Are Books Getting Dumber?

Yes and no, an author explains

Time to warm up the Hot Take Machine and crash this sucker straight into the latest Book Discourse. These takes will be SCORCHING, so grab a cold beveragino and put it on standby.

Maybe you’ve seen it: The hands, they are a-wringing! Everyone online wants to know why books are actual poop from a butt now.

Earlier this year, the take-havers were concerned that the male novelist was disappearing. But we found them! Don’t worry!!! They were busy getting nominated for the Booker Prize. Phew. Everything is as it should be. If you’ve been in publishing long enough, you know that we go through this every few years, now it feels like every few months. It’s an insane, annoying tradition that must be observed until the heat death of the universe, which will hopefully be any day now.

Unsurprisingly, everyone is worried about Romantasy now and its strong female chokehold on the industry. Why is it everywhere, why is the quality going down, wait was that AI-generated?, are authors treating us like we’re idiots?, where are the editors???

Here’s the short answer to the question: Are books getting worse?

No.

Here’s the long answer:

Well, sorta. Publishers are still publishing good things, but they have identified who is willing to spend the most on books right now and have allocated their advertising dollars accordingly. Fantasy romance, the good and the bad, has been around for decades, what’s changed is the virality surge, ease of creation, and marketing strategies.

The End.

I hope I don’t have to tell you that publishing is not a meritocracy. Incredible, life-changing books fall through the cracks every single day. What is pushed by the advertising machine is not What Is Best but What Will Sell. Quality and broad appeal do not—and I’d argue rarely—go hand in hand. Who has dollar in fist and is willing to slap it down for a novel drives acquisition and marketing. Recentish statistics suggest women buy 80% of fiction novels. We live in a capitalist nightmare. You do the math.

Remember when we as a species discovered Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code? Yeah. I worked at a Barnes & Noble when that book was hot shit; our front table would have made Indiana Jones’s eyes pop out of his immaculately stubbled face awooga-style. Just ninety copies of TDC and a sea of grasping knockoffs. The same thing happened when Jurassia Park hit. And Twilight. And Fifty Shades of Grey. And The Hunger Games. Some of these books inspired the rise of entire genres.

This is where that ‘sorta’ comes in. Publishing was a slower, more lumbering machine back in The Da Vinci Code days. The acceleration of online platforms and self-publishing has certainly expanded romance as a general market. It’s more accessible than ever. Something slightly new and different is happening with this craze in the sense that hundreds of Millennial women already have 300k word multi-part ShepxGarrus Mass Effect Wattpad erotica locked and loaded, ready to be converted into Smash Defect: Raw Doggin’ Bird Aliens. Definitely not me though!!!!!!

For sure not me.

It is significantly faster to produce a passable romance novel than it is to write a well-researched historical fiction story or conceive of, pitch, fund, and fact-check a nonfiction work. I’m not stating anything revolutionary here. (That doesn’t take away from the effort and skill required to write a genuinely remarkable romance.) And because these books are extremely hot (hi-ooh), publishers want more and faster. If you make the deadlines short enough to capitalize on the surge, there will be a corresponding drop in the quality of storytelling, characterization, and editing, and more pre-written fanfictions converted into ‘original’ novels. It’s hard to say if that will persist or if this particular bubble will pop. My gut tells me readers are tiring of it, judging by the amount of “I’m giving up on romance until the quality is better” takes I’ve seen across BookTok.

The steadily increasing tropification of the genre is by design; that might be the “worse” that some readers are zeroing in on. The graphic below is how a lot of authors are now encouraged to think about their books.

Egads.

Marketing a book is not easy. I have sympathy for the folks tasked with actually explaining and selling my books; they often straddle genres and can’t be neatly described in a single sentence. You can streamline the process if you’re packaging an Enemies to Lovers-One Bed-Grumpy/Sunshine-Forced Proximity-Fake Marriage Just Like Huge Book meets Other Popular Novel. I hate making trope graphics for my books, but holy shit do they get overwhelmingly more engagement than other posts about my releases.

Marketing departments are trying to shorten the time between hearing about a book and purchasing that book. So yes, they will have an easier time selling something if it’s already just like another title, or if it includes a heady list of tropes. You’ll also have an easier time if the book in question does not tackle complex themes or ask much of the reader. If you’re reading twenty of these books a month, you’re likely not interested in engaging deeply with the text. You’re not looking to have your core beliefs challenged or digest complicated worldbuilding or subtle themes. I’m not going to blow up anyone’s spot, but just today I read a review where a reader complained the excellent worldbuilding in a book got in the way of the sex. These books aren’t “worse,” they are doing precisely what they were designed to do.

These are novels aimed at consumers who consume content.

