YABookgate

[Kari Kamiya]

"Romantasy" is such a dumbass combination that it only makes sense some Millennial shipper came up with it.

 

[Gnillik Yot]

The Romantasy authors are basically outselling everyone else who has released a book in the last few years. Not just talking about Romantasy authors vs other new authors, this extends even to legacy authors who are still releasing books in other genres. I haven't crunched the numbers on SJM vs Stephen King yet, but Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing outsold King's most recent novel (Holly) by four to one. (!!!)

Like it or not, TikTok is the greatest determinator on whether a new author becomes a hit or not. Publishers are seeing this & are reorganizing their calenders & author contracts accordingly.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/93185-print-book-sales-improved-last-week-but-still-fell-4.html#:~:text=Sales%20of%20adult%20fiction%20fell,one%2C%20selling%20over%20108%2C000%20copies.

https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61641/1/romantasy-was-2023s-hottest-book-genre-booktok-trends-fourth-wing

 

[trekkor]

re: Maas. I wonder how long it took for a Harry Potter book to fall to # 5 on the NYT bestseller list? That's where Maas' book is, three weeks after release. Impressive as hell, something most writers would likely sell their grandmother's soul to Satan for, but I suspect nowhere near Rowling territory. Admittedly I'm spitballing here, but I thought Rowling's presence on bestseller lists was measured in month or more likely years.
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Side note, but Yarros' books are huge hits, bookstores are fucking filled to the brim with copies of both books, they have the coveted "as seen on TikTok!" sign next to them, etc etc...

...yet, whenever I see anyone on TikTok reviewing the books, all they can talk about how fucking garbage they are. I haven't bothered to leaf through them, but some people shared quotes and pages, and it feels so mid. Truly the sort of thing where you can honestly say you've read better fanfics. She's 42 years old, but the main criticism seems to center around her writing like a 14 year old on wattpad. Keep in mind also, BookTok girlies read a lot of YA(garbage) that they coo and fawn over, so it makes you wonder how bad this shit can be when they won't even defend this series.

I guess I'm not looking for any sort of answer here, but it makes me a bit amused. As does Hazelwood's werewolf/vampire porn fic being in third place.

 

[Three Gorillion Dollars]

Fourth Wing, from the very first line, makes it clear it's just a Hunger Games rip-off and then becomes a Harry Potter ripoff (with dragons and smut.) The most liked review on Goodreads is a one star review. Trekkor is pointing out an interesting phenomenon that what unites writers like Yarros and Maas is that even their devoted readers who post reviews agree that the books are just bad and generally just rip-off elements from other series.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

Interestingly, this podcast just came out and mentioned Romantasy: "Richard reveals some juicy details about his forthcoming new book but before then he and Marina delve into the world of 'romantasy', the genre which is taking up space on bookshelves at great pace."

>romantasy is well written
>chainmail bikini
>men like historical drams cause women get abused

Something so utterly disgusting about an older man putting down young men, "how dare you like hot women." Goyslop podcast, can feel my IQ dropping by the second.

The Romantasy authors are basically outselling everyone else who has released a book in the last few years.

Pretty sure spicy romance has always outsold anything else. Women are the majority of readers and the written word is how they consume most of their porn.

but the main criticism seems to center around her writing like a 14 year old on wattpad.

Sounds like she knows her audience then.

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

Inkitt - a Watpad clone, has been given $35 million dollars in seed money to develop their "bestseller creation" business.

They've been around for a while, they are a little more adult that Wattpad but they are an easier platform to monetise via their Galatea app.

No surprises as to what gets monetised. Yep, erotica and romantasy.

 

[Three Gorillion Dollars]

Inkitt - a Watpad clone, has been given $35 million dollars in seed money to develop their "bestseller creation" business.

They've been around for a while, they are a little more adult that Wattpad but they are an easier platform to monetise via their Galatea app.

No surprises as to what gets monetised. Yep, erotica and romantasy.

There's a few of these going around. Naver launched Yonder semi-recently, for example, and much of their business model was microtransactions for books that you could buy in one payment on Amazon (or just read for free online.) Do these platforms really make money? How much of it ends up with the creatives? What are the contracts like? Who looks at Galatea and thinks throwing thirty-five million dollars into it is a good idea? Galatea's front page when I looked at in the wake of this announcement was just Claimed By The Werewolf, Breaking the Billionaire Baby Daddy, My Brooding Mafia Boss shit.

Inkitt apparently wants to use AI on their platform, too. "The startup’s eponymous app lets people self-publish stories, and then, using AI and data science, it selects what it believes are the most compelling of these to tweak and subsequently distribute and sell on a second app, Galatea." That whole article reads like a nightmare. Putting anything on Inkitt strikes me as a mistake.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Fourth Wing, from the very first line, makes it clear it's just a Hunger Games rip-off and then becomes a Harry Potter ripoff (with dragons and smut.) The most liked review on Goodreads is a one star review. Trekkor is pointing out an interesting phenomenon that what unites writers like Yarros and Maas is that even their devoted readers who post reviews agree that the books are just bad and generally just rip-off elements from other series.

And of course Amazon picked it up to adapt. Lol. Lmao even.

This has to be a grift. There's no other way it's gotten this much attention otherwise.

 

[Conspiracy Mawile]

The last "booktok" novel I read was Priory of the Orange Tree and that's twenty bucks I never get back. Good marketing strategy, but not so good works of art. Outside of the koolaid platform, most people seem to agree that these books are merely mediocre, even for young adults media.
Same for Fourth Wing, there's a whole wall of copies in my local bookstore. Considering how well that streaming gig worked out for Shadow and Bone with their series, I think we can predict the worst.
Totally forgot about Inkitt, I think I still have an account there (without any works though). 35 Mill seems like a huge sum of money for such a website, I never got the impression it was very successful.

