Last October, the first book in my gothic romance trilogy about generational curses, the darker corners of Scottish folklore, and four morally grey bisexuals doing under-negotiated BDSM and unethical polyamory to survive the psychological saw trap of the faery underworld hit shelves.
“It’s not a romantasy,” I had explained to my editor, when I first pitched her the trilogy. “I mean…It’s a fantasy novel, and it has lots of sex in it, and the trilogy ends with a happy ending between two men, a woman, and the genderqueer heiress. So maybe it’s a romantasy?”
“Romantasy can mean so many things,” she said.
This was 2024, back when it could.
In October 2025, SAVAGE BLOOMS (Unearthly Delights #1) was released with a cover that followed blockbuster trends: fruits and flowers in saturated colors against a dark background, stark white typeset, and sharp fantasy ironwork that suggested plenty of steamy scenes. It was a romantasy cover, and it should have sold like hot cakes.
It did not.
SAVAGE BLOOMS didn’t exactly flop, but it underperformed my previous personal benchmarks so severely that when I got first week sales in my Baltimore Hilton on book tour, I understood why rockstars trashed hotel rooms. I did not trash that hotel room, but I did crash out in a truly operatic way over the phone to multiple friends, and I did have to go to a rage room about it after tour.
Even after the first month of publication, word of mouth remained sluggish in a way no touring or posting or podcasting could revive. Granted, the book had come out in a crowded season for the dark and sexies, and I had been pistol-whipped by publishing two weeks after ALCHEMIZED, a book that broke bestseller lists and bookstore software systems alike, flooding shelves with so many copies that some other books were put out late, or not given proper pride of place on new release tables.
Still, something felt stuck in a cosmic, maddening way that all my valiant efforts could not jostle loose.
My editor, God bless her, took it upon herself to look into the sales, reader response, and bookseller backchannel chatter, and came to a very simple conclusion.
“It’s an expectation issue. They’re expecting a romantasy, and this is a gothic. While the readership overlaps, they aren’t the same. How would you feel about a new cover?”
I’m here today to say that we have a new cover for the paperback release in January 2027, and that I feel very, very good about it.
Designer Ella Garret truly brought the freaky gothic fever dream to life, and I’m happy to say all the covers in the series will match the new look moving forward.
However, this whole branding pivot has made some unspoken genre conventions apparent, and brought some deep spiritual truths about my relationship with my creative work to the surface.
This is Metaphysical Girl, an interdisciplinary newsletter about the publishing industry, literary critique, spirituality, and sexuality, and I’m Saint, byronic hero and internationally bestselling gothic author. If any of your favorite words were in the previous sentence, subscribe here to get access to my entire back catalog.
Below the cut:
real talk about the impact of genre expectations on book sales
my insane theory that the sun and venus celestially conspired to punish me for pretending to be a romantasy girlie
speculative fiction flattening in the age of the algorithm
romance novel heteronormativity
building a multigenre career via the all-or-nothing road of unrepentant weirdness
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.