Romance has always been a genre that sells. Always. 33% of mass-market paperbacks are romance novels. In 2022, when publishing was in free-fall, romance was the genre to pull it out of the tailspin. Romance is the unsung workhorse of the industry, and it’s not going anywhere, no matter how much misogyny you throw at it.

But even a casual observer can tell there’s something new going on. I want to give a warning here because I know—I know—how some of you like to tussle. I know that anyone critiquing romance as a genre brings out the passionate defenders. I’ve published in Young Adult and Romance, so I’m aware of the condescending, sexist bullshit leveled at genres primarily written by and for women. I will continue to defend these genres. That said, what comes next might make you squirm. It’s an uncomfortable conversation, but reader, we find ourselves in uncomfortable times.

This is going to be five peppers spicy but not sex peppers. Now is your chance to dip.

Still here?

Both the lack of interest in fiction for men and the oversaturation of hastily produced romance for women can be traced to the rise of fascism in America and around the world.

Reading is sissy and a fiction book might make you cry, and crying will make your dick fall off. And like they say verbatim in Survivor, ‘your dick represents your life; when your dick falls off, you are no cap a skibidi beta.’ As for the ladies, women just want to be chosen by a man and dominated by him, and they are only teehee pretending to like rights and financial freedom.

IE, poop from a butt.

Look, there are writers out there fighting the good fight, mindful of harmful stereotypes and dynamics, producing queer-friendly and gloriously queer stories and straight stuff that isn’t eye-wateringly misogynistic. I’m referencing a specific oeuvre of popular, regressive heterocore Trad Wife agitprop. These are not subversive feminist works just because the ladies be fucking; they quite explicitly uphold the status quo, both in philosophy and aesthetics. A vast majority of the women are petite, slim, white, able-bodied, and meet Western beauty standards. If they are disabled, it’s lip service only, and forgotten about by the 20% mark. If the woman is at all full figured, then the man gets even bigger, or becomes a monster, to make sure he is still physically overpowering. When they marry or have children, they are shuffled quietly off the board. The men are tall, broad, grumpy, extremely muscular no matter their profession or exercise habits, and unimaginably well-hung. It’s bioessentialism with pretty sprayed edges and we are degrees more vulnerable to this kind of conservative propaganda when it comes from other women.

(It’s also important to state that while I personally find some of this content problematic, I am not ever in favor of censoring it. I will defend its right to exist with my life, just as I would similarly defend the right to critique it.)

Do you know why all the covers for these books are so similar? Why they are predominately swirly text treatments with varying quantities of clip art daggers and butterflies, utterly lacking depictions of the main characters? Sure, the Fabio covers were corny, but they were at least honest. Think. Think hard. Budget, sure, but I think there’s another reason. If you saw, with your own gorjessica eyes, the overwhelming sameness of these characters, the traits they all have in common, you might just start to have inconvenient thoughts.

Thoughts that get in the way of purchasing, purchasing, purchasing.

There is an assumption of sisterhood, of harmlessness and benign intentions swirling around these books. And for the most part, I believe these authors think they are participating in feminism by focusing on writing for women, focusing on women generally, on their thoughts and their pleasures. It’s not that deep, it’s just a fantasy!! Let people like what they like!!!—those are the thought-terminating cliches I see ad nauseum whenever romance or romantasy comes under even the gentlest fire.

Okay. Fair enough, but my question remains: If something is a fantasy, why does it center thinness, submission to men, and physical standards that harm every side of the gender spectrum? Does it not then follow that your fantasy is…?

You could fantasize about anything, and your fantasy revolves around these specific factors. Impossibly tiny women. Impossibly huge men.

Hmm.

Who benefits from this kind of homogeneity? I’ve seen, no shit, many of these books float the idea that all women secretly yearn for nonstop rough sex, even if they’re too shy to admit it. I’ve seen it come out of the mouths of the men and the interiority of the women. All it takes is the right man to remind a woman of their hidden purpose. If these concepts were coming out of Andrew Tate’s mouth, you’d rightly vomit on yourself. This surge of content just so happens to coincide with the Choice Feminism that corporations have slyly embraced over the last decade; the Womens don’t like when we tell them what to do or how to look, so instead, we’ll insist that every decision they make as a consumer is the right one, unimpeachable, and an act of empowerment. Naturally, self-care also means spending 500$ on a skincare routine, no coincidences detected. It’s the same ideology that promises it’s Feminist, Actually to be nip, tucked, botoxed and filled until you look like a police sketch of a jaguar.

But this is the fantasy springing spontaneously from your own beautiful mind. Nobody tells you what to do. Is this what your wild, unconquered interior looks like? CoolSculpt and deep plane facelifts and violent lovers?

Consumers consume. These books exist because readers are buying them. A lot of them. If you haven’t noticed the conservative shift in pop culture, there are charts and graphs demonstrating our pronounced cha cha slide to the right. Women are being erased from our history. Trump’s support among young women increased this election cycle. The Sentient Gooch Infection on track to become the world’s first trillionaire is publicly endorsing the idea that women are meant to be traded. Like Pokemon cards, like fucking sacks of grain.

