Coming soon · romance first
Describe the book
you're in the mood for.
Get that book.
In your own words, right down to the things you want the book not to have. A tag list can't hold that, and neither can whatever the algorithm is pushing this week.
Things you should be able to ask for
- “slow burn, she has all the power, and nobody breaks up in act three”
- “grumpy single dad, small town, closed door”
- “romantasy where the court politics are as good as the romance”
- “second chance, but they're both older and it's quiet”
Anything can hand you a list. The hard part is a list where every book actually has the thing you asked for, with nothing invented to make it fit. That means reading 65,510 books down into their parts before anyone types a word, which is what we've been doing. The search box is next.
From the corpus
Three things that turned up while we were building the groundwork, counted across every book we hold.
- 40×
- how much more often grumpy and sunshine share a book than chance allows. Almost every other pairing on the shelf is a coincidence.
- 55%
- of romance sits in the moderate heat band. Closed-door turns out to be the rarest thing on the shelf, at 4.9%.
- 15×
- how far one night stand and secret baby exceed their expected overlap, which is a strange way for two separate tropes to behave.
The reading room
What 65,510 romance novels look like from above
Character archetypes
Only two character types in romance are actually a couple
Grumpy and sunshine turn up together far more often than chance allows. Almost nothing else in the genre behaves like a matched pair.
Heat levels
Romance is far less explicit than its reputation, and far less chaste
Across 64,137 books the genre piles up in the middle. The extremes belong to a handful of subgenres, and the gap between those subgenres is enormous.
Trope pairs
Some romance tropes are secretly the same story
One night stand and secret baby are supposed to be two different things. The shelf disagrees, and a few other pairs refuse each other just as flatly.
The idea
A recommendation is only worth anything if it can be checked
A bad guess you can shrug off. What wastes your evening is a confident one, where the tool has invented the detail that made the book fit and you don't find out until three chapters in.
Every book gets read down into parts
Heat level, tropes, character types, the shape of the conflict, how it ends, what it warns you about. All of it kept per book, so anything we say about a book is pointing at something.
Your words get matched against those parts
That includes the negatives. “No third-act breakup” gets treated as a requirement rather than a hint, and it's the one thing existing tools handle worst.
The reason comes with the book
Each book arrives with the part of it that answers what you asked for, so you can tell a real match from a confident guess before you spend an evening on it. If we can't point at why a book fits, it doesn't go on the list.
Nobody can pay to be on it
No author, publisher or retailer can buy their way onto your list. Here's how this gets paid for.
The waiting list
Get one email when the search box opens
One email, then nothing. It isn't a newsletter and there's no drip sequence waiting behind it with “5 tips” in the subject line. If that ever changes, you get to say no first.
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