Antonia Bernardin

There are more than a few videos kicking around the Booktok, book tube and maybe bookstagram sphere where people are getting on their high horses and booktok ‘ruining’ publishing and bashing the increased demand for spicy books.

You can read my rant about the whole debate on whether this increased desire for books is creating a kind of book based ‘fast fashion’ here.

My conclusion in post, was that maybe it has but also there’s nothing wrong with it. These things will balance out and meanwhile, try a little harder to engage with the high quality books that are also coming out.

And this can kind of sum up my feelings about this debate, quite nicely too.

The question ‘is it spicy’ comes up under most book reviews that don’t mention one way or the other. ACOTAR and books like it becoming popular has made it somewhat acceptable to be a women openly enjoying books with smut in. This is a trend and like all trends, it will reach a peak until it’s done to death and dies down. Just like the dystopian YA trend of the 2010’s, which saw increasingly shittier series’s appearing.

However, I am of the opinion.. so what? So what if there is a somewhat aggressive thirst for spicy books. People are reading again. Publishers are thriving. Book stores are thriving.

Should some of these fantasy books that present as, or are being shelved as YA, be marketed a little more carefully? Also, yes. Unfortunately, book stores and publishers have been slow to adopt NA as an alternative genre, for those books that fit the very broad YA pigeonhole but absolutely should not be consumed by the intended YA audience range (12-18).

I also think if you are an adult reader who prefers not to read books with spice in, check some reviews online first before you read it and DNF the book or complain online about it. The book is not designed to appeal to you and there are plenty of fantastic books out there that are traditional YA or don’t contain explicit scenes.

It does not give you the right to trash that author, or booktok as a whole. It is not a flex, it is literally just a preference.

It enrages me when someone reads a trending book because it’s trending, knowing that it does not suit their reading preferences and then takes to the internet to bash booktok books. Yes, sometimes they are a mixed bag but this is no different to pre-book days, need I remind everyone of Fifty Shades of Grey?! These books have always existed. Even books with some spice marketed as YA existed before, remember the House of Night series?

They may be coming faster and in greater quantity but that just means, finally, publishers are giving the romance and fantasy fiction genres the financial backing they deserve. If your feed is dominated by people recommending the books you consider ‘low quality’ then that is just algorithm responding to what you interact with or post about. There are plenty of incredible books, without spice, coming out thanks to the boom caused by booktok, go find them.

On the flip side, I can also agree that in some cases the calls for spice in the books is getting a bit much. In researching many books for my rec lists I found several reviews bashing how little smut there was in the book and several saying it was too much and they DNF’d. Also, there was that incident where a teenager who was writing their YA debut got inundated with questions about the book’s spicy-ness, which is an excellent example of where this trend has gone too far in places, because yeah, they should not have been asking a young person that.

Some publishers are forcing writers to shoe horn explicit scenes into a book, which the writer is clearly uncomfortable or in-experienced at writing.

I fall on the side of I enjoy a little spice in a book but only when it serves a purpose, when it fits the character and the narrative. When it’s there for fun, not just for the sake of existing.

But I don’t enjoy the superiority complex some creators are having about this whole debate. They are very black and white, where I believe this is a bit more of a nuanced discussion.

I think publishers need to be held accountable, in terms of marketing, what they are picking up to publish in the first place and there’s need to be a separation between books designed for teens and books with explicit content, perhaps through new genres like NA.

Or we stop shelving fantasy book written by women in the fucking YA section and just stick them in fantasy, this is an issue largely affecting books written by women and speaks to a lack of respect for these writers. Sometimes they are only YA because a women wrote it.

Anyway, not sure there’s a neat and tidy way to wrap this up. I just miss the days when booktok was just a bunch of nerdy book friends sharing books they liked.