 

[neverendingmidi]

The last "booktok" novel I read was Priory of the Orange Tree and that's twenty bucks I never get back. Good marketing strategy, but not so good works of art. Outside of the koolaid platform, most people seem to agree that these books are merely mediocre, even for young adults media.

I was wondering about that one. I have dithered about getting it from Libgen (my general place to try books, I'll pay money if I like it), but haven't gotten around to doing so.

 

[Gnillik Yot]

Speaking of Priory of the Orange Tree... Now I'm curious. How many of us have read or plan to read at least one new YA book this year? Are there any you want to read, even if just for the pleasure of critiquing it? I found this list of all the big YA novels coming out this year and I read through it to determine if I could find even one I wanted to read.

https://archive.is/2024.02.28-201848/https://thenerddaily.com/2024-anticipated-young-adult-book-releases/%23google_vignette

The first thing you notice looking through the titles (and many of them you have to click on the store links to actually get an idea what they're about) is how, regardless of genre, romance is a big part of almost all of these books. A few months ago there were all those articles about Gen Z wanting more asexual & aromantic YA tales. Well, I'm not calling them liars, but I'll just say that it doesn't seem like the biggest YA publishers are obeying... yet. These books were all written within the last few years, so maybe next year's list will have fewer romance titles. I did notice at least one book about an asexual pirate daughter book, but this is just one in a list of nearly 100.

But enough about the romance. Did I actually find a book on this list I am curious to read? Yes, surprising as it may seem. "The Lamplighter" looks like a Dredge cosmic horror tale. Starring a classic beauty as an MC rather than your usual "Yaas queen" too.

I also see a lot of potential crap! I mean wtf, who wants yet ANOTHER feminist subversion of Sleeping Beauty?

Cait Corrain probably contemplates the bottle every time she sees a list like this. She's cringing harder than all of us I'm sure, not that her book would have been better.

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

Readers (let’s face it, the big reading demographic with spare time to read in bulk is young women and older women) will often SAY they want aro/ace and queer stories to get those sweet sweet SJW likes, but you know what they say: queer on the streets, straight in the sheets.

The number of books bought, and the money, nearly all goes to heterosexual romances.

Original Male/Male character pairings tend to be written in a very specific style that is almost faux-hetero (one guy is big and gruff, one small and sensitive, or a wildly differing power imbalance.)

I’ve mentioned it before, but after several years of queer books being pushed, and the absolutely non-erotic response to them, the average female reader has just rediscovered that reading horny scenes involving a man and a woman actually is hotter than reading about the desultory “doing it for the BookTok LGBTQ list” characters.

For quite some time, the average Gen Z even admitting that they found a heterosexual pairing in fiction hot has been considered “problematic” and “heteronormative”. All the girlies were saying they wanted sapphic shit publicly, while in reality they were secretly reading about Biggus Dikkus or whatever….

 

[Trianon]

For quite some time, the average Gen Z even admitting that they found a heterosexual pairing in fiction hot has been considered “problematic” and “heteronormative”.

There is no pleasing them. If an established author tries to include more gay characters, they are always doing it wrong, and their insane readers will find faults if they don't explicitly label a relationship in the text with the Modern-Day Terms. It doesn't matter if you're writing characters who are toxic, or closeted, or historical, or whatever, if the characters don't use the proper terminology, they are Problematic.

 

[Conspiracy Mawile]

I was wondering about that one. I have dithered about getting it from Libgen (my general place to try books, I'll pay money if I like it), but haven't gotten around to doing so.

First half is decent, but second half and especially ending suffer from severe pacing issues. There are some interesting elements and ideas (and dragons) but it's not a book I would recommend to fans of fantasy literature.

For quite some time, the average Gen Z even admitting that they found a heterosexual pairing in fiction hot has been considered “problematic” and “heteronormative”. All the girlies were saying they wanted sapphic shit publicly, while in reality they were secretly reading about Biggus Dikkus or whatever….

After the success of Twilight and 50 Shades I would also write that stuff if I were to make a living out of writing. Nothing beats some good old romance, no matter how cheesy it is written.

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

Who would've guessed women were fags for masculine cock.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

Now I'm curious. How many of us have read or plan to read at least one new YA book this year?

There are decades and centuries worth of literature more worth my money and more importantly my time, than anything on that list. So no, I don't plan to read anything YA this year.

 

[BaskingBarracuda]

I’m not as clued in on the modern literature community as people here are, so can you tell me if there’s still the regular blaming of huwyte male writers/audiences for problems in the genre as there was 5-10 years ago? I figure the genre becoming dominated by women both audience and creator renders that criticism irrelevant but idiots have never let reality get in the way of a favourable narrative.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

I’m not as clued in on the modern literature community as people here are, so can you tell me if there’s still the regular blaming of huwyte male writers/audiences for problems in the genre as there was 5-10 years ago? I figure the genre becoming dominated by women both audience and creator renders that criticism irrelevant but idiots have never let reality get in the way of a favourable narrative.

Are you asking if a leftie/sjw will throw a white men or whites in general under the bus if give a chance? Because the answer is yes. Old habits die hard and all.

 

[Trianon]

Checkin in on Xiran. She is pinging between complete demoralization and romanticized fedposting.

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

I watched a video of her bitching about something and damn does that woman have the square face of an old chinaman