Book Genre Trends for 2024: What Are Agents and Publishers Looking for This Year?
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What are shaping up to be the hottest book genre trends for 2024? Are people gravitating to thrillers, romance, contemporary, historical fiction, or do people want to read more romantasy?
I did some industry research to try to nail down the top five book genre trends for 2024. Specifically, I'm going to look at the genres that literary agents and publishing professionals are buzzing about and requesting in their manuscript wish lists.
I did something very similar last year where I highlighted the top five trending genres for 2023, so I'm going to compare how our genres for this year rank compared to last year.
Let me give you some context for the process I used to pull this data. I did a search for all of the Tweets that were tagged with #MSWL, which stands for manuscript wishlist, from November 1, 2023, to January 25, 2024. This was when literary agents were opening back up to queries over the end of last year and beginning of this year and talking about what they would like to see. Literary agents often use this hashtag to describe the types of queries they're looking for, and some other people in the publishing industry, especially acquiring editors, also use it to discuss the types of books they would like to see from literary agents.
A disclosure: sometimes authors who are querying will use that hashtag to describe their own books, so it's not a completely perfect data set. But this hashtag is mostly used by literary agents. In looking at all of the Tweets across this time period that used the hashtag, I then pulled out each individual genre or descriptive word and counted how many times the agents were using that word to see which book genre trends were rising to the top.
1. Romance
With 218 mentions across the manuscript wish list dataset, this was by far the highest trending genre, with three times more mentions than the next leading genre. Interestingly, romance was in the number two position in last year's list, but bumped up to number one this year.
I also looked at some of the Tweets to get a sense and a feel for what specific sub-genres or categories literary agents were looking for underneath romance. Some mentioned supernatural romance. Some mentioned that they're looking for steamy romance, while others said they were looking for sweet romance or slow-burn or low-spice romance. Most of the Tweets I saw were focused on contemporary romance, though there were a couple of mentions of historical, and there were numerous references to rom-com as a sub-genre that was of interest.
2. Fantasy
Fantasy had 64 mentions across the dataset. This is surprisingly about the same number of mentions as last year, and fantasy was in the number three spot for 2023 and is now in the number two spot for book genre trends for 2024.
Within the sub-genres, I saw literary agents asking for adult fantasy, middle-grade, and YA, so a really broad range of age categories here. And I saw several mention that they're specifically looking for cozy or light fantasy.
3. Contemporary Fiction
This had 35 mentions across the manuscript wish list dataset. Interestingly, contemporary fiction wasn't in the top five for last year, and it's important to note that contemporary fiction encompasses several sub-genres. It could include contemporary YA and middle grade, for instance. On the adult side, it can include contemporary romance, contemporary suspense, etc. So contemporary fiction can be more of a general term, but I think it speaks to the desire for stories set in our present day rather than in a historical setting.
The specific sub-genres that I saw mentioned the most in the dataset were middle-grade and YA, as well as — you guessed it — contemporary romance.
4. Romantasy
I was super eager to see if romantasy was going to make the list for book genre trends for 2024, and it did. It was especially compelling to see that it made the top five, and romance and fantasy were in the number one and number two spots. This speaks to the fact that these genres, and of course, the combination of them, are resonating really strongly in the book market right now.
We also see romantasy referred to as romantic fantasy and fantasy romance, so any combination of these terms I’m bucketing into the same category. Specific sub-genres that I saw mentioned across agents' manuscript wish lists were adult romantasy, including some that mentioned they were looking for enemies-to-lovers romances, and I saw several agents using Fourth Wing as a specific recent comp title, meaning that they would like to see more books that are in that vein or similar to that novel.
5. Young Adult
Finally, that takes me into our number five book genre trend for 2024, which is YA, and it had 18 mentions across the manuscript wish lists that I reviewed. Interestingly, last year, YA was in the number one spot, but it still made the top five this year. Some specific sub-genres I saw agents looking for were, you guessed it, YA romantasy, as well as YA romance and rom-coms, and some agents were looking for YA thrillers.
Other Trending Book Genres for 2024
Now, I want to show you a word cloud containing all of the terms from my search. You'll see the top five book genre trends for 2024, as well as some other bonus genres that weren't in the top five.
For instance, horror, thriller, and non-fiction were all mentioned — just not in the top five. You'll see "literary" was included there, but I didn't count it within the top five because I noticed that in the manuscript wish list Tweets themselves, “literary" was often referring to the literary agency or the literary agent and not the genre literary fiction.
In the word cloud, you'll also see some terms related to the types of characters or settings that agents are looking for, such as female and academia. We’re also getting some insight into the type of tone agents are gravitating to. Interestingly, both "light" and "dark" were used to describe the types of stories agents want, which I think just speaks to the fact that every agent is looking for something different.
Should You Write in a Trending Book Genre for 2024?
Now that we know the top five book genre trends of 2024, what do we do with this information, particularly if you are an author working on a current book and hoping to get it published? Maybe you're hoping to sign an agent this year.
I want to give a disclaimer that, as much as we enjoy and like to talk about trends in the publishing industry, when it comes to your writing, I don't firmly believe that thinking about trends is all that useful. If you happen to be writing in one of these genres that is supposedly trending this year, that's great. But if you're not, please don't get discouraged. After all, books across all genres continue to get published year after year, and while we can make some predictions about publishing in 2024, we don't know what's going to be in trend next month or in six months or in a year or more from now.
I don't think it's very productive for authors to think they should only be writing in trending genres. Instead, focus on the stories you want to tell, and focus on the genres that you personally enjoy writing in. That is going to show on the page, and what's most important is writing a story that means something to you and that you feel compelled to share with readers.
I hope you enjoyed looking at these book genre trends for 2024 — I had so much fun putting it together. Thank you so much for reading, and happy writing!
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