Ok, so we all hate tropes, is it?

I don't know why people are talking about this really. I don't even really know how much they are talking about it, but I've seen it float across my feed a few times over the last few days, and many more over the last ten thousand years or whatever.

Everyone hates tropes, everyone hates books being sold based on their tropes, everyone hates those graphics with all the little lines pointing to the tropes. No one wants to hear about enemies to lovers, fake dating, forced proximity, everyone thinks it's a sign of declining literacy, a readership that wants to be pandered to rather than entertained, stuff like this is why Rome fell or what the fuck ever.

I'm not talking about tropes simply existing of course, tropes have always existed and we've all always been broadly fine about it. Mistaken identity, cross-dressing, secret twins – tell me which of Shakespeare's plays I'm talking about, I dare you. I'm talking about tropes being named and talked about and used as a reason to read a book.

So this week I'm using my newsletter to tell us all to calm the fuck down.

Part of my frustration with this kind of talk is that selling books with their tropes is extremely a commercial romance thing. (I say commercial here to distinguish from literary romance – no one is listing tropes to sell Sally Rooney.) I've never seen a book marketed with lists like amnesia, hero with demons, return of past trauma, or evil AI, advanced alien race, liberal references to the myth of Prometheus, and those tropes are so common that I don't need to tell you what genres they are. I mean, the second one is a gimme, but still.

Tropes are predominantly a romance thing and that is an area that already attracts a massive amount of scorn. Romance is a very popular form of escapism that for some reason is dismissed a lot more readily than other popular forms of escapism. Like action movies. Or sports. For example.

One of the big reasons we turn to escapist forms of entertainment is for comfort. To feel safe but invigorated at the same time.

You read a romance because you know, a little bit, what's going to happen. Two people will meet, there'll be sparks of one kind or another, a conflict that appears insurmountable, and a happy ending. The art of writing romance lies in pulling in your reader enough that those familiar beats feel potent and vital.

A reader looks for a book that has things they know they like – enemies to lovers, fake dating, forced proximity – written in a way that makes them forget they've seen them before.

Ella Risbridger says in In Love With Love* (fair warning, this book made me buy several other books, please consider a paid subscription so I can continue to afford food and whatnot):

...romantic fictions are stories that believe the arc of the universe bends towards love, and they will use all the building blocks at their disposal to make you believe it too.

It's true and it's valuable and yet, still, it's a genre that gets picked apart over and over again, significantly more than other genre fiction – for both its content and external trappings. Using a list of tropes as a marketing tactic is just the latest in a long line of reasons to sneer at something you see as beneath you. It's gross and elitist and we need to calm the fuck down.

But on top of that, we need to calm the fuck down because quite frankly it is graceless to get all het up by a simple practicality just because it doesn't work for you. Oh, you wish people would just buy books without knowing what's in them? Me fucking too, but that's not the world we live in. People have a lot of demands on their time and money, and they need to be given reasons to part with either.

And the publishing industry is always looking for reasons that will persuade them.

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This may seem weird, but the backlash to tropes as a marketing tactic reminds me quite a lot about earthquakes.

It reminds me of the backlash when facebook started asking everyone to mark themselves safe from the bus crash that happened on the other side of the city they live in. Because what happened there is that a corporation commodified something that people were doing for themselves.

I have always defended the facebook thing. It came into being after facebook executive and New Zealander Sarah Wynn-Williams couldn't get hold of her sister during the Christchurch earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. People were using their facebook pages to check in with each other and she thought that was useful.

I was in Christchurch during those earthquakes and it was useful. It was honestly a life saver. What happens in this kind of situation is this:

You're pottering around, eating the ice cream that's melting because the power's out, sitting in your car with the radio on listening to the death toll rise when you remember a person you haven't checked in on. When a disaster impacts everyone you know, you can lose track of things pretty easily. So you think of someone, you realise you don't know if they're ok, and you open your tiny flip phone with the shitty browser and go to their profile page to see that they've written I'm ok so you relax a bit until you remember someone else.

Some people don't have cell signal or internet, but someone else has talked to them and has posted on their wall this person is ok.

It was something that happened naturally, it was incredibly useful, and facebook noticed it and codified it and immediately everyone thought it was annoying and pointless.

Clearly it was an imperfect system; it frequently prompted you to respond about crises that were nowhere near you, but it felt to me that the irritation was not about that. It was that it was coming from a corporation. It felt like it was being put onto us, rather than created for us.

I don't want to defend facebook, a company that continues to make the world demonstrably worse, but in this case it was actually a tool that was created for us. created by us, really. A tool that was built in response to actual people and their actual needs, a vanishingly rare situation the rot economy.

