Transcript: The ripple effect of romance: How to leverage trending subjects
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Jarin Pintana: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the Tech Forum webinar. I’m Jarin Pintana, your host for this session, and I’m a book industry professional, a book content creator, and a romance lover. Welcome to The Ripple Effect of Romance: How to Leverage Trending Subjects.
Before we get started, BookNet Canada acknowledges that its operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa and the Potawatomie, the Métis, as well as the unceded and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, or Tsleil-Waututh peoples, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vancouver, Vaughan, and Windsor.
The book industry has long been an industry of gatekeeping. Anyone who works at any stage of the book supply chain carries a responsibility to serve readers by publishing, promoting, and supplying works that represent the wide extent of human experiences and identities in all that complicated intersectionality. BookNet is committed to working with its partners in the industry as we move towards a framework that supports space-making, which ensures that marginalised creators and professionals all have the opportunity to contribute, work, and lead.
Now, let me introduce our speakers. Stephanie Small is a product coordinator at BookNet Canada. She has worked in small press book publishing and book selling, and has lectured on book marketing and technology. She’s also an avid romance reader. Brendan Flattery is a Toronto-based metadata analyst at HarperCollins, and previously worked in digital sales and digital production at Harlequin. In each role, he tackled questions of how books are searched, merchandised, and sold on online vendors. He also sits on the BISG BISAC Subject Codes Committee, where he works to expand codes in fiction, romance, and other growing segments in the industry.
Pavan Ranu is the western sales and special sales manager at Ampersand. She has been championing books, gifts, and looking after special sales in Western Canada since 2019. Cole Davidson is the co-owner of The Spaniel’s Tale Bookstore in Ottawa. He is also vice president of the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association. Prior to opening The Spaniel’s Tale in 2022, Cole worked in political communications for a variety of politicians at the provincial and federal levels, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Welcome, everyone. Here’s what we have planned for today. Our speakers will share mini-presentations about the ripple effect of the romance boom from their unique perspectives, including insights into how to apply some of the lessons learned to other trends. At the end of their presentations, we’ll have a short Q&A period. So, please use the Q&A panel found in the bottom menu to submit your questions throughout the session.
It’s no secret that romance is having a moment, and all eyes are on the subject thanks to the success of the adaptation of “Heated Rivalry.” But the rise in sales is not new. According to SalesData, BookNet’s national sales tracking service for the Canadian English language trade book market, sales of romance print books have increased by 105% from 2020 to 2025, with the biggest jump happening in 2022, when year-over-year sales increased by 52%. While we can’t see into the future to say whether or not sales will continue to increase, it’s safe to say that if publishers want to give their books a fair chance and leveraging this and other trends, the best they can do is make sure their metadata is complete and accurate. Here is Stephanie Small from BookNet to speak on this topic.
Stephanie Small: All right. Hello, everyone. I have the pleasure today of talking a bit about metadata standards and how they’re essential to jumping on trends in the romance genre. Now, I will be the first to admit, standards aren’t, on the surface, terribly sexy. So, if standards were a romance novel, they’d probably be that closed-door kind. They kind of give you an indication of what’s going on without telling you exactly what’s happening. But in order to make sense of sales numbers, circulation stats, and so on, and to help readers find what they’re looking for, we have to make sure that we’re grouping titles in meaningful ways. That’s where standards come in.
As we all know, every good relationship needs to exist on a foundation of communication. I sound like a therapist, but it’s true. Trading partners need to be on the same page when it comes to describing book content. They need to share a vocabulary. In describing our market, that means understanding and applying BISAC and Thema. First off, if you are not using BISAC and Thema, or if you’re only using one or the other, you might be missing opportunities to spot and take advantage of trends. BISAC and Thema are essentially doing the same thing, but they’re doing it in very different ways. There are key market and structural differences between them.
To get a sense of what’s trending in romance in both English and French-speaking Canada, and on the world stage, you have to be prepared to dive into both subject schemes. And BISAC and Thema really do have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. BISAC has a pre-coordinated approach, which is really great for quickly servicing top-level romance categories, big trends, and implying different shelving or display options. Codes that aren’t used just get inactivated. Thema is a bit different. It has a post-coordinated approach that allows you to stack meaning, which is really great for deep dives into specific romance tropes, character types, and relationships. Since it prioritises backward compatibility, codes stay in, even if they’re not often used. Now, the big opportunity is exploiting the differences between these two schemes to enrich your subject categorization game.
I also want to mention, it’s important to look outside of purely romance codes when it comes to categorising or searching for romance books, sort of. It’s less true of BISAC where you’re a little bit more constrained, but with Thema, it is essential. Using qualifiers as well as broader fiction codes or even non-fiction codes can help you get that granular detail you might need to pull together more specific groupings of titles. Just make sure that you’re consulting the Thema usage notes so you’re on the right track.
