Women Rule BookTok With Fantasy and Romance Novels

How important is adult fantasy for today’s book market in the U.S.? The genre right now is developing in a drastically different direction as the U.S. print book market as a whole (which is these days often shrinking or stagnating). In the first half of 2024, adult fantasy exploded once more, growing 85.2 percent compared to H1 2023. According to Circana BookScan, the renewed interest is concentrated on a specific subgenre - romantasy. This type of book that combines romance and fantasy has also been popularized on BookTok - a niche on social media network TikTok where reviewers post and authors present themselves using the hashtag of the same name. While BookTok is dominated by different types of women authors, the biggest of them in 2024 so far - Sarah J. Maas - writes romantasy.

Maas studied creative writing at New York's Hamilton College and has published different book series since 2012, with about one new book coming out each year. A popular one is A Court of Thorns and Roses with currently five books released. The story follows heroine Feyre Archero who is abducted to a magical land at 19 years old, where she is pulled into court intrigue and finds herself between two different men. Typical for the romantasy genre, the books are geared towards young adults between the ages of 18 to 30. The same is the case for many romance novels that are popular on BookTok, for example those written by Colleen Hoover. The Texas native has been praised and critiqued for her most famous book, It Ends With Us, which is a love story that includes themes of domestic violence. It is due to be released in August as a major motion picture starring Blake Lively. She was also named as one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2023. Of course, the book is also part of a series, even though this one only has two books, the other being It Starts With Us. In total, Hoover has published four different series since 2012, which consist of two to four books each, and together with standalone books has averaged two books a year between 2012 and 2022.