I was programmed to be a Charizard.

Read that post again, please. Read it until it sinks into your marrow. What do you suppose a trillion dollars gets you? Elections? Islands? Power? Even I struggle to imagine what it could really buy. A fair few sacks of grain, I’d bet. Influence, at the very least.

We are creatures of community. We want to fit in. If popular cultural sentiments in fiction tell us women should naturally be dominated by men and that we secretly (wink wink) know and agree to the submission of our minds and bodies, that it is the core of our desire, it begins to feel like there is little incentive to resist. Maybe it is the natural order, right? It’s everywhere, so why fight it? Women are selling it to other women, so how could it be bad? Something that should be explicitly and carefully negotiated in a kink setting begins oozing through the cracks of mainstream books. Mainstream thought. Just because something goes down easy does not mean it isn’t working on you subconsciously. Junk food is still food that you digest. You are not doing yourself any favors by pretending you are immune to propaganda.

Nobody gets to opt out of the patriarchy, it’s impossible. You can declutter your thoughts and de-center men, but this is the system we all live under. You can only make better and worse choices, choices that strengthen or weaken the system. The most powerful men on Earth are devising ways to set women’s rights back two centuries, and witting (and unwitting) accomplices in every sphere of pop culture and fiction are going right along with it. It buys their groceries; it pays their mortgages. Many women have no idea they’re holding water for the patriarchy until one day they notice their shoes are soaking wet.

What can we do?

Well, care more about what we buy and read, for one, and take this shit seriously for another. Either these books are meaningless fun and therefore unworthy of getting defensive over, or they are a genuine part of the publishing landscape and therefore merit examination. You can’t have it both ways. And we’re not doing censorship, okay? Never that. Fascists win when we get ban happy, it plays right into their plans. Kink up your life, girly pop, but maybe do it ethically, idk. These companies do not care about the product, only that you purchase that product. They would publish a romanticized retelling of The Human Centipede if they thought you would buy it. They probably already have.

Don’t steal my idea!!!!!

Are books getting dumber? Worse? No. I think you could argue this is an emergent genre, because if hardcore sex is the point, then it’s a subgenre of erotica, not romance. But I’d argue instead that you are simply noticing that your standards do not align with the popular zeitgeist. You are outgrowing something. A blip on the edge of your vision is taking up more space. Maybe you are awakening to an aspect of our culture you find really fucking gross. (Welcome, it blows chunks here.) Believe me, those Dan Brown copycats were slapdash, cobbled together trope soups, too, but it was perhaps harder to recognize back then because we weren’t dealing with the proliferation of AI (and our subsequent distrust in the industry and authors) or the 24/7 marketing onslaught of social media.

And most of us weren’t really on the cusp of a continent-hopping symbological caper to fistfight angels or whatever; maybe we notice now because our bodies, our sexuality, and our romantic lives are the subject matter, and we’re all embroiled right now in an ongoing political battle to determine the trajectory of those lives. Maybe it’s because someone is selling us a fantasy that doesn’t feel like a fantasy.

There are good books still being published (in romance, of course, and in every genre), but it might take you more work to find them. And that suuuuucks. God, it sucks. It is unbelievably difficult to cut through the noise and get your book to the right readers. It’s significantly harder for BIPOC and queer writers to get the advertising share they deserve. And it’s difficult to ask anyone to put more effort into the buying process, but if you care about literature and this industry and our world, it’s essential. It would be great if publishing was a wholesome, ethical meritocracy, but it isn’t and never has been, but there is no industry-wide plummet in quality, only corporations doing what corporations do: identifying a group that is eager but not necessarily discerning and chumming the waters. Be a pickier shark.

(Epilogue)

Look at me, the fucking hypocrite! A romance novelist critiquing romance! A snake eating itself! Grotesque!!

Yup! Hey, I grapple with this a lot. A lot a lot. I think many authors believe that their job ends after you buy their book, but I disagree. Do you know how fucking strange it is that my words go into your brain? They’re just swimming around in there getting up to all kinds of good trouble. That’s a huge responsibility and one I do not take lightly. I care genuinely, maybe too much, about making sure the relationships in my novels are not adding to the misogynistic cacophony. They aren’t perfect, but holy shit do I give it significant thought. The women in my books are flawed, but they have determination, they seek a better, fairer world than the one they find themselves in. The men are bisexual, or healing from PTSD, or neurodivergent, they might not come with perfect beliefs, but they learn and change, and they respect their partners. The women do not exist to fuck, and the men do not exist to execute the fucking. Respect, not dominance, is at the core of the relationships in my romances. Buy them or don’t I’m not the boss of you!