SPLENDID SPRAYED EDGES: Romance, Fantasy, and Romantasy
If you enter a bookstore today, your eyes will immediately be drawn to a glitter- and pastel-heavy section of the store, where ‘new adult’ readers are offered splendidly decorated books, sporting sprayed edges, intricate cover designs, enclosed character cards, bespoke scented printing
Clearly, book design today spans a wide range of expectations: the printed books still have to appeal to readers in the bookstore, but their flat digital counterparts as thumbnail images in online webshops need to be equally recognizable in a small format. This leads to certain aesthetics – recognizability is key, even in a saturated market. Beyond the thumbnail, many books take on a further digital iteration in photographic or video content on #bookstagram or #booktok, where readers exchange recommendations and reviews these days. In this digital age, the penchant of readers for elaborate print volumes bearing the hallmarks of mass-market bibliophile décor is striking. And while there are exceptions to the rule, these splendid designs are often reserved for certain genres – with romance leading the charge.
Publishers have reacted to this recent diversification of genres by establishing a wide range of additional imprints in the past few years. This ensures that readers find their preferred and age-appropriate reading material, with the ‘spice level’ that they are looking for, under the auspices of recognizable and reliable brands. In Germany, these are tailored imprints such as LYX and One (Bastei Lübbe, with One focused on young adult readers), Cove (Carlsen), KYSS (Rowohlt), Everlove (Piper), Forever (Ullstein) or Loewe Intense (Loewe). The same trend is visible in other markets as well. Ideally, these imprints can offer guidance and reliability for readers. This has also been the case for the current move towards darker romance content, where imprints such as Blush (Penguin Random House Germany/Blanvalet) have been established to put up guardrails between more traditional romance and darker contents. LYX (Bastei Lübbe) has not yet founded a sub-imprint, but has its own dedicated website for “Morally Grey Reads.” The increasing shift to dark romance has triggered debates around publishers’ responsibility to communicate recommended or required age limits for readers. There is no standard practice yet, and booksellers maintain that age limits cannot be enforced in a busy bookstore environment. In the meantime, many romance, romantasy and fantasy authors and their publishers have opted for clear content warnings to inform and empower readers in making their own choices. Without leaning any further into the debate here, it remains to be seen how reading preferences and trends develop further, and how publishers, booksellers, and readers will react and contribute to these shifts.
Undisputably, #bookstagram and #booktok have caused and supported a reading boom among young people belonging to these communities. New book festivals and other bookish events have been established to give these readers chances to encounter their favorite authors live. There are even increasing numbers of dedicated bricks-and-mortar retail spaces for romance and new adult readers, for instance “The Ripped Bodice,” with locations in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, New York, or the bookstore “Dear Reader” in Gera, Germany and the pop-up store “LYX by Thalia” in Münster, Germany. These physical spaces serve as proof that the algorithms of Instagram and TikTok can, in fact, turn up surprising and sometimes contradictory results.
Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover!
The books in the curated collection SPLENDID SPRAYED EDGES, all written by German female authors, epitomize the booming romance trend, with a focus on general romance and the hybrid genre romantasy, with some of the books leaning more heavily into the fantasy genre than others. Many of the books selected for this collection have been published within duologies or trilogies, emphasizing the fact that ‘new adult’ readers are committed and passionate booklovers – once they are hooked, they are willing to read heavy tomes to follow their favorite protagonists’ life stories. And readers are willing to follow these protagonists around the world! While the authors selected for this curated collection are German, their stories are not solely German or based in German-speaking contexts. The universal themes addressed, such as friendship, love, trauma, and healing are set both in complex fantasy-worlds and in the (similarly complex) real world, with books in this collection featuring venues from the Amalfi coast to Sweden, from Fuerteventura to Tennessee, from Brighton to the Adirondack Mountains. As you’ll see, the books bear the unmistakable visible markers of their genres: glittery for romance, mysterious for romantasy, elaborate for fantasy. But please don’t judge them by their covers – read them for yourself instead.
