Rachel Kersey

It was a bestseller as a book.

It became an absolute bestseller as a movie series.

And it got publishers thinking.

I spoke with romance duo Christina Lauren, who actually met writing Twilight fanfic.

And they said that when they first spoke to people about going...

into the traditional publishing world, and this is more than a decade ago, they were told, don't say a thing about fan fiction.

That's a scarlet letter.

Well, that is not true anymore.

These days, particularly last summer, you saw three works in particular that either had been Draco Hermione fan fiction.

Or at least a prominent Draco Hermione writer wrote a series that wasn't exactly the fanfic, but certainly the fanfic roots were actually being advertised by the publisher as a selling point.

One very famous one is The Love Hypothesis by Allie Hazelwood, which was originally a Ray Kylo Ren fanfiction from Star Wars.

And what is so kind of funny and meta about that is that that is now being adapted into a movie.

And the male lead is actually married to the actress who played Rey in Star Wars.

If you look at genre fiction these days,

publishing houses, when advertising those works, are using very similar tags to the ones that you would see on Archive of Our Own.

So they are broadcasting those same tropes as saying, if you like that, you'll find that in this book, because they've realized, thanks to fan fiction, that's how a lot of readers like to find what they're going to read next.

So here are some books with the one bed trope that make me go a little bit feral.

I asked BookTok for enemies to lovers recommendations where there are actually enemies.

Here are eight of my favorite grumpy sunshine romance books with the perfect tension and banter.

Another thing that I found incredibly fascinating is, you know, a decade, a decade and a half ago, fan fiction writers were writing in the first person present tense.