In recent years, especially with the rise of BookTok, authors are pushing out books at an alarmingly fast rate. Now, as bookworms, this shouldn’t really be a problem for us, right? Getting the sequel to a book a year after the first one was released seems like a dream. But I’ve noticed, and so have many other avid readers, that many people are getting their hands on a book they’ve felt like they’ve been itching to get, and it flops. Because this has happened to me recently, I wanted to talk about the over-saturation of book tropes and publishers treating books like they are fast fashion. 

The first time I really saw this type of thing becoming a problem was the release of “Iron Flame,” the sequel to “Fourth Wing.” Though there was a lot of hype about “Fourth Wing” on the internet, I heard a lot of mixed reviews about it. Some say it was extremely poorly written and hard to get through; others said they liked the vibes and were able to ignore some of the writing aspects. I am never one to really judge reading a book purely based on vibes, even if the writing itself could be better, but after reading a few select pages from the novel, I just couldn’t do it and never picked it up. But when “Iron Flame” was released last fall, I was floored by how quickly I saw the sequel after feeling like I had just heard about the first book. It was insane for someone to write a book so quickly and go through all the hoops of publishing in just a few months. And the quality of the second book really showed how much this accelerated publishing date affected the novel.

When a particular type of trope becomes popular, many authors and publishers will jump on it and try to sell as many copies of this type of book as they can to make the most money. But the problem here lies with the fact that, at some point, you begin to feel like you are reading the same book over and over. You never see any other type of book being marketed, like with the surge of enemies-to-lovers novels we’ve seen recently. We’ve obviously seen this same type of thing before, with the obsession we all had with dystopian novels as teenagers, but we are releasing as adults that the books were all the same and not that well written. But now, especially with TikTok, we are able to get so much information thrown at us at once, so many people are able to go viral that book trends are starting to feel like the micro fashion trends that websites like Shein and Romwe contributed to. Whenever too much of one trope is over and done with, writers and publishers just seem to move on to the next thing that will sell. 

Another author I am sadly seeing this happen to is Sarah J. Mass. Her publishing company has recently been expected to release an insane number of books in the coming years. At first, I was really excited about this, having loved her “Throne of Glass” series and liked ACOTAR, but with her newest “Crescent City” series, the last two books have severely flopped for me. It makes me wonder if she is becoming too worried about pushing out as many books as possible because readers want books too quickly, and she is sacrificing quality over quantity.

As a kid, I remember reading one book, having to wait years for the next installment, and being so excited to read it. But I wonder if we’ve all become too spoiled and expect writers to overwork themselves to get a new book out. Or if writers/publishers are becoming too money-hungry. It’s safe to say it’s both at this point, and I’m hoping that with the realization that many readers are having about this fact, we can find a happy medium so that we can all just enjoy the hobby a little bit more.