The Quirky Genre That’s Sucking Up All the Oxygen and Other Surprises in This Week’s Deep Dive on Debut Book Deals.

May 12, 2025

Most everyone knows it’s a tough market, but what’s selling? And what kind of authors are getting those deals? Today’s newsletter tracks adult debut deals from March to May 7 of 2025.

There were 65 adult fiction book deals, which is 15 fewer than my last report covering January and February.

Twenty-six of those deals involved authors with significant platforms. Take a gander at these credentials:

Playwright and Orange Is the New Black screenwriter, Author of SH*T MY DAD SAYS and writer and producer of Abbott Elementary., Bestselling YA novelist, Bestselling non-fiction author, magazine editor, Peabody-winning Produce, dating columnist for Vogue, screenwriter, founding editor of a lit mag, non-fiction writer male, columnist for Paris Review, Bookstagram influencer, acclaimed children’s book author, acclaimed cartoonist, short story writer, three journalists,, three memoirists, (one a Thurber Prize winner), Tony and Pulitzer prize winner, co-creator and executive producer of the Emmy-Award winning series, musician male, playwright and middle school novelist collaboration.

Nineteen deals involved academics who have either an MFA or a PhD.

Ten of these authors are PhDs or PhD candidates. If you’re a creative writing academic, you need a published novel to get a tenure track position, making for a competitive literary novel market.

The rest of the deals (18) were with authors who have minimal or no platforms. Here are the represented genres:

Thriller (six): climate-change, two upmarket, literary, two weird girl (see below under trends)

Mystery: (four) White-Lotus inspired, locked door, dark academia, weird girl

Horror: (two) Historical gothic, 90s horror

Fantasy: (two) Gothic and romantasy

Women’s fiction: (one) weird girl

LBGQT: (two) Two trans novels,

Speculative: one

Read an interview with C.C. Foster on her gothic fantasy deal.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Are you young, white, and female? Good news for you. Not-so-great news for everybody else.

Women are far more likely to get debut book deals. Out of 63 deals, only 15 went to males. Opinions differ on the reasons for the decline in male book deals, and a creative writer teacher weighs in on why this trend is troubling.

Also, only sixteen deals went to non-whites, but the latter isn’t for lack of effort. Anyone who’s queried recently knows that most agents are actively seeking diverse authors. Some even have “BIPOC only “ submission timelines. Publishing is trying to address this inequity, but it’s still a problem.

Book deals in March and April also favored youthful authors. I looked up each writer’s background, and only two appeared to be over 35. Does publishing know they have an ageism issue? Why are they underserving older readers who have the most time to read and plenty of funds to buy books? The bias against older writers deserves its own post, so I’ll address that in a future issue.

The Hottest Trend in March/April Deals

Last week, I mentioned a new genre, which some people are calling "weird girl fiction," referring to angsty young women with messy lives. In March and April, this trend dominated. Words like twisted, warped, and unhinged signal the trend.

Weird girl fiction usually has a coming-of-age element, as in Rufi Thorpe’s Margot’s Got Money Troubles and Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier.

Some weird girl novels take a page from Stephen King’s Carrie and lean heavily on horror as in Rogue by Mona Awad and Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth.

“Readers are captivated by stories about the expression of female rage and what happens when something so long suppressed finally ruptures, something which the horror genre facilitates ‘perfectly,” says Sarah Stewart-Smith, campaigns director at Verve Book in a Guardian article.

A familiar trope of the genre is an unusual relationship with food. Milkfed by Melissa Broder is about a zaftig yogurt shop worker feeding and falling in love with a woman obsessed with calories. A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers is about a food critic who strikes out at the male-dominated magazine culture in a particularly lurid way.

Sapphic relationships are often represented in weird girl fiction as in Big Swiss by Jean Beagin and Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samanta Allen. Absurdist relationships play a part in Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su about a woman who finds a blob in the street and shapes it into a custom-made man, or Sky Daddy by Kate Folk, which features a protagonist who is sexually obsessed with a jet plane.

