I have so many thoughts oh my god. Dark romance as a genre has been gutted to just be taboo erotica, and we've lost so many aspects that used to be really good vehicles for plot and symbolism. Sex scenes aren't necessarily bad, but they should serve the story in some way, as everything should. And for the love of god, let your disabled characters be disabled by their disability. I can't believe I have to say this.
I’ve been more interested writing strong platonic bonds. Sometimes I’ll work on a story and feel it would immediately be a flop because everyone wants spicy books, but I’m spiced out myself 😅. There’s so many relationships that can be explored and I definitely feel it’s time for them to have a spotlight. I can see the appeal of series, but there’s something beautiful about reading a good, solidly *finished* story that can be so impactful and meaningful.
And most times the spicy stuff isn’t even between people with actual good, solid relationships, which is infinitely more frustrating because it just feels trite 😢
There's a series by an author I adore which could fall under the hopeful but dealing with environmental grief. Monk and robot by Becky Chambers. Absolutely incredible solarpunk. Her other series is also just beautifully written
With regards to the "everything getting/being a series even if it doesn't need to be", I wonder if publishers push authors into doing a series (or drawing it out if it proves popular) because that's more money for them and it's easier to draw up a contract around it, whereas a standalone novel is a one-off and then the author needs to have another idea that's also going to be popular but may be different to the first, which may in turn alienate the established fans etc, etc. I don't know much about publishing though so I could have it all backwards 😅 Also, audiobooks are absolutely books and listening to them still counts as reading, and I love when reviewers back this up. Shout it from the rooftops! I find listening to audiobooks difficult because of my own disabilities, and I love the sensory comfort a physical book brings, but I hate when people get so snobby about. It's like saying the only correct way to listen to music is with a radio. (And this isn't a call-out in anyway but "idiot" is considered an ableist term for a lot of people, so I'm trying to use things like "silly goose" or "goofy" instead, just as a heads up because you mentioned overcoming your own biases and things and it's something I didn't even realise until recently)
@dontfretreadbooks no worries, it took me being told about it to learn as well, and it really is such a common usage that it's easy not to remember where the word actually came from. Thank you for being so open to change, though 😊 your videos are always super interesting to watch
In my writing, I'll sometimes use tropes to give myself a springboard for where the story could go. I get frustrated when tropes or story beats feel plugged into a generator instead of a means to an end. I recently found your channel and I'm enjoying it so much!
Just on the topic of representation not equalling "good" writing/ "good" stories: the biggest and most frustrating example of this is Fourth Wing. Any amount of criticism or critical discussion of this book on tiktok was most often met with some variation of "but it has disability rep!" as if that 1) makes it worth recommending (it doesn't. that's just one element) and 2) the rep itself was actually pretty insincere and harmful in my opinion. When I see interactions like this it just makes me feel like the represented identity is being tokenised and in some caseses even *weaponised* because it is used to shut down genuine critical discussion and thoughts on the book that aren't "positive". A big disability booktoker called someone ableist for not liking Fourth Wing; Many Fourth Wing lovers have attacked people who were critical of the disability rep; People have invalidated reviewers opinions and their own experiences with disability in order to defend Fourth Wing. Sorry this turned into kind of a big block of text! It just felt so relevant as a good example of "rep" being *super subjective* and also something that probably shouldn't be used as a marketing tactic...
People really don't understand dark romance at all. I have an enemies to lovers that could count as a dark romance, and while they do hurl abuse both physical and verbal, they have conversations about it. People in universe are like "cut the shit", and they do get over themselves, kinda lol. Can we stop comparing work to each other? Like two books can be similar, but like I don't want books that are like SJM and Collen Hoover combined or something lol. 23:21 A series shouldn't get good two-three books in. It needs to be compelling from Page 1 Book 1, and continue. Like I hate that mindset of "Oh well it'll get good eventually" that just encourages shitty writing.
The thing about toxic romance discourse is that I think it could be helped with one of those commercial disclaimers. "This is a work of fiction. Do not attempt."
Hello! I found your channel last week and I'm loving your content! (: You're not afraid to say what you really think and I appreciate the honesty. A book trend I think we need to leave behind is buying MASS amounts of books. I see this so much and tiktok and it's crazy the book hoarding I see LOL. I see some videos where they buy 15 books at a time, it's just so insane to me.
