Top 5 Tiring Book Trends

It’s Wednesday!

I’m never going to get tired of that camel.

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This week’s topics are trends I’m tired of seeing in books. Not talking just tropes, but also like trends focused around books, if that makes sense. Anyways, if you’d like to join T5W, here is the link to do so.

5. “The ______’s Daughter”, “The Girl with/on ______”, “The ______’s Wife”

This title trend, man. It’s everywhere, I’m sure you’ve seen it. I’m not knocking any of the books who have these kinds of names, just the names themselves. They’re. Everywhere. I think my first and third examples particularly are troubling. Obviously, the book is about the girl, but the girl isn’t being described as herself, they’re being described as ‘important because they’re related to this other person’. The second I think is just plain overused. 😛 Haw.

4. Releasing paperbacks months after the hardbacks

I am a paperback person. I love paperbacks. I’ll read hardbacks, but paperbacks are my babies. In the US at least, a book is released and it’s only available in hardback for months, sometimes a year before the paperback is released. Kind of hard to keep up with a series that way as I’m one of those ‘must buy all books in same edition’ people. So I can end up doing two things. 1. Bite the bullet and buy them in hardback, which is expensive. 2 Buy them in paperback, choosing to either wait a year to read them or borrow the hardback from the library and then later buying when the paperback is released. Both methods, they mess with my feng shui. Seriously. They’re my paperbacks and I want them now! D:

3. False stand-alone advertisement

This isn’t a huge epidemic or anything I suppose, but I’ve run into it two or three times now. A new book, advertised as a stand-alone is released! Great! I buy it, I read it! But guess what! Cliffhanger at the end! Not a stand-alone, nope nope. I’m invested in a new series now, dammit. I was not ready for this baggage, I was not ready for this responsibility. I didn’t sign up for this! But I need to finish it because I like it, dammit.

Huff.

2. Cover changes

I don’t really need to explain this one, do I?

1. “I’m not like other girls” girl

This one actually has been getting a lot better recently. I’ve seen a huge decline in this trope in books. I feel like there’s been enough reader push-back against it that authors have started actually listening. A lot of us scream for strong female friendships, for women with more than one dimension to them, for characters that defy gender norms without putting those down who choose not to. I love it!

But let me tell you what son, every so often this trope slips into a book and when I come across it, I crack. It needs to go away.