Now that I’ve convinced you to broaden your horizons and use both BISAC and Thema, I want to give you a bit of specific advice on how to make the most of each of them. Romance readers tend to be really good at knowing exactly what they’re looking for, and this is something that you can capitalise on. Every title needs at least one subject code, and in Canada that means at least one BISAC and one Thema code. You can and should include more than that if it’s necessary and makes sense, but keep in mind that too many codes can cause confusion and dilute meaning. Restraint really is a best practice here.
It’s also important to be accurate. Apply codes that are broad enough to fit the entire subject, but specific enough that your book doesn’t get lost in a sea of general titles. And don’t be tempted to apply an ill-fitting code just because it’s on trend. That is a great way to alienate romance readers. Also, make sure your subject codes are consistent across formats so you’re not disadvantaging anyone depending on how they like to read.
Finally, if you’re providing more than one code, you need to tell data recipients which one is the main most important one for each scheme. So, if you’re sending both BISAC and Thema codes, you need to identify one main BISAC code and one main Thema code. This helps the data recipients make the best possible choice on where to place your book. But for Thema, it’s even more important because meaning can stack. So, you need to ensure all of the descriptive terms and qualifiers can be interpreted in the right context and applied to the right main code.
If you’ve done all these things, if you’ve applied clear, accurate, consistent BISAC and Thema subjects, then you have positioned your book in the best possible way to find its ideal reader.
So, before I move on to what’s new in BISAC and Thema for romance, I do have a caveat, and that is that both BISAC and Thema are mature subject schemes. So, when it comes to adding codes, the bar is really high. Romance is one of the most extensively described sections in Thema, for example, but new codes and qualifiers are constantly being proposed. And I can tell you, any new additions are hotly debated. Just adding a new code doesn’t necessarily indicate a new trend, but neither is the lack of a code indication that a trend isn’t trending. It may just be that it can already be described with existing codes. So, with that in mind, let’s see if we can get a sense of where demand is heading for romance categorization.
So, the elephant in the room is the sports romance, and these are not new. BISAC has had a way to categorise these for quite a while. Shockingly, though, it was a new addition in Thema 1.6. So, it could not have come at a better time. Jarin mentioned the surge in popularity of a certain Canadian hockey romance TV show. Fans are hungry for more. The best part about this, though, is, because it’s Thema, you can combine this sports romance code with existing S codes to indicate which sport is central to the romance.
Next, we can see the continued importance of identity and representation in the romance genre. The very nature of these books is intimate and personal, and it’s important to help readers find romances that not only reflect their own identities, interests, and experiences, but also allow them to explore other cultures and ways of being. In the latest update, both BISAC and Thema have added codes or qualifiers that can be used to surface books featuring different people with disabilities or people who are neurodivergent, indicating the importance of romantic storylines in which disability or neurodiversity play a substantial or important part.
We’re also seeing additions to existing categories and qualifiers that can be used to classify romance books pertaining to other cultures. Asian American and Pacific Islander or Indigenous Pacific Islander are new in both BISAC and Thema updates, but I also wanted to bring your attention to the fact that some specifically Canadian qualifiers have been added to Thema 1.6 that might be of interest to you. These can be used together with other romance codes to identify books where the themes, topics, storylines, or perspectives relate to people in these identifiable cultural communities in Canada.
Now, moving away a bit from identity and representation, there also appears to be a need to categorise romance novels based on what I’m just calling vibe. Readers have specific expectations of books set in a certain time of year or in a certain setting, and that shorthand can imply some of the tropes, characters, relationships, and storylines readers might find. So to this end, BISAC has four new romance categories for seasonal books that aren’t about a specific holiday, for example, cozy fall romance that doesn’t centre on Halloween or Thanksgiving. And Thema, well, they’ve already had seasonal interests covered, but their most recent updates added codes that are intended to capture atmosphere.
One final trend I want to touch on is the growing desire to use familiar romance tropes to find and categorise books. Again, BISAC already had a few of these because they’re so pervasive in the genre, but there have been new ones added to Thema 1.6. These codes are responding to a demand to describe a book’s central relationships and archetypes using language that readers already understand and use. This may end up being an area of growth in Thema 1.7, which will be published later this year. So, watch this space.
So, hopefully, this has given you an idea not only of what’s new in BISAC and Thema, but also what you need to do with respect to subject schemes to ensure you’re spotting and taking advantage of romance trends. Thanks, everyone.
Jarin: Thanks, Stephanie. The ripple effect of a trend and the opportunities that come with it don’t end at the metadata level. There are other aspects publishers, sales agents, and booksellers can consider when seeking to fully leverage the power of a trend. So, what does a publisher do when the sales of a book increase exponentially? Here’s Brendan Flattery sharing insights from the publisher side.
Brendan Flattery: Hi, everybody. Let me just share my screen. All right. So, you know, I think we knew that these books were special. They’ve sold well for us for quite a while actually. And when the TV show was made, you know, it was very exciting, but especially when HBO picked it up, which happened fairly late, and things kind of escalated beyond, I think, what we could have imagined they will in a very good way.