Especially since books are mad expensive now. Selling for $15+, I don't think it's smart at all. I wish people would do this for libraries, granted that might get out of hand, but like at least it would be encouraging people to go to the library.
D, thanks for featuring my comment in this video! I think you would definitely enjoy Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Nice to see you plug Haikyuu into this. If you want another amazing sports anime that focuses on friendship I can't recommend Run With the Wind enough! It's top tier content 👌
21:00 If you're looking for amazing platonic bro-love and like high fantasy, give The Lies of Locke Lamora a try!!! (The first 40-50 pages are slow, but they're important and it picks up SO FAST after that.)
I'm fine with the trend towards "YA but make it spicy" if only because I'm hoping that'll make adults leave YA alone 😂 Adults can read YA, of course (I am one of them), but it ticks me off when people don't respect that YA is written with a YA (typically 14-18) audience in mind.
Love hearing your perspective! Lots of things to think about turning over to a new year... This year I really want to practice the mentality of "encourage Y" rather than "discourage X". Opening windows rather than closing doors, or something like that lol Like I'm not really into discourse about things being normalized or romanticized, but I'm all for encouraging creators who want to portray things healthy and mature. Of course, there's a ton of different perspectives on what that is in the first place. That goes the same for genres and tropes. Speaking from my own experience, I think plenty of writers might be afraid to take risks, especially if there's so many voices telling them what *not* to do or that they absolutely *must* do something and in a certain way. Then they might resort to what's successful and safe...resulting in more chasing trends and readers seeing the same stuff over and over...
If you havent already tried them, I recently finished the transformation series by Cassie Alexander. It was dark, paranormal romance. The sex is slow burn. The dark elements are woven well into the plot and character arcs. The man AND the woman grow as people. Good side characters. I liked the plot. Its consensual sex. It was like coming up for air after reading other authors who kept trying to drown me with glorified toxic behavior.
@@colleen6644 Thanks for the recommendation! I'm writing my own romance, and I really want to hone in on those elements of positive growth and healthy communication. It's a forbidden love, so I'm sure it will get hate or be considered not spicy or dark enough, but I'm just writing what I wish I could read lol
I also prefer seeing tropes talked about by readers rather than publishers. But I get that publishers want to get the vibes and gist of the novel through in more succint terms, and tropes are a good shorthand for that. Now forcing tropes into the writing is where I'd raise an eyebrow. I curate my reading well enough to avoid seeing tropes forced into books I read, so thankfully I've avoided that. I've also bought myself some stand-alones so I can have something to read that doesn't need following up. I can follow book series, but I have to consider the availability of the whole series, if my bookstore will stock them, are they selling the same editions, etc.
I feel like A Table of Tomatoes and Blood has to with a festival gone array. Or maybe the festival is MESSED up and somebody needs to fight to survive.
The state of editing has its as far back as the downsizing among publishers in the 1990s, and I don’t think its stopped yet, at least among major publishers.
