6 Comments

Someone said a sequel for Groundhog Day would be the original Groundhog Day!

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lol! Love it.

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Ok, now this is interesting. I subscribe to several romance author newsletters who tend to poll their readers every once in a while. And it's always multiple choice about tropes and character types (military, firefighter, mountain men, etc.). This tells me they're doing exactly what you said at the beginning of the post: writing to what the readers voted on (aka writing to market).

Funny enough, I remember when, back in the day when I first started reading romance (mid-80s), no tropes were listed in the title or in the book blurb. I read the book based off the cover and the blurb. If I liked it, I read it. Simple as that. Nowadays, it's listed in the title on Amazon, in the blurb, in the marketing collateral... it's a tad ridiculous, to be honest. LOL

While your suggestions have merit, I'm gonna be that OG romance writer and be tropeless. LOL

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Well, that is not writing to market. Writing to market is writing what the main market wants. They are writing to their audience, which is very different, and has a lot more chances to not find virality. The thing is, you DO have tropes. Like, they exist in your writing whether you want to be tropeless or not. Every book has tropes. If you line up the right tropes, that's when you get real aligned.

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I stand corrected. LOL And that makes sense. All books do have tropes, I guess it was just never an obvious thing when I was reading Loveswept and Harlequin Blaze.

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🎶hooked on a feelin’🎶

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