So, the initial questions were really, you know, can people even buy it? Because Amazon sometimes, if books aren’t available, they won’t let customers continue to order them. Or we may also lose the buy box to a third party marketplace seller, which can happen. So, there was just a lot of work done on inventory management for quite a while. And then, you know, more and more accounts wanted it obviously as well. So, I think that is something that is probably still ongoing, but it’s a very good problem to have.
But as well, you know, what do we do to make sure that people even, you know, know these…the show is based on a book series, what the name of that series is, is actually “Game Changers.” “Game Changers,” the book one in the series, and the storyline is also included in the show, which is really nice. So, we want to make sure people are aware of that in our metadata and our marketing materials and other things. So, this screenshot is just from the harlequin.com page for this book, right up front and centre of the series that inspired the show, where to stream it on Crave in Canada, HBO in the U.S. And then at the bottom, we typically include the series data as well. So, making sure people understand that “Heated Rivalry” is book two, and they can go back for book one and continue on through the series as well.
So, that’s kind of more broadly at Harlequin, what has been happening in HarperCollins. But from my perspective, what I then do, which I find just really fun, is look at, you know, are people really just interested in “Heated Rivalry” in those books, or is there actually an interest in just a broader category now? Has this created a category, or is it escalating a category that already exists? And for romance readers, I’m sure many will definitely understand that hockey romance has been around for a while. So, I wanted to kind of see if there was a little bit of nuance in that, if it had grown, and if…not just hockey romance, but focused on LGBTQ characters, if that is also a changing interest.
And it seems that both of those are true. When I looked at just hockey romance searches, this is on Google Trends data over the last five years in Canada. It was fairly steady. When I just looked at, you know, 2025, it didn’t seem like a huge increase until I expanded it out. And then when I just looked at gay hockey romance side by side, you know, definitely going to be more niche. It’s not going to be as well searched as the more general category. But both had a very significant increases after the show aired. So, this is something that we will be continuing to watch. And we do have more hockey romance books as well as more books in the LGBTQ space. So, something we were hoping that will expand beyond just the one book series.
As well, you know, it’s not just the broader category that I’m interested in because, you know, there are all those lovely new romance trope BISAC codes, and people, romance readers, as has been said, really know what they want. And so, you know, are people more interested in hockey romance? Are they more interested in the enemies to lovers aspect of these books? It’s something else I want to know.
So, looking at these side by side, generally, in the past, enemies to lovers has been a much stronger hook, which makes sense. It can be applied across many different genres of romance and time periods and situations. So, that makes a lot of sense. But looking at the way that hockey has increased almost to the exact same level is very fascinating to me. Because enemies to lovers has been around for longer, probably, and more recognizable. So, I think this shows that, you know, potentially, maybe even higher…hockey may go even higher or maybe it’ll flatten out and maybe enemies to lovers will continue to rise and hockey bombs. So, again, these questions that I have, and we’ll continue to be looking at.
And there’s many different ways of blank to lovers, friends to lovers, rivals to lovers is often mentioned as well. And “Heated Rivalry,” with that in the name, I wanted to see if that was something that was on the increase. And it seems a little bit, you know, very low searches overall in general, but it’s something that increased a little bit just in January of this year. So, it’s actually worth watching, but not something that we’re going to go rush to update all our metadata to capture necessarily.
And finally, because my interests are not always just on romance corporately, I wanted to look at smoothie preferences because of the focus on those in the show. And so, blueberries versus banana smoothies, just something kind of fun. Bananas, generally more popular. Well, seeming to have an uptick in 2026 at the beginning of the year, but that is also something, if you can look at, at the beginning of each previous year, those increased. They’re probably part of just more of a health trend related in January. But something kind of fun, interesting to see. So, that’s kind of where my head goes in how we can try to take advantage of some of these trends.
Jarin: Thank you so much, Brendan. Subject trends tend to spill over. For example, the “Heated Rivalry” phenomenon may encourage others to seek other romance books with a sports theme. Maybe pickleball romances are next. This title’s popularity has the potential to increase interest in romance books by other Canadian contributors or champion books with 2SLGBTQI+ themes beyond romance. And the list goes on. Sales agents are experts at making unexpected connections and leaning on trends from unexpected angles. Here’s Pavan Ranu sharing insights from the sales agency side.
Pavan Ranu: Hi, folks. Have you ever wondered what is a sales agency, what is a sales rep? Sales reps work for sales agencies. We are contracted by publishers to sell their books and their gift products to stores across the country. Sales reps have a very pivotal role. We’re both a window to our publishers and our booksellers. We have this dual role where our job is to connect the books and gift products from our publishers to our booksellers while also informing our publishers what is currently working on the front lines. Our position is very unique. We’re influencers in our own right. If you’re a bookseller and you’re watching this right now, find out who your reps are, and leverage their capabilities because they get to see trends in action.
One of the most profound things I’ve learned in the last year came from a bookseller. And what they had to share was so simple, so obvious. Buyers want to buy intentionally. They want to stock up on what sells, on what moves. And one of the greatest ways to do that is by leaning into trends. Just think about it. What does your consumer want? Right now, they want romance.