This may end up being a long comment so pardon my rambling: I think that from the point you made about some new authors jumping into making a whole series before they're "ready", I'm sorry if this sounds presumptuous of me to say about an author like Alex Aster or Rebecca Yarros or other really popular Booktok authors but I know for me, writing fanfiction off and on since I was a teenager (and then taking it more "seriously" a couple years ago) as well as various unrelated creative writing things like Nanowrimo, for me when I'm writing I do tend to find the seed of the story in just freewriting or making the characters have conversations with one another so my drafts can end up become kind of lumpy and then having to put in more effort to run my drafts through spell-check because of my dyslexia. I will say, even though I don't really write fanfiction anymore, it did teach me in the way I was doing it the art of pacing. Because I had multiple drafts I'd bounce from, I would put a note at the top of my draft about the intention of what that chapter draft would be i.e. "such and such and such and such have a confrontation about blah blah blah" both to remind myself about that story and to keep myself on track with that story and I wouldn't consider that chapter draft "done" ("done" as in ready to edit and post) unless I introduced some twist or surprise to make the readers excited for more. I don't want to make it sound like it's easy: basically the method I came up with worked for me because I have problems remembering so I need those constant reminders and I did need to edit my drafts multiple times to get rid of misspelled words or redundancies. Being able to tell a cohesive story from start to finish seems like it's easy but if you are a "pantser" (writing at the seat of your pants) you almost have to do more editing after the fact because you have to cut so much and "find" the story in the draft as well as cut, reorder scenes, all the structural editing you'd need to do or an editor would need to help you with. Part of me is BAFFLED a book like "Lightlark" or its sequel "Nightbane" COULD get published in the states they were in but if I'm thinking about if I got one of my drafts published AS IS with little to no editing, it'd be just as bad. I don't know if its entirely the authors or the editors are to blame equally; it probably depends on the book and the circumstances but I'm wondering if how badly it seems the reception on Booktube "Fourth Wing"'s sequel "Iron Flame" and "Nightbane" were, this kind of New Adult roman-tasy subgenre might have crested in this year and in the next year roll back. Idk, maybe the audience for these books like them despite their problems or see past them but maybe there will be just as many people in 2024 who see through the fancy covers and scalloped edges to the nothing in these books and take their money elsewhere. I'd also like to see some of the publishers accountable for such low quality in the books they put out. I'm surprised copies of "Iron Flame" with pages in wrong places or upside down wasn't subject to a mass recall or at least a refund
13:35 - this one reminded me of Artemis by Andy Weir, I read it a few years ago but I remember thinking that the representation in that book was so terrible it would literally be better if it had none at all😭
Publishers and agents ask authors for comps (stories to compare to), and I feel like some authors really don’t have an answer and just force movie/book titles just to sell. As an author, I hate doing that too
One of the things I try to do is write my books - which are part of an overarching series - as standalone books. Why shouldn't you be able to pickup book 2, get a slight bit of context at the beginning, and enjoy a fantasy epic? Sure, you're going to get some spoilers from the earlier parts of the series, but I daresay that is on the reader when picking up book 2 and thinking "Wow, I feel like there are events that haven't been well described!" Another point you made is how indie authors (like me!) struggle to find our audiences. Any advice you have on that front will be most welcome to me and (I'm sure) many others as well!
I really appreciate the comments on audiobooks. I’ve never understood the audiobook hate. While I can understand that they aren’t for everyone they have definitely been for me. Several years ago I was an avid reader of ebooks until I started having neurological symptoms which made reading nearly impossible. I switched to audiobooks so I could still enjoy reading without killing my eyes. As of this year I’ve been diagnosed with three neurological disorders that affect my vision so I will never have the ability to read in the format I used to read in. This all happened while going back to school in my thirties to get a writing degree lol. The humor. So I hate when people say I’m not reading when I can break down a book better than half of them. I’ve had to convince my other disabled friends that it’s still reading because they feel shamed for listening to an audioBOOK. It’s just so wrong. And audiobooks have come a long way in the past fifteen years. So thank you for stating this. ❤
Almost every thriller or mystery novel written by a Black author was “Get Out meets ______” for like three years straight and none of them was like Get Out. It pissed me off so bad.
I don't mind the idea of publishers/authors wanting to put tropes in marketing. It's nice to have a general idea of what you're getting into. My problem with it is that they lie all the time. I don't remember what book I read recently where they claimed it was Rivals-to-lovers and like...the two characters were never rivals and maybe kissed once. Why lie? Probably because people like me will pick it up thinking they wouldn't mislead me. So annoying.
Im still a proponent of marketing the tropes. For the life of me i dont want to read enemies to lovers romance and this has saved me from picking up books solely on the cover, only to hate them
Just because a book is not deep, doesn't mean it doesn't need an effective plot and I feel some authors forget that.
Sometimes a well done simple plot is what a reader needs.
I have so many thoughts oh my god. Dark romance as a genre has been gutted to just be taboo erotica, and we've lost so many aspects that used to be really good vehicles for plot and symbolism. Sex scenes aren't necessarily bad, but they should serve the story in some way, as everything should. And for the love of god, let your disabled characters be disabled by their disability. I can't believe I have to say this.
I’ve been more interested writing strong platonic bonds. Sometimes I’ll work on a story and feel it would immediately be a flop because everyone wants spicy books, but I’m spiced out myself 😅. There’s so many relationships that can be explored and I definitely feel it’s time for them to have a spotlight. I can see the appeal of series, but there’s something beautiful about reading a good, solidly *finished* story that can be so impactful and meaningful.
