Good morning Sunshine!
What’s in a trope? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…
We all have our favorites; grumpy-sunshine, enemies to lovers, forbidden love, love triangles… The list is endless.
My half-hearted wikipedia search to confirm my own bias tells me that tropes have been around basically as long as story-telling itself.
However, since we’ve entered into the era of search engine optimization, tropes have exploded. This makes sense, it’s an easy way to summarize aspects of your story into a 2-3 word chunks that will pull when someone googles or uses the Amazon search bar.
It’s also a common language for readers to discuss their favorite novels. After all, if I know I like grumpy-sunshine (which I 110% do), and someone recommends something to me under those terms, I’m far more intrigued than if they just tell me they liked it. I’ve done more than one search in the r/romancebooks subreddit for groveling and grumpy-sunshine and I’m definitely not alone if the results are anything to go by.
Why does it suddenly feel like all new books are just piles of tropes strung together with a few similes?
Oh my friends, the things I’ve learned in starting this self-publishing journey… There is a not so new trend of “writing to market.” I say not so new, because it’s a fairly safe assumption that it has been going on since the early days of publishing and beyond.
Until very recently, in order to get a book published, an author had to convince an agent and an editor that their book would sell. However, the definition of what would sell was determined by that agent and editor’s gut, industry knowledge, and the publishing house’s guidelines. There was probably someone at the publishing house whose entire job was track sales and performance of similar titles making those determinations. And I would bet a lot of money that one of the things they tracked, were tropes.
Now though… now we have access to more data than we can possibly use in a lifetime. Not just sales data either, but clicks. Most important of all data, we have the Amazon Kindle ranking data…. The holy grail.
At any moment in time, we can look at individual keywords and see how other books with those key words are converting into sales. It’s no longer publishers trying to guess which word on the back cover made you buy the book from Borders. Now, they know. They can see the exact keyword you typed that led you to click on a book and then purchase it. And the keywords you’re typing most often? Tropes.
To me, that is where the trope problem we’re seeing comes from. We have all this data, we know which tropes interest readers, we know which ones drive sales. It’s concrete evidence of what readers want right now.
And there comes the temptation, authors want and deserve to make money for their work. It is months, sometimes years of work to publish a single book. What better way to do that than giving readers exactly what they want? ALL the things they want, AKA writing to market.
This, I believe, is how we get novels that are just a collection of all the popular tropes, whether or not they fit the setting, characters, or plot. After all, the tropes have a built-in audience, the more of them you can stuff into your book, the more clicks you get and the more sales you make.
So where does that leave my books? Finding out after I’ve finished the first draft that I’ve done it all wrong and will starve. Kidding, I have a day job that keeps me in ramen and Darcy in the luxury she deserves.
Editor Darcy
Flip flop toys are not luxurious enough
Courting Scandal has tropes, I just didn’t write the book with the tropes in mind. I wrote the story I wanted, and identified the tropes that naturally formed after the fact.
So what can you expect when you crack open that spine?
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Not good enough for her, falling in love with the wrong person, lovable rogue, unattainable love interest, can’t say how I feel, emotional scars, break up to save her, spontaneous vs. serious, rich vs. poor, cinderella story, enemies to lovers (more like mildly acrimonious to lovers)
Has my approach to tropes changed now that I know more about publishing? A little, but not intentionally. I don’t ever expect to quit my day job, if only for the health insurance (yay ‘Merica). That being said, when I began mentally planning the rest of the series, I had some of my favorite tropes in mind for some of the upcoming books.
For example, with The Baker and the Bookmaker (Book 2), you can expect to watch Augie and Anna transition from friends to lovers. In Winning my Wife (Book 3), I wanted to write my favorite trope, a good grovel.
This was not a case of writing to market so much as issuing myself a challenge, you love to read them, now write them.
All that to say, tropes are awesome, tropes are terrible, and tropes are everywhere. And, if you love any of them I mentioned above, you’ll love Courting Scandal.
<3 Ally!