Next slide. At Ampersand, we love trends, and I imagine that’s the case for many sales agencies. Trends are a great way to find out what’s currently resonating with people. And as a rep, it gives me the opportunity to provide relevant suggestions to booksellers and buyers. In my experience as a sales rep, I’ve discovered that trends aren’t always top down. They can be very cyclical in that we feed and inform one another. And because they’re living and breathing, trends can evolve, and how we come into contact with them can vary.
The question then becomes, how are we monitoring trends? Some of the tools that Ampersand uses to monitor trends are Bookstagram, BookTok, Goodreads, SalesData, publicity, and the booksellers and publishers themselves. Bookstagram and BookTok in particular have been very exceptional. They’re a hub of activity for the book community. And over the years, we’ve witnessed authors and their books become overnight sensations as a direct result.
As a sales rep, these are some of the current trends that my colleagues and myself are seeing in romance sub-genres. Of course, there’s sports romance, but there’s also dark romance, fantasy, and gothic romance. Part of the job of a sales rep is to identify what is trending, and to share those findings with our booksellers so they can benefit as well.
As mentioned before, sports romances in particular are the hottest thing at the moment. As reps, we’re definitely getting behind this trend, and encouraging booksellers to do so as well, especially since these books are quickly being optioned by streaming services. Canadian author Elle Kennedy’s “Off-Campus” series is another hockey series to soon be looking out for.
Have you ever wondered how sales reps leverage trends? Well, we make connections. We look out for products that resonate and then connect them to current trends. We then share these trends with our booksellers through emails, curated lists, sales appointments, trade shows, book fairs, newsletters. I could go on. Given that romance is a hot category at the moment, it’s not too difficult to share these book and gift products because our publishers have been really great at their jobs, and they’ve been bringing forth a lot of great options. More importantly, they’ve been finding crossover potential, which leads me to my next slide.
Romance has become so popular that it’s begun to bleed over into other trending categories. Here, I discuss cross trends as a collaboration between categories that are currently trending. The benefit of a cross trend is that you get to sell to the demographic of each category, which means the likelihood of a sale is greater. The example I’ve used here is between romance and colouring books. If you’ve been doom scrolling recently, you’ve probably noticed that colouring books are trending again. You’ve also likely noticed the move towards analogue activities, and nothing says let’s unplug than a good romance novel and some great colouring options. A collaboration here ends up getting you a romance colouring book.
Romance has also entered the world of stationery. I mean, who doesn’t love stationery? You can only love it more when it collaborates with one of your favourite books. And let’s not forget the bookish romance games. Again, have you asked your rep to send you a list of suggestions? I highly suggest leaning into the trend. And how about all the romance book-to-screen adaptations? These adaptations are a great opportunity to sell books and gifts that support every cinematic event.
With all the adaptations making their way to the big screen, and many currently in the works for streaming services, there are multiple opportunities to merch displays, and romance books, and romance-themed items. Creating suggested lists of all the relevant romance products available is just one way that a sales rep can advise booksellers and buyers with their purchasing decisions.
As a takeaway, here are some actionable strategies to help booksellers leverage a trend. Create a dedicated romance space in your store. Romance is serious business. The rise of the romance bookstore over the last few years has been astronomical. Create a display, big or small, it can be a table or it can be an end cap. Lean into the trend. And remember, there is support there. If you can, host an event. Whether it’s a publisher-supported midnight release party, an author event, a no author event, find a way to connect with your community.
Also, inform yourself, sign up for newsletters, especially ones created by your reps. If you’re short on time, it’s a great way to learn about the trends, the latest trends. Do you have access to publisher co-op? That’s the next one. Chances are you probably do. And if you can, use that extra money to help with displays, events, and advertising that assist you in getting the most out of each trend. And finally, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, contact your sales rep. We’re a wealth of information, and we can offer you a lot of guidance.
Jarin: Thank you, Pavan. Sales agents are not the only ones who get creative when leaning on a trend. Booksellers are masters of this, too. Here’s Cole Davidson sharing his experience as an independent bookseller, who is not afraid of leveraging trends.
Cole Davidson: Thanks, Jarin. I’m very happy to be here today to bring the bookseller experience. A lot of what I’m going to talk about actually is going to sound like a repeat of Pavan’s presentation, which is probably not surprising. We work a lot with our reps. And so, we know the value there, and a lot of it…we’ve learned a lot of this from them. So, that makes a lot of sense.
Our bookstore is a general trade bookstore in Ottawa on the unceded, unsurrendered land of the Anishinaabe Algonquin people. We’re in Hintonburg, which is a little area just west of downtown. It’s a pretty small store, about 980 square feet of selling space. However, we do have some exciting news that we’re sharing with our community next week, which is that we’re moving to a new space, where we’ll have an even bigger romance section.
So, we opened about three years ago, three and a half years ago, and the romance trend was already heating up. And so, we jumped into it right away. We really integrated it into our store from the beginning. It’s about the same size as our other genre fiction sections. And so far, it’s been working really well. When we first opened, we worked with a local romance author to help us curate the selection, and make sure that we had enough stuff in all the different subgenres that we didn’t necessarily read. We wanted to know sort of where our blind spots were, and that worked really well. And now, we’re able to work with our reps to sort of fill that need as well.