And most times the spicy stuff isn’t even between people with actual good, solid relationships, which is infinitely more frustrating because it just feels trite 😢
I don’t want a series. I usually only pick up trilogies or one-off books, tbh. Seven books is a huge commitment for me. Too big of one.
There's a series by an author I adore which could fall under the hopeful but dealing with environmental grief. Monk and robot by Becky Chambers. Absolutely incredible solarpunk. Her other series is also just beautifully written
I love Becky Chambers!
With regards to the "everything getting/being a series even if it doesn't need to be", I wonder if publishers push authors into doing a series (or drawing it out if it proves popular) because that's more money for them and it's easier to draw up a contract around it, whereas a standalone novel is a one-off and then the author needs to have another idea that's also going to be popular but may be different to the first, which may in turn alienate the established fans etc, etc. I don't know much about publishing though so I could have it all backwards 😅
Also, audiobooks are absolutely books and listening to them still counts as reading, and I love when reviewers back this up. Shout it from the rooftops! I find listening to audiobooks difficult because of my own disabilities, and I love the sensory comfort a physical book brings, but I hate when people get so snobby about. It's like saying the only correct way to listen to music is with a radio. (And this isn't a call-out in anyway but "idiot" is considered an ableist term for a lot of people, so I'm trying to use things like "silly goose" or "goofy" instead, just as a heads up because you mentioned overcoming your own biases and things and it's something I didn't even realise until recently)
I appreciate the call-in and letting me know. I’m gonna scrub that from my vocabulary. Thank you for watching!
@dontfretreadbooks no worries, it took me being told about it to learn as well, and it really is such a common usage that it's easy not to remember where the word actually came from. Thank you for being so open to change, though 😊 your videos are always super interesting to watch
In my writing, I'll sometimes use tropes to give myself a springboard for where the story could go. I get frustrated when tropes or story beats feel plugged into a generator instead of a means to an end.
I recently found your channel and I'm enjoying it so much!
Same! I consider tropes as happenstance, features of a story that just happen to tell the story better
"Just turn off your tastebud" lol! The best comparison I've ever heard this year! 😂
Just on the topic of representation not equalling "good" writing/ "good" stories: the biggest and most frustrating example of this is Fourth Wing. Any amount of criticism or critical discussion of this book on tiktok was most often met with some variation of "but it has disability rep!" as if that 1) makes it worth recommending (it doesn't. that's just one element) and 2) the rep itself was actually pretty insincere and harmful in my opinion.
When I see interactions like this it just makes me feel like the represented identity is being tokenised and in some caseses even *weaponised* because it is used to shut down genuine critical discussion and thoughts on the book that aren't "positive".
A big disability booktoker called someone ableist for not liking Fourth Wing; Many Fourth Wing lovers have attacked people who were critical of the disability rep; People have invalidated reviewers opinions and their own experiences with disability in order to defend Fourth Wing.
Sorry this turned into kind of a big block of text! It just felt so relevant as a good example of "rep" being *super subjective* and also something that probably shouldn't be used as a marketing tactic...
People really don't understand dark romance at all. I have an enemies to lovers that could count as a dark romance, and while they do hurl abuse both physical and verbal, they have conversations about it. People in universe are like "cut the shit", and they do get over themselves, kinda lol.
Can we stop comparing work to each other? Like two books can be similar, but like I don't want books that are like SJM and Collen Hoover combined or something lol.
23:21
A series shouldn't get good two-three books in. It needs to be compelling from Page 1 Book 1, and continue. Like I hate that mindset of "Oh well it'll get good eventually" that just encourages shitty writing.
“She’s not that good at writing, or at being a good person” my favorite quote of the day 😂. Love your vids!
The thing about toxic romance discourse is that I think it could be helped with one of those commercial disclaimers. "This is a work of fiction. Do not attempt."
Hello! I found your channel last week and I'm loving your content! (: You're not afraid to say what you really think and I appreciate the honesty. A book trend I think we need to leave behind is buying MASS amounts of books. I see this so much and tiktok and it's crazy the book hoarding I see LOL. I see some videos where they buy 15 books at a time, it's just so insane to me.
