For the first time, more than 2 dozen women will have their real names adorn the covers of books they wrote

Baileys Is Recognizing Female Authors Who Used Male Pseudonyms With a 25-Book Collection

Egerton, Eliot, Fleming and Sand may have all been the “men” behind some of the most widely celebrated works in the Western literary canon, but not a single George authored these texts. In fact, the writers of Keynotes, Middlemarch, The Head of Medusa and Indiana were all women who chose to adopt pseudonyms during a time when gender could hinder ones chances in being published.

Me when I spontaneously spend too much money on books

Having a really galaxy brain thought process about how “originality” and “derivativeness” in books, and even just how well a book pulls off the tropes it uses...are all almost totally relative and subjective things.

People have discussed how, at one point, “the butler did it” or “Luke, I am your father” were stunning and unexpected. The biggest and most predictable cliches were, at some point, exposed to a big audience for the first time, and they were fresh and original and they worked.

But this doesn’t just happen for everyone at one point in time for every trope, as if the Trope Codifier comes about and from then on all people are like “ehh, it’s been done before.” This is happening on a micro-level all the time. An example is when a niche subgenre or long-running franchise starts to expand and get more fans. Newer installments or examples of the subgenre that are seen as tropey and dumb by Fandom Olds can be really popular with the newcomers because to people who are new, the ideas aren’t cliche or “already done.” They’re new. The same thing happens when a book borrows elements from a different genre—a fantasy book having a romance subplot that would make regular romance readers cringe is acceptable because the romance readers and fantasy readers are largely two different groups of people.

You also see this with people who are new to a genre or category of book—or people who are relatively new to reading in general. Middle grade and YA fantasy continue to produce very formulaic and unoriginal stuff, that people who read hundreds of books in that category generally hate. However, these books often gain fans who are captivated by them, because there will always be people who haven’t read hundreds of books in that category. There will always be people for whom your book is their very first experience encountering a particular trope or reading in your genre or even reading a fiction book for pleasure at all.

And all of us were new to every genre we’ve read, once upon a time. My first real YA novel I read was Origin by Jessica Khoury, and in hindsight the love interest and teenage girl main character were both pretty typical and cliched for YA, and the love interest was definitely described in ways that would make me cringe now, simply because “the ripple of muscle beneath his tanned skin” and the “smell of cedar and wind that clung to him” are in every. YA. novel. ever. But I didn’t have that reaction, and I was honestly pretty taken in, because I was like 14 and hadn’t read a genre-typical YA romance before.

Some books, I would argue, specifically exist to appeal to people that are category/genre newbies. That’s their niche. MG/YA variants of lots of genre fiction are often like this, because kids and teens just...have not read as many books due to just not having been alive as long. Children’s books still (unfortunately) get away with incredibly cliche portal fantasies about boy chosen ones because their audience is one that is always full of people who have never read a fantasy book before. Children, though critical and thoughtful readers, got born more recently than adults. Romance in YA or MG tends to seem formulaic and tropey. Horror in YA or MG tends to seem overdone and tropey. Of course there are outstanding MG and YA books for which this is not true, but for the broad mass of YA and MG literature, tropey works because the audience almost definitely doesn’t have the kind of experience with romance or horror needed to develop a sense that “ugh, this is such an overdone trope.”

So it’s true that “every cliche trope got used for the first time at some point,” but the corresponding fact that “every trope a person percieves as cliche got encountered by them for the first time at some point” doesn’t seem to be getting attention and I think it shapes the way we see genres and tropes a lot more.

There will always be people who will appreciate cliches because there will always be people to whom they aren’t cliches. There’s even some validity to the idea that the people who have read extensively enough in a category to bitterly hate its common tropes are outliers. The vast, vast majority of people don’t read hundreds of books per year, and therefore there’s a sort of volunteer bias going on with reviews of books from Goodreads book bloggers who devote a massive fraction of their lives to reading and reviewing books.

With fairly niche subgenres or just genres that don’t have broad, far-reaching appeal, I feel like it’s way more common to have a plague of what seems like tropey garbage constantly churning out to annoy the “Fandom Olds.” Horror is a good example. I’ve experienced this myself—there’s a post where a bunch of people are like “OH GOD WHAT THE FUCK” in response to a clickhole article where an astronaut is talking about seeing his fellow astronaut trapped outside the airlock begging to be let in while the same fellow astronaut is safely inside, warning him not to let in the doppelgänger. And like, yeah, a pretty fucked up concept—which doesn’t really affect me anymore because the clickhole article was like, the third time I’d seen it used in some online short horror piece. There have been stories in this exact format with some slight variation going around online for a long-ass time. And horror is always going to have this problem by the bucketload because the really (or even moderately) fucked up stuff does not appeal to general audiences, at least not in large quantities or consumed frequently, but dedicated horror fans are going to end up desensitized to all of the common tropes. Which is going to cause problems because the horror that’s the most appealing to general audiences is going to be the exact stuff that seems like insipid tropey garbage to the people who really, really, really love horror.

So now I’m thinking about how literally no one has literally complete knowledge of any given genre or category of book, because it’s like physically impossible to read all the books even in fairly niche categories because there are just so many books in the world. Which means that there are Forbidden Opinions about the cliches and tropes of them all that are literally inaccessible to mankind, but that hypothetically a person who’d somehow read them all would develop. We can extrapolate what those opinions would be, but we don’t know for sure what cliche or originality or uniqueness really is! Because none of us have ever experienced All Of Fantasy!

Like. Everyone’s experience of what a genre is is different, because everyone’s sampled literature differently. So everyone’s understanding of what a unique or original idea is...depends on and is limited by what they happen to have read or not read.

And the people who have read more books and who have been dedicated to the genre they like for 20 years or more aren’t necessarily more correct. Like, yes, they have a broader knowledge of the genre, but from a different point of view, don’t they matter less, since having read, say, 900 fantasy novels since the 1990’s makes them actually kind of an outlier in the category of people who enjoy fantasy?

Her Lord of Death by Katherine Diane is the most tantalizing and engrossing book I’ve read in 2020! Its wonderful and I cannot wait to share it with all my friends who like steamy romance that involves tragic back stories, alpha male love interests who strive to protect the heroine, and supernatural historical romance! 

It hit all my hot spots for a sexy, romantic read. Witty dialogue that actually did make me laugh out loud (my partner gave me a few confused looks while I was giggling over conversations between Kore and Acheron). YUP! Dominant alpha male type who isn’t a total asshole? Check! Strong willed but soft heroine who isn’t too stupid to live? Check! Paranormal, supernatural, witchy shit? YES! Historical and mythological references that aren’t totally inaccurate? WOOHOO! SO many goodies AND well written.

If you enjoy dark fantasy romances like Black Jewels Trilogy, wanted more from ancient greco-roman mythology classics, and need a steaming hot read that you won’t want to put down – grab Her Lord of Death!

(This post contains Amazon affiliate links)