Since last year, our romance sales are up 96%, our romantasy sales are up 22%, and our fantasy sales are up 61%. So, some of the stuff that we’re doing is working anyways, and we’re really happy to share some of that with you today.
Initially, we started with just a romance section, and we very quickly expanded that into a separate standalone romantasy section. And that has worked out really well for us because it gave us more space for other types of romance in our romance section, but it also gave us more space for fantasy in our fantasy section because we were able to pull those books out into their own space. And when we get into our new store, we’re going to be putting those sections sort of side by side. And so, it will be YA beside romance, beside romantasy, beside fantasy, beside sci-fi. And so, we’re hoping to sort of get some of those titles that are a bit tricky to place. Hopefully, people will be able to find them when those sections are right next to each other.
Some of the things that we have done to embrace romance… If we can go to the next slide there please. So, we’re always trying to find ways to reach people, reach these romance readers who are very much online, but maybe are not…maybe they’re not by default independent bookstore supporters. They’re not the people who necessarily come in all the time. They’re online a lot. They’re maybe shopping out of convenience with Amazon or somebody else.
And so, we wanted to find ways to reach them. And one of the ways that we did that was by bringing back midnight release parties. And a lot of people hadn’t really seen midnight release parties since “Harry Potter.” So, it had been a long time, but those people who liked “Harry Potter” and who went to those “Harry Potter” midnight releases, they’ve grown up now, and many of them are reading romance. Many of them are reading romantasy. And so, that’s why we started doing that. And the parties have been a huge success. We do some smaller ones that are about 30 to 40 people, and then we do larger ones that are upwards of 200 people.
You can see some of these photos here are from some of our…the photos on the right side, the two photos are from midnight release parties that we’ve done. Our “Onyx Storm” party was our largest so far with over 200 guests, and they’ve been really, really great. People are really excited. And I think that romance and romantasy in particular lend very well to those midnight release parties.
We have also done some after work parties for titles that we feel maybe don’t attract the same type of person who’s willing to come out at midnight on a Monday. And so, we do after work parties for authors like Emily Henry or Carley Fortune, where we feel that their readers are maybe… I’m going to generalise here, and I apologise. I don’t mean to offend anybody. Maybe more mature or they just don’t want to be out at midnight celebrating dragons. And so, we do after work parties which are very similar, but they run from, you know, 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. instead. And they happen on the Tuesday instead of the Monday night. And those have been working really well for us as well.
The other thing that we do, we’ve been leaning into, and this falls into the same category. This is a category that we call authorless events, and that’s our candlelit shopping night. And so, we really sort of attract a lot of romance and romantasy readers with that. We brand these events as A Night of Ink and Embers. Don’t worry. We don’t use real candles. We use battery-operated candles.
And they’re really easy events to pull off. All we do is sort of curate our displays for the type of books that we think people will be looking for. We fill the store with hundreds of battery-operated candles, we turn off the lights, and we get some wine, we get some chocolate, some brownies, just some nice little treats, and people get to come. We sell tickets for that, and people come and browse. They get 10% off anything they buy that night. And we get readers from all genres, but I would say, it does skew heavily towards romance and romantasy. And that’s sort of why we called it A Night of Ink and Embers, was to go after those people.
And then another thing that we are looking to introduce this year, and I know some other bookstores have done it to success, great success, is we’re going to be launching a romance book club. Because these romance readers are excited to discuss their books. They’re excited to discuss the tropes and the characters, and what they liked, what they didn’t like. And so, bringing those people together in a more of a sit-down option, where people can chat as opposed to these more party-like atmospheres, we think that will be really successful as well. Next slide please.
So, then I wanted to talk about another trend that’s not specifically YA, but I think is very related to YA, and has a lot of crossover in the audience, and that is YA. So, YA readers, like I said, I think there’s a lot of crossover in romance and YA readers. We hear a lot about how social media, and specifically TikTok, has sort of made reading cool again, and has brought a lot of people back to reading, and is bringing a lot of teenagers to reading.
But I think there’s a question about where they’re buying. And I can speak from our experience… And it wasn’t in our store. We weren’t getting those people through the door. I think, probably that they were shoppers of convenience, and they were shopping from their phone when they saw a book that they wanted, or they’re putting a hold on a book at their library or what have you. But we weren’t really getting them through the door and into our physical store. And so, we thought about how we could reach them. And what we came up with was bringing the store to them through high school book fairs.
We do a lot of elementary school book fairs, too. But high school book fairs was something relatively unique. There was nobody else in our area doing it. And sort of the market leader in book fairs is Scholastic, and they were not doing high schools as well probably because they don’t have the breadth of inventory for that particular age group.
So, we’ve done that. It’s gone really, really, really well for us. Each season…we have a fall season and a spring season to coincide with the school year. And each…and busier. This year, we have…this season, we have 14 school book fairs that we’re doing. And seven or eight of them are high schools. So, each of those high schools has between 500 and 2,000 students. So, that’s a lot of teenagers that are going to be passing through and looking at these books.