The only really annoying part of it is that it pushed things beyond their intended audience. Why is facebook asking me, in London, about flooding that's happened in Manchester. But that's not really a massive problem when set against a genuinely useful feature.

What does all this have to do with tropes, I'll tell you what it has to do with tropes:

The thing is, no one knows how the fuck to market books.

I mean, books themselves, just the text, right? It's hard to communicate to a person what the experience of reading a particular book will be like. You can't put snippets into a trailer, the way you can with movies. You have a cover, a blurb, quotes telling you it's good, but for the most part you have to market things around the book, rather than the book itself.

You market the author, if they have a particular hook. Is this novel in any way related to a personal trauma, for example, and can they write an essay about it? Or, is there any chance they're already famous? Failing that, do they have an influencer level social media following which is not quite the same thing as being famous but will do in a pinch?

If the author is not interesting or famous, which most of us aren't, all you have left is this books is a little like that other book you liked. Then you can simply bung a sticker on the front that says for fans of that other book you liked and hope that gets you enough sales that the actual only effective form of book marketing will take over: word of mouth.

As an unfamous author whose most recent book's marketing campaign consisted of one (1) tweet and one (1) instagram story, I can tell you how important word of mouth is.

When my first book came out in 2014, the American version of Amazon would show you where in the US your book was selling. This was pulled from Nielson bookscan, so it wasn't just about sales on Amazon; it included all the bookshops that Nielson tracks. So I was able to see that my book was selling a weirdly high number of copies in Houston, Texas.

I don't know anyone in Houston, I've never been to Texas, but someone in that city (probably a bookseller) liked my book and talked about it and made a lot of other people buy it. Whoever that person is, they are my favourite person in the world.

The goal of all the formal marketing is to spark this more informal marketing. Get people talking and the day is yours. It's really hard to do that. Really incredibly difficult. So if your job is to make people talk about books, you maybe start by looking at how people are already talking about books.

Listing tropes started, not with books, but with fan fiction. As far as I'm aware the earliest uses of list of tropes were tags on AO3 to make it easier for readers to find what they want in the truly vast oceans of work available there.

Of course, these tags were often much more specific and much weirder than anything you'll see Harlequin put on an instagram grid post. They included specific ships, specific kinks, specific changes to stories some fans felt had ended badly. But they did also include more general plot descriptors. Enemies to lovers. Fake dating. Forced proximity.

Tags are a filing system. A way of cataloguing information so it's easier to find. And here, what people wanted to find were stories that do this thing I like.

And since a lot of fan fiction is romance, since a lot of fan fiction is erotica, a lot of people who read it, also read original, traditionally published romance and erotica. It's not surprising that the way they talked about the one influenced the way they talked about the other. Either way, this was all also happening online.

For the past fifteen years or so the publishing industry has been chasing influencer culture. Because influencer culture is entirely talking about things and, as I've mentioned, getting people to talk about books is one of the only (actually the only?) consistently effective way to sell books.

Romance fans talk about books on the internet a lot. Like a lot. They read a huge amount, they are always looking for more, they are always recommending books. And they started talking about them less in terms of if you like this other book and more in terms of if you like when this kind of thing happens.

And they don't just talk! They make graphics, and fan trailers; they get enthusiastic and they go all out and it's honestly magical. This is all being done by a bunch of random people on the internet because they love books! And they want to talk about books! They want the books they love to be read widely and they found an efficient way to tell people why they should read them!

It happened organically, no one asked for it, and it spread and grew. Among readers.

That's kind of the crucial thing. It was happening within a (vast) community. Tt was a way one specific group of readers were talking to each other. It was a shorthand romance fans on Instagram and TikTok understood that made it easier to summarise books. And if you're not following those kinds of people, if you're not telling the algorithm you want to see that stuff, you don't see it. It doesn't impact you.

But publishing houses are following those kinds of people. Publishing houses have been chasing influencers for years, and they saw the this start, and spread, and work, so they started to do it to.

There's nothing wrong with this! Again, it is so hard to sell books so anything that might make people buy books is fine to me. But it pushed this weird little influencer thing to a much wider audience. To book lovers more generally.

And because everyone now sees it, everyone thinks it's for them and when they don't like it they wang on about it as if it's objectively bad. No one has the fucking grace to simply think oh hey, this is a marketing tactic that doesn't work for me and move on. They've got to complain about it, they've got to read into it, they've got to take it as a portent of doom.

It's not. It's just marketing that works for people who are not you and marketing to people who are not you is actually a completely fine thing for anyone to do.

You can let this one lie. You can calm the fuck down.

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