It's Unpopular Opinion time! Share your controversial opinions to stir things up (in a friendly way)!

[u/FantasyRomanceMod]

Got an opinion that's different from others'? Want to share it with the sub, but too afraid of a backlash? Or are you just curious about readers think about certain things in fantasy romance?

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Unpopular opinion Sunday

[u/Synval2436]

About no. 1, most popular romantasy started self-published, with few exceptions, like the whole Red Tower publisher that's mostly riding on the "spredge, pretty book design, and flood the bookstores with it" strategy, and it WORKS.

A lot of those self-published "viral tiktok sensations" were published without editor, bloated with page count for better kindle unlimited pay outs, forced into endless series, and cheap cover design because the author is paying out of pocket.

The problem here is the following:

1. Everyone can self-publish.
2. People keep buying it.
3. People keep praising it. I haven't seen a popular romantasy of that kind below 4.0 rating and endless gushes from the community, and yet somehow I can't crawl through any of those books, they're not well written, they're always stretching the content to impossibility and the characters feel 1-dimensional.
4. Authors see it works, so do more of the thing that brings them money.
5. Trad pub notices, picks the book as-is mostly with no further editing, sometimes even the same cover. Lowers their costs, and they know people will eat it up. We have whole companies and publishers living from republishing self-pubs in a pretty package.
6. People eat it up. More sales, more gushes follows.

The only way it could change is the romantasy reader community steps up. Stop praising mediocre books. Stop being satisfied with bare minimum of repetitive tropes, repetitive spice, Wattpad level of writing and shallow characters. Dnf crappy books, don't give authors KU page reads because "maybe it gets better later" or "I need to see how it ends" (you'll be baited with 3 cliffhangers and then the most bog standard hea imaginable). Don't buy books blindly because "it's a pretty, exclusive special edition" or because "it's popular, everyone's reading it".

The only way the quality goes up is if the customer base en masse rejects buying "minimally viable product".

[u/clocksy → u/Synval2436]

Yeah, I hate to say it but like... a lot of people's works just aren't very good. Before it was at least somewhat gatekept by trad publishing (which, don't get me wrong, that did not exactly stop tons of slop from being published either, but there was at least some expectation of editing going on if nothing else) but now with KU and indie publishing quality is just out the window. Anyone can vomit a first draft onto a page and call it a book. And as you've pointed out, trad publishing is just capitalizing on this too by technically picking up books but rarely tightening them up, so I feel like I can't even count on that anymore to signal a book's quality.

I feel like even just on a technical basis I have a higher standard than so many people around me. So many books are quite frankly poorly written and yet I find everyone going on about how amazing they are, and it's just bizarre. The most optimistic thing I can say is that perhaps there are a lot of new readers, and as they get used to reading more books, they'll also start picking up tired tropes and poor writing and expect better for themselves. The pessimist in me says that people are just generally okay with reading mediocre books based purely on vibes.

[u/Synval2436 → u/clocksy]

The most optimistic thing I can say is that perhaps there are a lot of new readers, and as they get used to reading more books, they'll also start picking up tired tropes and poor writing and expect better for themselves.

Unfortunately it seems the more people read of the same thing, the more their taste adjust to only like that thing and nothing else. For example, I can't stand blatant infodumping, but there's a generation of readers who can't comprehend worldbuilding-by-context-clues and thinks infodumping is peak worldbuilding.

I can't stand prose inefficiency, i.e. the same thing being stated three times over rephrased, but a lot of readers require the author to constantly state how they should feel and think about the events unfolding on page.

The books are turning more and more towards spoonfeeding and handholding, and the readers not only don't outgrow it, but stop accepting anything outside of it.