So, we work with our reps to find books that maybe are brand new, that we haven’t heard of, or maybe that are trending on TikTok. I’m not on TikTok personally. So, I find it difficult to keep up with those trends, and that’s where working with our reps is really helpful. And then, of course, we bring sort of the favourites, the fan favourites that sell every single season. You can see in those photos there are a few different book fairs, school book fairs that we’ve done. And, yeah. So, they’ve gone really well. And the vast majority of our YA sales come through our book fair programme. And then, of course, there’s other benefits, too, like making those connections with schools and getting those school orders as well. Next slide please.
So, then I want to talk about some of the other trends that we try to leverage. Not every trend that you hop onto needs to be a big multi-year project like romance. There’s a lot of smaller trends out there. And so, we really work with our reps. They send out emails all the time talking about titles that are trending or film or TV adaptations and that sort of thing. And so, we’ll build our in-store displays around that. You can see our “Heated Rivalry” display there, which we’ve paired up with some stickers that we also sell. You can also see our “Project Hail Mary” display. And that’s because we’ve got a movie coming out. So, we have a shelf talker there that says read the book before the movie. And we’ve got some other sort of space-themed non-book product as well as that sticker that says the book was better because, as we all know, the book is always better.
So, those kinds of little displays are really, really easy for us to jump on. They don’t really cost anything. We bring in just a little bit of non-book inventory or other book inventory to supplement it. You can see there with “Project Hail Mary,” like, we have another space book in behind it. And so, sometimes that’s as easy as just pulling stuff we already have in the store, and other times, we put a little bit more thought into it and order it in advance.
We have a look-ahead meeting every month at the beginning of the month, where we look at the next two months. That’s myself, and my partner, and our manager. And we sort of look at what are the important dates coming up, what are the holidays coming up, what are the big film or TV adaptations that are coming up. And we try to figure out what we think those trends are going to be, those sort of short-lived one to three-week trends that we can jump on and sell a handful of extra copies that way.
And then also social media. We try to hop on the social media trends, and these are very fast-moving. Like, if you’re not on these within a week, then you’ve missed it, but they’re also pretty easy to do. They’re pretty low cost to do. And so, some of the more recent ones we’ve done are, like, the double tap during curling at the Olympics, that controversy. So, we jumped on that, of us just pushing books back onto the shelf with a double tap. And that did really well. We did the “Heated Rivalry” trend where everybody was reenacting the scene where Shane asked Ilya to come to the cottage. We redid that in the shop, and that was very popular as well.
So, these are little things. They take a few hours out of the day. They drive a small uptick in sales, I would say. They help grow your social media followers, but they’re not a huge lift. It doesn’t take too long to do it. It doesn’t take too much money to do it. And so, that’s great.
Another place where we look for these trends, like I said, is our reps. They send us emails all the time with things that they see that are trending. And of course, they have a much broader view than we do. So, they can see things sometimes before we do.
And then also, there is a great email newsletter from CBC Books that we get every week, and it lists all the books that are going to be on CBC Radio that week and all the books that have been on CBC Radio the last couple weeks. And they have a handy spreadsheet with all those titles on there. And so, we use that to help us put together displays, or even if it’s just helping us choose what books to put face out on a shelf. That sort of helps us leverage those, I guess you could call them, micro trends because I’m sure all the booksellers on the call have had times where people come in and they say they heard this book on about…they heard about this book on the radio on CBC, they’re looking for it. Next slide please.
So, those little trends are really great for trying it out if you’re not completely sure if it’s going to work. Not every trend is going to work for every store. We’ve tried plenty of things that didn’t work. But the great thing is, if you are trying to take advantage of these small trends by doing smaller projects, then it’s okay if it doesn’t work. It’s not a big deal if it fails. So, the Canadian author trend, for example, that did really well for us as it did, I think, for everybody. And so, we have Canadian author tags on a whole bunch of books throughout our store that we…they’re just little things that we slip into the top. And that’s worked out really well. And we thought maybe this is a great time to bring out a travel section. We didn’t have a travel section because we have a really great travel bookstore just two blocks away, but we thought maybe we can do a travel section that’s focused on Canadian travel.
And so, we did that, and it didn’t work. We didn’t see very many sales. So, we pivoted it, and we tried to make it more general travel, not specific Canadian. And that’s what you can see in the photo there. You won’t find, like, destination-specific travel books there, but it hasn’t really worked. And so, that’s not a big deal. Our costs for that section were, you know, we had to decrease our sports section by one shelf, and we had to print out a label for the shelf. It wasn’t a huge cost. It wasn’t a huge burden to try it out for a year. And it’s not a big burden for us to take it away now and go back to something else that works.
