Let’s Talk Bookish: Do Tropes Count As Spoilers?

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022.

I love getting to talk about tropes. They’re such a valuable tool, not just for crafting a novel but for marketing, too. When certain tropes pop up, I start kicking my feet; I love seeing how different writers handle them. So, let’s dive into today’s topic, then.

Let’s Talk Bookish March 22nd
Do Tropes Count as Spoilers?

Prompts: A lot of the time, books will be promoted on social media books with their tropes. For example, a book might be advertised as being enemies to lovers, having found family, or starring a ‘chosen one’. Can those tropes be spoilers, giving away parts of the plot? What do you think about marketing books based on tropes?

Okay so first, I want to make my stance clear: I like tropes. I think they’re great, we define genres by what tropes they use and how they use them. Good writers can lean on old tropes to make something new, and the use of tropes rests in how skilled the writer is. Do the two characters in a romance just waltz up to a hotel and suddenly find themselves with only one bed, or are they trapped there by circumstance, or are they stuck out in the wilderness or in a storm and seek shelter for the night, only finding a small cabin with (gasp) one bed?

Tropes range from character types (grumpy! Sunshine!) to situations (only one bed) to plot elements (love triangle), and the examples used so far are all from romance. If there’s a high level of technology or it’s in the future, you’ll know you’re reading a sci-fi book. If there’s elves and dwarves and a vague resemblance to medieval England, you’ve found yourself reading fantasy. If there’s a murder to be solved, you’re likely in a crime novel.

I don’t think tropes are spoilers. Saying “this is a romance so there’s a HEA” is not a spoiler, or “there are demons is this horror novel” isn’t a spoiler. Even before marketing with tropes became as popular as it is now, you still had some idea of what you were getting into before you read a book, just from the back cover blurb or Goodreads summary. Picking up a romance book where the blurb tells you “Character A and Character B have been enemies since…” you can infer this is going to be enemies to lovers. Or “When young Arthur pulls a sword from a stone he’s declared king…” implies some sort of ‘Chosen One’ narrative.

If you advertise more specific tropes, you might end up accidentally giving spoilers, though it really depends which tropes you’re relying on. Again, tropes are part of genre expectations, and they feed into what readers expect. Giving readers an idea of the tropes used gives readers a glimpse of what they might expect. I think marketing with tropes is a really good idea, as long as the book lives up to the tropes presented. If you say there’s only one bed, and at no point in the story are characters forced to share a bed, or one character sleeps on the bed and the other on the floor, readers are going to feel let down. If you market your book as a romance but have no HEA for the main character(s), readers are going to end up disappointed, and reviews will reflect that.

On the other hand, marketing with tropes also ensures you don’t get the readers you don’t want. Some people really don’t like enemies to lovers, or chosen one narratives, and maybe they’ve been on a run of grumpy/sunshine books and want something a little different. Marketing with tropes means a reader can decide if that’s a trope they currently want to engage with or not. It prevents people picking up a book and DNF’ing or rating badly because it contains tropes they just don’t like, or they’ve read so many books with an excellent version of that specific trope, they need a break before reading it again. There are so many different reasons a reader might or might not want to engage with a particular trope, by marketing a book with those tropes, you can attract the right readers and discourage the wrong ones.

So, tropes are here to stay, they’re a valuable part of a book, useful to writers and readers alike, so why wouldn’t you utilize that in your marketing? Depending on what the trope is, if using something like enemies to lovers, chosen one, or anything else that might be set up within the first few chapters, results in a spoiler, there’s something missing from the book itself. A good story is made up of more than tropes strung together, tropes should be used like bricks – they can help build the story up, but you need more than just the brick/trope to actually make a wall(book).