One of the latest trends in the publishing industry is trope-based marketing.

This was new to me. Instead of marketing a book by genre, as steampunk romance or self-help or yaoi, authors and their marketing teams will promote their books by trope, as enemies to lovers, only one bed, found family. And in book culture (BookTok, BookTube, and the like), recommendation lists are less like “my favourite 5 steampunk romance books” and more like “my favourite 5 enemies-to-lovers books” now.

I don’t know how to feel about this. It seems to me a backward way of thinking about a book. And I enjoy TVTropes-style analysis of any media, but as TVTropes itself reminds us, tropes are tools. The tropes serve the story, not the other way around. And when authors promote their books by listing the tropes they used, I can’t avoid the impression that they came up with a list of cool tropes and then worked backwards, constructing a story to string them together.

Perhaps there are some authors who do think like that, but maybe it’s just a marketing fad. The marketers understand that BookTok people like their trope-based recommendations, and it would be nice if their authors made things easier for them. I wonder how these conversations go.

“Here’s the manuscript for my latest project.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about a young woman who flees the Vietnam war and tries to start her life over again in California, but her past won’t leave her alone.”

“No, I mean, does it have, like, enemies to lovers? Only one bed? Found family?”

“What?”

“You know what? Here’s a list, just check off which tropes your book uses and come back to me when you’re done.”

Whereupon, Providence willing, the harried author dutifully researches the keywords, checks off the tropes one by one, and hands her list back to the marketing team, who sends it off to BookTok influencers to work their magic.

But then it occurs to me that if music had tropes, I would love trope-based marketing for music. It would be so much easier to find music that I’ll enjoy if instead of it being categorised as “rap” or “pop” or “Latin”, it were tagged with “sax soli in close harmony” or “IV-V/vi-vi progression” or “melody in zigzagging thirds and fourths”. These are elements that give me a thrill when they come up in music, far more consistently than any genre category. “Jazz” I can take or leave, but “melody jumps up to the sixth scale degree over a iim7/IV in bar 12” gives me goosebumps every time.

Why do I like this idea for music, but not for books? I don’t know. But when I do figure that out, I think I will be able to understand the BookTokers a little better.