So, I would say, if the cost is small to go for those quick trends, that’s where you can sort of take the risks and see if it pays off. And then for the bigger efforts, where there is more of a cost, maybe, you know, creating an entire romantasy section is more of an effort. Maybe you want to wait and see how that trend plays out for a little bit, and that’s what we did. We only got our romantasy section maybe two years ago. And we didn’t have it right from the beginning, but as we studied using data from SalesData, we were able to see kind of what parts of romance were selling well. And that’s why we knew that a romantasy section would work for us. Yeah. That’s it.
Jarin: If you can, please turn on your cameras. We will now move on to the Q&A portion of the webinar. If you haven’t submitted your questions yet, there is still time, but we have a couple in. So, let us just start and see. And I think there are some questions that are for specific panelists, but to all the panelists, if you want to jump in and add anything, please feel free here. Okay. This first one is for Stephanie. Is there any way for book industry professionals to suggest new BISAC codes or additions to Thema and…or, like, what’s the best way to get involved?
Stephanie: Yeah. Absolutely. So, luckily, for all you, BookNet Canada has representatives that deal with BISAC working groups and Thema working groups. So, we are always able to kind of get it in touch with the BISG or with editor to add or request addition of those codes. But then there’s a whole process of debate. So, there’s no guarantee if you propose a code that it would actually be adopted. As I mentioned in my presentation, very mature subject schemes, it’s really, really hard to get something added, especially considering, you know, Thema, for example, is international. So, there has to be international appeal. It has to be translatable. And there has to be enough chutzpah behind the request to really get it going. But long story short, you can get in touch with us, [email protected], and we’ll take care of you.
Jarin: Thank you. This one is for Pavan. Is there anything publishers can do proactively to facilitate a sales agent’s work in promoting their book to, you know, like, lean on emerging trends?
Pavan: I think publicity hits are always a great thing. So, we know ahead of time what is coming down the line in terms of trends. And using that publicity and sending it over to our accounts is always great. It’s the quickest way for everyone to know what’s going on.
Jarin: Excellent. Here, we have one for Cole. Sometimes, trends seem to appear out of nowhere, and it can be hard to keep track of what’s new. As a busy bookseller, how do you keep your finger on the pulse of new trends? Do you have any resources or strategies you could share?
Cole: The biggest resource that we use are the reps. They all send out their own emails every week throughout the week. Some of them are newsletters and some of them are kind of one-offs, but they do a great job of keeping track of the trends. And so, they keep us up to date as well. That’s the BC newsletter that I mentioned. It’s really great for kind of those quick publicity-based trends that you might see. And social media, following other bookstores, following authors, following the publishers on TikTok and on Instagram. Like I mentioned, I don’t really spend a lot of time on TikTok, but I do spend a lot of time on Instagram. And usually, things are cross-posted.
And I would give a shout out to the BookNet Canada newsletter. There’s a lot of great stuff in there as well. And, yeah, that’s what we do. Just try to keep an eye on everybody, who’s in the game. We don’t always pick up on every trend. Sometimes we’re late to every trend. We’re all very busy, and you have to give yourself a bit of grace with that as well.
Jarin: That’s so true. Thank you for also acknowledging that part. For Brendan here, how nimble can publishers be when chasing trends and putting out books in categories that are hot? Or do you try and, you know, spend your efforts to set, you ,know the next trend through the books that you publish? Is there a balance between those two? What are your thoughts?
Brendan: I mean, it really depends on the format. Print trends are something we need to, you know, usually already have in the catalog to take advantage of something that’s really happening emergently right now. But for digital first publishing, things can be faster. But it’s often a challenge. That is one challenge with publishing, that it does sometimes take a while to get there. So, that’s partly where we try to advise on…you know, if we’re seeing sustained increases, then maybe the publishers that we work with would be more likely to want to continue to require in a certain trend.
But part of it is also just mining back lists. If we already have, you know, books in the list that we can go back to and then start increasing the metadata and, you know, the publishers may want to start printing more. And the sales reps also would be the ones that we’re, of course, asking for things like that. So, it can be a challenge. It can definitely be a challenge.
Jarin: Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense, I think, something that is felt industry-wide. This one is for, I would say, anyone. But Cole or maybe Pavan to start. But what role do special editions, you know, sprayed edges or collectors packaging play in boosting sales?
Cole: I did actually have a note that I wanted to talk about this, and I forgot to bring it up. So, I’m glad that this question came. I would say that this is similar also to movie tie-in editions or TV tie-in editions. You have to sort of, I think, judge based on what works in your store and what works for your community, which ones to bring in. Certainly, they’re not all going to work, but you have to kind of…yeah, you kind of have to know your audience and what you can sell. And you can also start small. Depending on the publisher, like, shipping times are not super egregious in most cases. And so, you can start small with a few copies of those deluxe editions before you go big. But I think, probably, if you haven’t been selling the standard edition super well, I don’t…in most cases, I don’t think a deluxe edition is enough to tip the scale. I think the deluxe edition is really for people who are already fans. And so, if you’re not selling the book with the standard, you’re probably not going to be super successful with the deluxe.
Jarin: Does anyone have any additional thoughts on this? Have you seen any trends in regards to, you know, special editions in your sort of areas of this?