Weird girl fiction also has its own listicle on Goodreads, and in March and April the category exploded. Here are the deals:

AN ENDLESS CYCLE OF EVENINGS, a coming-of-age set in Brooklyn about a grief-stricken 20-something as she spirals into an alcohol-fueled affair with her employer and becomes increasingly obsessed with his enigmatic wife,

DON'T CROSS MO ELLERY, a humorous murder mystery pitched as “unhinged Nancy Drew,” following a chaotic bisexual hot mess, who, after accidentally exposing her partner's genitals in a work Zoom meeting, stumbles into a gig as a school crossing guard, witnesses the mysterious death

HELLO, LIMERENCE, following the major humiliations and minor triumphs of an overworked, undersexed young woman in Tokyo, exploring the depths of female rage, delusion, and obsession; pitched as for fans of Asako Yuzuki and Fleabag.

UNIVERSE OF GRACE, a queer, multiverse, coming-of-age story pitched as equal parts Miranda July, Emily Habeck, and Evelyn Quan Wang, following a Philadelphian girl after a jaguar at the zoo tells her she isn't human, and traveling through the surprising turns of her life as she tries to figure out what—alien? animal? machine?

DECOMPOSITION BOOK, a survival drama and twisted queer love story, following two young women: an ill-fated hiker who gets lost in the woods, and the desperately lonely student who finds her dead body; pitched as for fans of Yellowjackets and Mona Awad.

BACKSTABBERS, pitched as Bodies, Bodies, Bodies meets Yellowjackets, about three women fighting to survive in the hunting ground of a serial killer, where the only thing more twisted than this nightmare is their friendship.

OFFSEASON, narrated by a self-described “sexually frigid, spiritually sick, and morally warped” PhD dropout who arrives at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal tourist town to teach English;

I'D PEEL A POMEGRANATE FOR YOU, a psychological thriller pitched as Killing Eve meets BOY PARTS, about two female vigilantes whose secret pact to kill prominent male art world figures catches up to them when they start receiving anonymous threats, forcing them to question who they can trust, including each other.

THE WHITE HOT, the story of one woman's messy, painful, and transcendent journey from inner-city Philadelphia to enlightenment; about motherhood, class, feminine rage and desire, spirituality, trauma, and liberation, and a young mother's admission that in order to find herself, she must break generational cycles of living for the sake others,

A Book to Watch

The biggest deal during March/April went to Rioghnach Robinson, who writes YA (young adult) under the name Riley Redgate. It was a seven-figure deal with foreign rights sold in nine different territories, most at auction.

BAD WORDS, in which a novelist faced with his worst nightmare, a devastating pan of his second book by the same literary critic who torpedoed his debut novel years ago, confronts her at an industry party and sets off an escalating high-profile feud that raises questions about writing, criticism, and who gets to lead an artist's life—but is complicated by the attraction sparking between them in secret.

Sounds like it has Yellowface vibes although that wasn’t used as a comp.

This Time Last Year

In the same period, there were 77 debut deals compared to 65 this year.

This Time Two Years Ago

Both the Ministry of Time and The Husbands were major deals that paid off and made multiple bestseller lists. Major deals that didn’t live up to the hype in terms of bestselling lists and acclaim were Just Some Stupid Love Story and Killer Potential.

Dark and Light Fiction Battle for Readers’ Attentions

A recent Publishers Weekly article, discussed how trends in young adult fiction are bouncing between dark academia and dark fantasy to more light, romantic reads.

A visit to a bookstore last week showed the battle between light and dark playing out on the romance shelves. In troubled times, people either want to escape or read dark books that remind them that things could be worse. It’ll be interesting to see which genres dominate over the next few years.

History indicates that feel-good might prevail over fearsome. After the pandemic, there was a massive rise in rom-coms. But, so far, this year’s book deals and best sellers are trending darker with a slight silver lining in feel-good mysteries.

I find myself leaning toward escape. It can be a dark or light read, so long as it’s entertaining. Right now, I’m reading The Husbands, and it fits the bill, but I’m also all about this GTFO Summer list from Bustle. What do you like to read in difficult times?