Especially since books are mad expensive now. Selling for $15+, I don't think it's smart at all. I wish people would do this for libraries, granted that might get out of hand, but like at least it would be encouraging people to go to the library.
D, thanks for featuring my comment in this video! I think you would definitely enjoy Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Nice to see you plug Haikyuu into this. If you want another amazing sports anime that focuses on friendship I can't recommend Run With the Wind enough! It's top tier content 👌
21:00 If you're looking for amazing platonic bro-love and like high fantasy, give The Lies of Locke Lamora a try!!!
(The first 40-50 pages are slow, but they're important and it picks up SO FAST after that.)
I'm fine with the trend towards "YA but make it spicy" if only because I'm hoping that'll make adults leave YA alone 😂 Adults can read YA, of course (I am one of them), but it ticks me off when people don't respect that YA is written with a YA (typically 14-18) audience in mind.
Love hearing your perspective! Lots of things to think about turning over to a new year...
This year I really want to practice the mentality of "encourage Y" rather than "discourage X". Opening windows rather than closing doors, or something like that lol
Like I'm not really into discourse about things being normalized or romanticized, but I'm all for encouraging creators who want to portray things healthy and mature. Of course, there's a ton of different perspectives on what that is in the first place.
That goes the same for genres and tropes. Speaking from my own experience, I think plenty of writers might be afraid to take risks, especially if there's so many voices telling them what *not* to do or that they absolutely *must* do something and in a certain way. Then they might resort to what's successful and safe...resulting in more chasing trends and readers seeing the same stuff over and over...
If you havent already tried them, I recently finished the transformation series by Cassie Alexander. It was dark, paranormal romance. The sex is slow burn. The dark elements are woven well into the plot and character arcs. The man AND the woman grow as people. Good side characters. I liked the plot. Its consensual sex. It was like coming up for air after reading other authors who kept trying to drown me with glorified toxic behavior.
@@colleen6644 Thanks for the recommendation!
I'm writing my own romance, and I really want to hone in on those elements of positive growth and healthy communication. It's a forbidden love, so I'm sure it will get hate or be considered not spicy or dark enough, but I'm just writing what I wish I could read lol
Two guys who love each other platonically = The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard!!!
I also prefer seeing tropes talked about by readers rather than publishers. But I get that publishers want to get the vibes and gist of the novel through in more succint terms, and tropes are a good shorthand for that. Now forcing tropes into the writing is where I'd raise an eyebrow. I curate my reading well enough to avoid seeing tropes forced into books I read, so thankfully I've avoided that. I've also bought myself some stand-alones so I can have something to read that doesn't need following up. I can follow book series, but I have to consider the availability of the whole series, if my bookstore will stock them, are they selling the same editions, etc.
I wanna read a table of tomatoes and blood and a bowl of mac and cheese so bad now :D
I feel like A Table of Tomatoes and Blood has to with a festival gone array. Or maybe the festival is MESSED up and somebody needs to fight to survive.
"A Bowl of Mac & Cheese" sounds so unassuming, you just know the actual story is completely wild
The state of editing has its as far back as the downsizing among publishers in the 1990s, and I don’t think its stopped yet, at least among major publishers.
If you have to wait for book 2 for the series to get good the author didn't need book 1.
This may end up being a long comment so pardon my rambling: I think that from the point you made about some new authors jumping into making a whole series before they're "ready", I'm sorry if this sounds presumptuous of me to say about an author like Alex Aster or Rebecca Yarros or other really popular Booktok authors but I know for me, writing fanfiction off and on since I was a teenager (and then taking it more "seriously" a couple years ago) as well as various unrelated creative writing things like Nanowrimo, for me when I'm writing I do tend to find the seed of the story in just freewriting or making the characters have conversations with one another so my drafts can end up become kind of lumpy and then having to put in more effort to run my drafts through spell-check because of my dyslexia.
