Romance Trends 2025-2026
Nat 'Nose' Connors
<nat@kindletrends.com>
RWNZ · August 2026
Everything you are about to see is real information, drawn from the Amazon Kindle Store about 48 hours ago.
None of it is made up.
This talk is going to be a bit more nerdy than usual
although not in a tech sense
There will be practical techniques
but there will also be some abstract waffly big-brain stuff
What you may have been expecting
Why is this not very helpful?
The problem with the weather for the whole world
-
It's accurate, but not helpful
-
It doesn't tell us much about how things happened
-
It doesn't tell us about what it means for our 'neighbourhood'
- Amazon doesn't tell us much about anything outside the Top 100
- Searching for books is a black hole
- Categories are wonky; some good, some not so good
- Covers are important - but we can't search by them or their properties
Most sources of information are pretty author-unfriendly
(like I've been promising for years)
So I wanted to do something about it
Broader information
Print & audio (accidentally right now!)
Translations (accidentally right now!)
Relating different versions of books
More stuff
We're getting Also Boughts en masse
We're getting cover information
Changes to titles, covers, blurbs
New information
95% of the top 30,000 books, every week, nonstop
Nonfiction as well as fiction
So we're not limited by categories any more
Historical information
About 5 years, every week and every month for 14 genres
We can search it all and look at trends reliably
What we've got now
Within 7 days or less
The top 30,000 books (>95% of them)
Comprehensiveness
Timeliness
Me (UK version)
Me (US version)
Now at this point
So what
Your neighbourhood, not the whole store
MM Sports Romance
hockey any sports romance
Any sports romance vs hockey, share of the Gay Romance Top 100, 2021–2026 (2026 = year to date).
Other story elements in MM
College Hurt/Comfort Omegaverse
Selected tropes as a share of the Gay Romance Top 100, 2021–2026 (2026 = year to date).
Instead of the weather for the whole world
I think what happens in your neighbourhood is actionable.
Covers
Now we can get information about covers!
It's not 'running in the cloud', it's...
Frozen chicken breast
Frozen chicken breast
Cat food shelf
Illustrated covers
photographic illustrated 3d-rendered
Romance Top 100, four time points 2021-2026.
Tones by genre
Romance Paranormal
Left: illustrated covers — both shelves rise. Right: dark-palette covers — only Romance falls. 720-cover run, Top-100 panels.
More detail
hand-drawn cartoon ornate-emblem (romantasy look) painterly digital-realist
Romance Top-100 covers by illustrated sub-style.
The moral:
Changes in cover styles aren't universal
Author neighbourhoods
We can make networks of Also Boughts and Also Reads
FILLER — every real reader neighbourhood, named
Every real also-bought neighbourhood in Romance/Fantasy/LGBTQ+ (23 of them; Erotica omitted), sized by real book count.
FILLER — Amazon's shelf vs your readers' map
Same real neighbourhoods, same positions -- the ones we'll come back to are named; the rest fade to grey.
FILLER — readers mostly stay in romance
Reader neighbourhoods from also-bought behaviour, coloured by Amazon shelf. Most are Romance.
FILLER — one 'Romance' shelf, many neighbourhoods
Amazon's single Romance shelf is really all of these separate reader neighbourhoods.
FILLER — and some neighbourhoods cross the store lines
The moral:
Follow your instincts about your readers
It looks like changes in the market can happen in a few different ways
Some of them are kind of obvious
Growth at the top
Top 100 Deep list (101+) external event
Share of books mentioning hockey: Romance Top 100 vs the deep list (ranks ~101–470), same scrape, by quarter.
Romantasy in two categories
Fantasy Top 100 Romance Top 100
'Romantasy' in Top-100 blurbs. Fantasy leads Romance by ~2 quarters.
but some of them aren't
Growth in the midlist
Grumpy-sunshine (being published) Random comparison terms On the Top 100 the chart fills up (2023 Q4)
Top: is the rise real? (grumpy vs random terms, share of new releases). Bottom: what could you see? (grumpy books on the Top 100, of 100).
The moral:
Keep an eye out for words/phrases growing in your neighbourhood
So we went looking for what else is out there
I looked for sudden unexpected spikes in words and phrases
"Marriage in crisis"
Also Boughts 'network'
"Marriage in crisis" Also Boughts
stays within the cluster reaches elsewhere in Romance
Readers cross-shop within the cluster about six times more than any organic subgenre checked (author/series-excluded).
And again
(interim ones, anyway)
Conclusions
Changes in the market can arrive in more than one way
-
Cross-store spillover — romantasy
-
Broad at the top, not one book — hockey
-
Below the waterline — grumpy-sunshine & marriage-in-crisis
What's next for all this?
-
Getting the cover tagging out to genre communities
-
Print and audio data
-
Going wide (as long as we can match ISBNs)
-
Data from newsletter promos (Bookbub, Zoebub, whatever else actually still works)
-
BookTok (but this is heavily manipulated so harder to trust)
And finally
the attempt to replace judgment by formula is always irrational;
all that can be done is to make judgment possible by narrowing its range and the available alternatives, giving it clear focus, a sound foundation in facts
and reliable measurement of the effects and validities of actions and decisions
Acknowledgements
Lana Love
Jennifer Hilt
Eileen Mueller
Holly Dunn
Cheryl Phipps
Becca Syme
Thank you to all the authors and artists who helped with this talk
Kelly, Marija and the RWNZ conference team for giving me a chance to speak
All of you for your time and attention
Thank you for watching!
For more free resources, check out:
I'll have the slides up post-conference (little bit knackered currently, sorry)