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Some of my favorite book genres: Cozy Fantasy, and Romantacy, are hard to find, yet some authors of these genres continue to make best seller lists with each title in their series, sometimes concurrently! (Looking at you Sarah J. Mass and Rebecca Yarros!) I think a big part of the reason is that finding other books in similar genres isn’t as easy as it should be. Newer subgenres simply don’t exist in bookseller catalogues such as Amazon. Unless the publisher markets the heck out of the book, is a master with metadata, or includes the subgenre in the subtitle of the book, doing a search at the actual marketplace may result in only a few titles from the actual subgenre.
I wanted to find the top Cozy Fantasy books, so I searched on Amazon. A few of the heavy hitters came up including Travis Baldree’s “Legends and Lattes”, and “The Spellshop” by Sarah Beth Durst. These two were labeled with “Previously viewed”, so I’m not sure how much my search terms even played a part. There were a small handful of others followed by a ton of Cozy Mystery titles. I did some investigating and looked at the categories that were used to label these books, hoping that I could find the top sellers, but although “Legends and Lattes” is a high ranking title in multiple categories including “Gaslamp Fantasy”, “LGBTQ+ Fantasy”, and even “Action and Adventure Fantasy”, “Cozy Fantasy” is not one of the categories listed. I checked a few other titles and found the same result. However, when looking up Cozy Mystery titles, I found there are books that are bestsellers in “Cozy Mystery”, “Cozy Mysteries”, “Cozy Animal Mystery”, and “Cozy Animal Mysteries”. Hmm.
“Romantasy” likewise doesn’t seem to exist specifically as a category. However, since it contains parts of both the words “Romance” and “Fantasy”, using it in the search can get you pretty close.
These subgenres aren’t necessary new, but their category names might be, and they’re definitely trendy right now. If I go on social media and enter #Romantasy or #CozyFantasy, I can go down a video short rabbit hole a mile long. Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon, has them listed as genres. But if I want to look up the top ten Cozy Fantasy Books or Romantasy books on Amazon, I’m out of luck. I hope this changes soon!
Thanks for reading!
Rebecca H. Lee
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