It’s a big part of my job as a Creative Director to be on top of bookcover trends. Actually, no, that’s not accurate. It’s a big part of my job to be ahead of trends before they hit bookcovers. Which means paying attention to aspects of culture you wouldn’t necessarily consider linked to book publishing. It’s one level to say we look at industries that tend to adjust faster to trends than books — like film and gaming — that have a pretty straight line to an overlapping target audience.

Recently the concept of trend watching and how it applies to an artist’s portfolio has been coming up frequently in my portfolio reviews, and I realize it’s not something art school teaches, so I wanted to start a series here. It’ll definitely be spread out over the next 2-3 posts bc it’s a big topic and can really help you get work from ADs and engagement from fans. Most artists think about trends in art and trends as far as the artists that artists admire…but they don’t think about trends from the consumer’s POVs. Art Directors and Designers that work in-house have to balance both.

So let’s dig into what Trend Watching actually means. Remember that Bookcovers are designed about a year ahead of a book’s on sale date. Sometimes manuscripts are bought 2 years before. So that means we have to be at least a year ahead of where trends currently are, so you can meet them in a year. It’s hard enough to look around and articulate what’s trendy now…it’s even harder to guess where trends will be in a year or more. So if you’re looking at what other books are coming out now, you’re already too late.

It’s not too much of a stretch to say the target audience for this fantasy book is watching The Witcher on Netflix and playing Final Fantasy. It’s next level to look further afield to trends that adapt faster — fashion and music, for example — and extrapolate how those trends are going to trickle down to books. Fashion and music are great things to look at because a) the fanbase is young and hip and b) these industries spend a ton of money researching and even pushing/encouraging certain trends to take stronger holds. The production cycles of both the fashion and music industries have been massively sped up over the last 2 decades. Fast fashion houses have almost completely broken the seasonal nature of fashion, and things are often being copied (and slightly watered down) from runways straight into Zaras and H&Ms. The music industry has completely changed from the concept of whole albums crafted over a year or more which then have a few singles picked out and given to radio stations to play directly into a more streaming friendly singles-first concept. Many musicians now have just strings of singles released as quickly as possible that may be compiled into an album after the fact.

In fact, it’s more accurate to say top level trend hunting relies on going back even further to the source to the sociological, economical, and political reasons behind these trends. And once you recognize them, to think about how that might manifest in your field.

What’s a good example of this kind of trend pattern in SFF recently? What’s hottest in SFF publishing right now? Cozy Fantasy and Romantasy. Cozy Fantasy is a subgenre where the stakes are not that high (no world-level apocalypses and absolutely no dystopias) and there is only very soft action and romantic interest (think pining and flirting max). The “Cozy” came from Cozy Mystery, a genre that has been around for ages — think Murder, She Wrote level of (non)violence as opposed to thrillers. Examples of genre-defining books of Cozy Fantasy are Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree (art by Carson Lowmiller) and The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Kline (art by Chris Sickels/Red Nose Studio).

Romantasy is a portmanteau of Romance and Fantasy and it is defined as “Romance in a Fantasy setting” and I know, that’s not a new idea (can you stay Princess Bride?) but where in the past Romance-forward stories tended to stick to Romance publishing houses and have very Romance-coded covers, Romantasy is (mostly) done by SFF publishing houses and has the same kind of SFF genre covers you’d see on any other book. This can get a little confusing because you can’t tell the spiciness level from the cover (like you could in older Romance cover where there were very specific checkpoints for spice level—usually how many buttons were unbuttoned on a hero’s shirt). And Romantasy fans LIKE it that way — Bookstagram and BookTok are full of funny posts about people not being able to tell how depraved a reader is by the cover of what they’re reading. That’s a whole other post. Expamples of genre-defining Romantasy are The ACOTAR series by Sarah J. Maas (art by HappyPets) and One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig (design by Lisa Marie Pompilio)

Now on the surface these trends couldn’t be further from each other — you have a subgenre that defines itself by no sex vs. a genre known for sex scenes so spicy fans debate whether they’re physically possible. But if you look beneath the surface both are driven by escapism. When the world feels scary and dark most of us reach for escapism in our entertainment. SFF and Romance are always popular, but put political turmoil on top of a global pandemic and yea, SFF sales have gone through the roof. In books, in games, in film. SFF is mainstream culture now, in a way that would have seemed impossible to SFF fans even as late as the 90s/early 2000s. Both of these genres also always have happy endings. That becomes really important when you’re reading or watching media for stress relief. You need that hit of dopamine the happy ending will give you. In a world where we’re all super burnt out and overwhelmed we are (successfully or not) combating overwhelm and burnout with entertainment. If you are trying to read your burnout away, a sad depressing ending is not going to give you the same effect as a happy ending.

The action & details in these genres may look very different but they’re just happy endings and escapism for people who have different definitions of what those are. Many people are very introverted or may have sensory processing sensitivities and their idea of escapism is staying home and reading with a blanket with a cup of tea. On the other side of the spectrum I have plenty of friends whose idea of escapism is reading about someone getting plucked out of obscurity and taken to a fae realm where everyone is oozing sex appeal and they have mythical beings fighting over the right to bed them. We say “pick your poison” but we’re actually picking our medicine.

So how does this help artists? This has come up in a lot of portfolio reviews recently so one good example is that a lot of artists that only would have worked in kids books due to their style have a whole new subgenre to explore into because a lot of the soft cute pastel style we’re seeing connect with Cozy Fantasy readers would not have been used in adult SFF publishing houses before. Those artists would be smart to figure out which publishers are putting out a lot of cozy fantasy and reach out to those ADs, even if they thought their work was “too young” for adult audiences before now.

Artists that have a naturally darker gothic lean and an interest in romantic vibes can find a lot of work in Romantasy right now — especially because a lot of the big Romantasy books get picked up for subscription boxes like Illumicrate and Fairy Loot or special edition exclusives for Barnes & Noble and smaller special-edition-only publishers and those special editions usually hire illustrators to depict the characters from the books, especially if the original editions don’t have a character on them.

And if you think this is just books, think again. The “Cozy Fantasy” trend really started with Animal Crossing. And if you look at Magic: The Gathering’s Bloomburrow set that’s pure Cozy Fantasy. Even Warcraft’s Dragonflight expansion was especially cozy-coded. When a trend pops up there’s always versions of it across most media.

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This is getting pretty long, so we’re going to pause here and continue next month. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this exercise: Look around, what’s the Cozy Fantasy and Romantasy version of movies? Of music? Of fashion? Of food?