I will say, even though I don't really write fanfiction anymore, it did teach me in the way I was doing it the art of pacing. Because I had multiple drafts I'd bounce from, I would put a note at the top of my draft about the intention of what that chapter draft would be i.e. "such and such and such and such have a confrontation about blah blah blah" both to remind myself about that story and to keep myself on track with that story and I wouldn't consider that chapter draft "done" ("done" as in ready to edit and post) unless I introduced some twist or surprise to make the readers excited for more. I don't want to make it sound like it's easy: basically the method I came up with worked for me because I have problems remembering so I need those constant reminders and I did need to edit my drafts multiple times to get rid of misspelled words or redundancies. Being able to tell a cohesive story from start to finish seems like it's easy but if you are a "pantser" (writing at the seat of your pants) you almost have to do more editing after the fact because you have to cut so much and "find" the story in the draft as well as cut, reorder scenes, all the structural editing you'd need to do or an editor would need to help you with. Part of me is BAFFLED a book like "Lightlark" or its sequel "Nightbane" COULD get published in the states they were in but if I'm thinking about if I got one of my drafts published AS IS with little to no editing, it'd be just as bad.
I don't know if its entirely the authors or the editors are to blame equally; it probably depends on the book and the circumstances but I'm wondering if how badly it seems the reception on Booktube "Fourth Wing"'s sequel "Iron Flame" and "Nightbane" were, this kind of New Adult roman-tasy subgenre might have crested in this year and in the next year roll back. Idk, maybe the audience for these books like them despite their problems or see past them but maybe there will be just as many people in 2024 who see through the fancy covers and scalloped edges to the nothing in these books and take their money elsewhere. I'd also like to see some of the publishers accountable for such low quality in the books they put out. I'm surprised copies of "Iron Flame" with pages in wrong places or upside down wasn't subject to a mass recall or at least a refund
13:35 - this one reminded me of Artemis by Andy Weir, I read it a few years ago but I remember thinking that the representation in that book was so terrible it would literally be better if it had none at all😭
Publishers and agents ask authors for comps (stories to compare to), and I feel like some authors really don’t have an answer and just force movie/book titles just to sell. As an author, I hate doing that too
One of the things I try to do is write my books - which are part of an overarching series - as standalone books. Why shouldn't you be able to pickup book 2, get a slight bit of context at the beginning, and enjoy a fantasy epic? Sure, you're going to get some spoilers from the earlier parts of the series, but I daresay that is on the reader when picking up book 2 and thinking "Wow, I feel like there are events that haven't been well described!"
Another point you made is how indie authors (like me!) struggle to find our audiences. Any advice you have on that front will be most welcome to me and (I'm sure) many others as well!
I really appreciate the comments on audiobooks. I’ve never understood the audiobook hate. While I can understand that they aren’t for everyone they have definitely been for me.
Several years ago I was an avid reader of ebooks until I started having neurological symptoms which made reading nearly impossible. I switched to audiobooks so I could still enjoy reading without killing my eyes. As of this year I’ve been diagnosed with three neurological disorders that affect my vision so I will never have the ability to read in the format I used to read in. This all happened while going back to school in my thirties to get a writing degree lol. The humor. So I hate when people say I’m not reading when I can break down a book better than half of them. I’ve had to convince my other disabled friends that it’s still reading because they feel shamed for listening to an audioBOOK. It’s just so wrong. And audiobooks have come a long way in the past fifteen years.
So thank you for stating this. ❤
Almost every thriller or mystery novel written by a Black author was “Get Out meets ______” for like three years straight and none of them was like Get Out. It pissed me off so bad.
16:11 1000000% agree
I don't mind the idea of publishers/authors wanting to put tropes in marketing. It's nice to have a general idea of what you're getting into. My problem with it is that they lie all the time. I don't remember what book I read recently where they claimed it was Rivals-to-lovers and like...the two characters were never rivals and maybe kissed once. Why lie? Probably because people like me will pick it up thinking they wouldn't mislead me. So annoying.
Were you talking about Hi Ren by Ren?? Because I love that song!
Yes I was. It’s a world class piece of art and wow did it hurt my feelings 🥲
Im still a proponent of marketing the tropes. For the life of me i dont want to read enemies to lovers romance and this has saved me from picking up books solely on the cover, only to hate them
As a survivor of domestic violence, abusive boyfriend trope is not a joke and you CANNOT change a man. Abuse is not love!! WTH
Stealing that idea about friends in platonic love. Will see if I can make magic with it.
lads i think the conclusion here is if we want to fix books we have to destroy capitalism ASAP
✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽
What can we do so that this person reads and reviews Rivers of London please .