donât wanna read about two people falling in love and fuckinâ
just wanna read more about some specific characters
good news! this post is not about you. here are some posts i have seen with great regularity on this site:
no one who writes original fiction is capable of writing good sex
no one who writes original fiction understands tropes
original fiction doesnât understand kinks
too many books are about high-stakes things and not enough books focus on character development and interaction
all of which is blatantly and on the face of it absurd to anyone who reads a lot of romance and which is what this post is about. it downplays and devalues the good work being done, especially by marginalized authors, in the romance space. authors should get paid! authors should get rewarded for originality! if you read a shitty romance novel once, i donât care! so have i! iâve read a lot of shitty books in a lot of perfectly good genres. if you can spend three hours sifting through pairing tags on ao3 to find the one fic that doesnât suck, you can look through ebook previews to find something that looks good.
âbooks are expensiveâ is almost a compelling argument, except that romances and mysteries are two genres where ebooks go on sale for $1-2 with startling regularity. my bookbub emails regularly get ebook boxed sets with tons of different books by different authors going on sale for a buck, which is a great way to find new authors. most authors have newsletters where they let you know about sales and send out freebies. and if your library has overdrive, you can request books. you donât have to just⊠see they donât have it and give up.
will i ever stop recommending courtney milanâs brothers sinister series? literally never. if you prefer contemporary and donât mind first person thereâs also the cyclone series. if your local library does not have at least one courtney milan book i will be shocked. donât worry about it if theyâre not the first in a series. you can read it out of order. thatâs how romance novels work. lots of her books also go on sale for the low price of free on the regular, especially the novellas.
alisha raiâs forbidden hearts series also rules.itâs got starcrossed lovers, itâs got feuding families, itâs got hatefucking, what more could you want
alyssa cole has never written anything bad in her entire life, iâm pretty sure. you want historicals? you want contemporary? contemporary but thereâs still sexy dukes? post-apocalyptic? pick your poison, enjoy.
i just read this one recently and now i need to read all the other cat sebastian books iâve acquired over the years because whenever a book is a dollar and looks like this i buy it immediately (itâs literally a dollar right now). this graphic was very helpful and i wish more authors had ones like it. itâs 2019, bring back web banners for link pages.
i discovered six de los reyes when courtney milan recced beginnerâs guide: love and other chemical reactions and iâm really interested to read more of her books. also it made me realize iâd never read a book that took place in the philippines before? no one fucks in this but itâs really cute and sweet and involves a hyper-logical lady scientist, an artist/barista/bad boy, a coffee shop, and Making Out For Entirely Scientific Reasons.
bound with honor is the only book iâve read from the regency reimagined series. the reimagining seems to be that itâs very bisexual and polyamorous and everyone fucks a lot and also thereâs bondage. i am cool with this. i actually bought the whole series at some point?? i⊠should read these.
i havenât gotten around to reading tess boweryâs treading the boards series (i have bought so many books) (i was not kidding about the one dollar sales) but iâve got high hopes because look at them
kj charles is⊠prolific. and another author whose books i havenât gotten around to despite owning a lot of them. i actually just bought that one on the right, just now, because i saw that it was a dollar when taking this screenshot.
