Dark Academia...Preppy... Cottage Core... If you spend any time on Booktok, you may have noticed that there is a lot of talk of character aesthetics, as well as an aesthetic in general, which seem to have supplanted genre. That, and in certain genres, tropes such as #friendstolovers or #forcedproximity, are how readers are deciding which book to read next. You’ve also probably heard that the highest grossing romance novel of all time, 50 Shades of Grey, started off as Twilight fan fiction. You may have been wondering, should I care about this?

No one is going to tell you that you have to write to the market, or that you need to fit into a particular aesthetic or fandom. But if you do decide to, there are some things you can absolutely leverage to make your book more likely to succeed commercially. Who knows? Maybe your book will launch the next superfandom?