Before Romantasy

Publishing Trends of Decades Past

What is the best-selling book genre of all time? Romance. One of the other top genres? Fantasy. So it's no surprise that in the 2020s, the hybrid genre Romantasy is sweeping the publishing world and topping all the charts. Romantasy fiction combines the world-building and escapism of fantasy with the passion and excitement of romance. The genre has taken BookTok by storm, and readers everywhere are enchanted by books like Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, and A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. These are the stories we can't get enough of now. But what genres captivated readers in previous decades?

The 1970s and 1980s — Horror

In the 1970s and '80s, horror reached major audiences in films such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween readers were also craving horror in their books. In the 1970s and '80s, we saw authors like Stephen King and Anne Rice dominate the charts. Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire is one of the most influential vampire novels of all time, surpassed perhaps only by Bram Stoker's Dracula. And Stephen King, often referred to as the "King of Horror," published some of his most iconic novels in the '70s and '80s, starting with 1974's Carrie. Horror literature is seeing a big resurgence in the 2020s, but the authors writing horror now are still heavily influenced by the films and literature of the '70s and '80s.

The 1990s — Legal Thrillers

Readers were first introduced to the legal thriller genre back in the Victorian era with novels like The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Still, we didn't really see a big legal thriller boom until over 100 years later, when Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent became one of the bestselling novels of the 1980s. The genre continued to grow in popularity throughout the 1990s, with authors like John Grisham and Michael Connelly producing hit after hit for the burgeoning genre.

The 2000s — Young Adult Fiction

Books for young adults have been around ever since teenagers were first named a distinct social demographic back in the 1940s. But it wasn't until the late '90s into the early 2000s that books marketed directly to teens became wildly popular. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter paved the way for other major young adult series, such as The Hunger Games and Twilight.These books became profitable film franchises and influenced a whole generation of fantasy, romance, and dystopian fiction specifically for young adult readers. To this day, YA fiction remains a genre that is widely read by people of all ages, but YA as we know it today owes a lot to the books we were reading in the 2000s.

The 2010s — Domestic Thrillers

In 2012, thriller author Gillian Flynn changed the trajectory of the publishing industry with one single novel, Gone Girl. Ever since its release and the now-infamous "cool girl" speech, readers have hungered for domestic thrillers that bring fear and unease into the suburbs and into our homes, with plenty of unreliable narrators and twists no one could ever have predicted. As readers hunt for the next Gone Girl, books like The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole have topped charts. Have any other domestic thrillers hit us with the same intensity as Gone Girl did? Either way, we still can't get enough of this genre, which still remains popular in the present day.

What has been your favorite genre of the past few decades? Do the most popular genres of these decades reflect your reading tastes? What do you think the next trend in publishing will be? Trends in publishing can be difficult to predict, but we can't wait to see what readers will flock to next.

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