’t until TikTok that readers got together and demonstrated through their choices and enthusiasms just where the sweet spot lay.
The numbers speak for themselves. Five of the top-10 best-selling titles of 2024 were written by the category’s two most prominent authors, Sarah J. Mass and Rebecca Yarros, according to Publisher’s Weekly statistics from October. Bloomberg estimates that in 2024, Romantasy books achieved $610 million in sales, up from $454 million in 2023. The category is juicing the statistics on overall book sales, which are in decline, and has contributed to a boom in romance-focused bookstores in the United States.
“It has been amazing and crazy to me how busy we’ve been,” says Cunningham. Katie Steele, the Romantasy expert at A Novel Romance, a Kentucky bookstore, says that demand was so high the owners moved to a new space “10 times the size” after only a year in operation. Steele’s other topic areas are manga, danmei (Chinese novels with male-male, or MM, romance), and queer.
Victoria Gerken, the publisher of Podium Entertainment, a digital-first publisher that has moved into print distribution on the wings of Romantasy, believes the genre has been so successful because it “provides entertainment for its audience that’s not available in any other format”. This entertainment is a form of escapism that allows women whose daily lives have little magic in them to imagine themselves as bold and powerful, starring in an exciting adventure and having great sex. Perhaps it’s the chick version of the thrill that men get from video games. It’s also worth noting that the magical framing allows women to perform girl-power and to be swept off their feet by men (or male beings) who are unapologetically dominant and boast castles and domains, too. Between the genre’s unique pleasures and an audience Gerken describes as “voracious”, she says “it’s a little bit of a perfect storm. The demand has always been there, but nobody harnessed it.”
Just how a multibillion-dollar industry devoted to selling books managed to miss the demand is an interesting question, but it’s clear that the category is being driven by authors and fans, with little distinction between mainstream and self-published titles.
The first breakout Romantasy title was the conventionally published Sarah J. Mass series A Court of Thrones and Roses (#ACOTAR), a young-adult fantasy romance in which a young woman falls in love with a Lord of the Fae. The series began publication in 2015 but blew up online during the pandemic, around the same time its publisher, Bloomsbury, reclassified it as an adult due to its increasingly graphic sexual content.
Yet sales are also being driven by the proliferation of self-publishing platforms, with authors increasingly winning a following as self-published audiobooks, e-books, or print-on-demand, and only later making deals with the corporates. One of the current best-selling titles, Quicksilver, another Fae romance, just appeared in print through Forever, an imprint of Hachette, in December 2024. Author Callie Hart had published several previous series as e-books or print-on-demand through Amazon’s CreateSpace, and it was only after Quicksilver’s success online that she teamed up with the French giant. Podium Entertainment’s Gerken says that “the vast majority” of Podium’s title acquisitions are independently published first.
A January 2025 story in The New Yorker on a copyright infringement lawsuit against publisher Entangled and author Tracy Wolff, the creator of best-selling Alaska-based vampire-romance series Crave, contained a quote that generated some pearl-clutching by writers online. An anonymous writer who’d had dealings with Entangled told The New Yorker that its publisher and CEO, Liz Pelletier, said to her that “the problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be”. From a traditional viewpoint, that sounds like the death of creativity and a loss of authorial control.
The New Yorker story also reports on several other objections to the genre. It’s allegedly not diverse (often written by socially conservative and photogenic white women with good social-media skills); it moves very quickly, sometimes forcing writers to adhere to brutal delivery dates with little time for polishing their work; and it can be relentlessly formulaic, with the huge volume of titles contributing to the problem.
From a different viewpoint, however, the trend is empowering authors who are able to build their own fan base. Companies like Podium and Bloom Books, a new independent romance imprint that launched during the pandemic, offer the kind of hybrid rights deals traditionally forbidden by major publishers. Bloom’s star client is E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Gray was originally published as an e-book and print-on-demand title in 2011. It’s one of a growing number of publishers whose business model is to scoop up successful self-published authors, often allowing them to keep their lucrative e-book and audiobook rights, while supplying the kind of print distribution and brand-building muscle that independent writers find difficult to achieve. Authors working with such publishers can sometimes retain creative control of cover design and marketing strategy. And they can reap dream benefits, such as the publisher’s ability to send out expensive influencer boxes or put their work out in gorgeous deluxe or collectible editions, another publishing trend that has synergy with the Romantasy market.
A perusal of popular Romantasy titles reveals perhaps even more groundbreaking developments. Blue Box Press co-founder Liz Berry, speaking to Publishers Weekly, says of star author Jennifer Armentrout that “she has a capability to drive the plot and romance forward, while mixing character development with high-concept plotting, that few people have”. I found this type of clean forward motion — a grasp of the essentials of storytelling — in all the highly recommended titles I tried. I also found tight writing and world-building, atmospheric and fun detail, crisp conflicts, exciting high stakes, and two engines of narrative pleasure — a romance plot and fantasy-adventure plot — for the price of one.
There’s a common opinion in writing and publishing circles that the reason for declining book sales is that the readers are uninterested in or unable to appreciate great work. However, in the mega-hits of this unusually reader-selected genre, there were few of the errors that make bad mass-market fiction so bad, such as inconsistent characters with unclear motivations, convoluted plotting, unnecessary detail or description, and clunky dialogue. The knack for keeping the finger on the pulse of the story tends to cut away such dross, and the readers, it turns out, can recognise it.
The readers don’t care, however, about most of the rules of good writing. The Romantasy characters I encountered were psychologically consistent, but not necessarily complex or psychologically real. The prose was sometimes laden with clichés. Every broomstick offers an echo of Harry Potter, every magical wall taps Game of Thrones. And the narrative voices are quite simply contemporary, regardless of where in time or space the books are set. Characters in Medieval-ish settings have thoughts such as “painkillers are awesome”. They use the magical equivalent of the internet, love fashion and shopping, have anxiety attacks, and display modern values like girl-power and casual promiscuity.
Romantasy writers are the lawless “bumpkin dandies” found in Melville’s New Bedford, for sure, but they can tell a great story, and I found something liberating in their freedom. If more writers were trying to grab readers directly, literature would be better off.
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SubscribeTwo articles today on brain rot, tik tok and romantasy: whose brains are being rotted, male or female? My own straw poll suggests that males are not affected by these two viruses.
No, we have porn.
I think the porn thing is overdone. Both of Maas’s long series have a heroine who is actually a queen and has to save the world. In one series, the heroine is a virgin anyway.
If virginity or a heroine incompatible with pornography?
Overdone? Or… overblown?
New Mills and Boon.
Most people prefer self-focused kidult lit.
Hence, it makes money. Shock horror.
Having sex with a dragon is probably appealing to a woman, given that the alternative might be having sex with a Republican.