Brendan: I think, you know, in the romantasy space is where I’ve seen them work the best and have the most sort of staying power. But I think readers are definitely looking for collectible items that they can kind of have on their bookshelf. I don’t think they always work to the same degree, but I think in the romantasy space in particular, I’ve seen them do well.
Pavan: And I think, among, like, book buyers, if there is a standard edition and a special edition, they’re going to go after the special edition. And that’s where the interest is.
Stephanie: I would say, from a standards perspective as well, just to slide this in here, there are ways of indicating special editions properly in the metadata. And if you do that, you make it a heck of a lot easier for book readers and booksellers to know exactly what edition that they’re getting. And that makes everyone’s life happier so they’re not getting the unsprayed edges when they expected the fancy ones.
Jarin: Thank you. Stephanie, this is another one for you. What is the best way to start implementing Thema in addition to BISAC?
Stephanie: Well, we have a really awesome tool at BookNet called the BISAC to Thema Translator, which is always a good place to start. So, you can input your existing BISAC codes, and it will give you recommendations for Thema codes that are equivalent. I would simply say that, you know, as with any kind of mechanical or automatic conversion sort of thing, you always want to give it a second check and use your own good judgment to make sure that you’re not missing any opportunities because BISAC and Thema are not the same. As we know, there are strengths and weaknesses to each. So, kind of doing a little more digging and exploring once you have that translated version in hand will really help you make sure that you’re not missing any of the tropes that you really want to communicate or, you know, communicating that it’s a hockey romance and not just a general sports romance. So, yes, BISAC to Thema Translator, I’m sure someone will put that link in the chat.
Jarin: Thank you, Stephanie. Okay. This is one for everyone, and it’s also kind of a big question. So, we’re going to be a little speculative here. But what do you think the next big trend in romance is? We’ve mentioned a bit about, you know, what are just, like, passing quick trends and what’s going to be, you know, the next big thing. Maybe it’s going to be curling romance. Who knows? But do you have any thoughts about directions that things might take or whisperings that you feel an undercurrent in romance trends?
Pavan: We definitely see us heading towards dark fantasy. I mean, dark romance is there, but seeing fantasy and seeing those darker elements. I know Keri Lake has a series…her book two of her “Eldritch” series. So, that one, “The Eating Woods” series is technically an example of dark fantasy, which Bookstagram definitely loves.
Brendan: Yeah. I’ve seen definitely a lot in the dark space and, you know, not just fantasy, but in contemporary as well. Over the top possessiveness and touch her and die is a phrase that I learned about recently. That could be something that is increasing as well.
Jarin: Yeah. I can definitely say just even as a romance reader and what we’re seeing even movie tie-ins were mentioned, you know, “Wuthering Heights.” Those kind of, like, dark, gothic classics even, I think, are coming to the forefront as we see popularity in those kind of dark romance, dark romantasy titles.
Okay. I think we have quite time for about one more. Pavan, is it helpful for publishers to integrate social media strategies to engage kind of the online book community themselves? And actually, this can be for a wider, I think, question. But Pavan, we’ll start with you. Or do you think it’s more effective to work with existing bookstores and Bookstagrammers? So, from any side, do you think there is a preference or do you think…?
Pavan: I think they’re kind of already doing it out there. Like, when they have author cover reveals, those go out right away. So, the book community is really big on that. And the authors themselves have their own community. So, it’s kind of already out there, and it’s happening. Sometimes I wish, as a rep, we would also get some of that information ahead of time. But it’s the…I get it. Like, the audience, the excitement, it’s all there in…like, on Bookstagram, on BookTok. There is a living, thriving book community that just loves a romance.
Cole: I could just add on to that really quickly from a bookseller perspective. I think, for us, knowing about things ahead of time is really important. And we see that in some cases when a publisher will give us a heads up about something, or sales reps will give us a heads up about what an anonymous ISBN is that’s in the catalog. They’ll tell us what it is ahead of time. Those kinds of things really help because there’s nothing more frustrating as a bookseller to see a huge announcement from a best-selling author on Instagram, and within minutes, we’re getting ads on Facebook and Instagram from other larger companies, and we haven’t even had the opportunity to be sold that book yet. We don’t even know anything about it. So, if publishers could work with reps to get us information even under embargo earlier is better for us.
Jarin: That’s a great perspective as well. And I will just point from the chat to a previous question about next big trend. We’ve seen sad lit. That is what someone else has said also. So, I guess keep a finger on that.
With that, we have reached the end. Thank you, Stephanie, Brendan, Pavan, and Cole for joining us today. Before we go, we’d love it if you could provide feedback on the session. We’ll drop a link to the survey in the chat. Please take a couple of minutes to fill it out, and we’ll also be emailing you a link to a recording of this session as soon as it’s available.
To our attendees, we are happy to announce that early registration is open for Trendspotting Book Subjects on the Move in the Canadian Market, and is scheduled for March 24th. Find information about our upcoming events and recordings of previous sessions on our website bnctechforum.ca. And lastly, we’d like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage for their support through the Canada Book Fund. And thank you to all of you for attending.