The wild success of Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing has birthed a new category on the Goodreads Choice Awards: Romantasy. But many are asking, what is romantasy? While the word itself can give us some clue—it is obviously a blend of romance and fantasy—that isn’t really enough information to identify the genre.
Google says:
Romantasy is a subgenre of commercial fiction that combines fantasy and romance elements. It’s a portmanteau of the words “romance” and “fantasy”. Romantasy can take place in a low or high fantasy world, and often features high fantasy settings, such as worlds with elemental magics, warring kingdoms, and mythical creatures.
As an editor and book coach, I can tell you that “fantasy” is a marketing category and a setting, not a story type. Unfortunately, a quick read through the books that made the list for 2023’s GCAs indicates that definition may not be too far off the mark. After all, the category winner, Fourth Wing, features a global action plot, dominant romantic subplot, detailed world building with unique lore and a complex magic system, political intrigue, and complex social issues.
Contrast this with the second place winner, Assistant to the Villain, by Hannah Nicole Maehrer. Assistant is a light-hearted romance with a familiar-feeling magic system and mild action elements that focuses more on character development, emotional dynamics, and the romantic relationship between the main characters than action or adventure.
So what does this tell us? That “romantasy” is an extremely nebulous marketing category. While I read and enjoyed both Fourth Wing and Assistant to the Villain, I definitely would not say that either counts as a comp title for the other.
With the resounding success of Fourth Wing (it won the category with more than ten times the votes garnered by Assistant to the Villain, the biggest margin of victory for any book by far), it may become the standard for this nascent category. If that is the case, Assistant to the Villain and other similar novels may enjoy greater success if they find a different category in which to market themselves.
After all, I found Assistant to the Villain to be a delightful read. Unfortunately, people looking for books in the same category as Fourth Wing are not looking for “delightful”, and nothing disappoints readers more than getting something that is not what they thought they were signing up for.
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