Tropes. Some people cringe when they hear this word, thinking that tropes are inherently lazy or boring, but as a writer and especially a writer who’s trying to write to market or gain more readers, tropes are your best friend. But simply shoving a trope into a story isn’t always enough. So, how can you use tropes effectively not only to market your books but to make readers love them? I’ve got some places you can start!

First things first, what the heck even is a trope? Simply put, it’s a theme or rhetorical device that’s commonly used. What I’m talking about specifically today is what people often refer to as a story theme. Some popular examples would be: Best friends to lovers, closeted athlete, fake marriage or relationship, etc.

You might be asking why authors should care about tropes, and the answer is because readers love them! Everyone has their own favorites and every trope has its own market. When I need a comfort read, the first thing I go on the hunt for is a best friends to lovers story because that’s a trope that feeds my soul. And more than that, when readers find a book they love, they’ll want to find MORE books with that trope! Some tropes come and go in popularity, and some are ever green, always drawing swaths of readers.

I learned first hand with my recent release of Rocket Science how important it is to have a marketable trope. Readers want to know what they can expect from your book, and if you can tell them in the FIRST LINE of the blurb what they’re getting, they’re much more likely to click it.

The problem is, it’s not enough to simply slap the words “nerdy virgin” into a blurb and call it good as far as marketing. Doing a trope RIGHT is as important as using tropes. Four paragraphs later and we’re finally getting into our topic- how to not fuck up a trope! haha.

Okay, so you’ve picked your trope, you’ve plotted your story, you’re ready to write so readers can start falling in love with your book. But before you put pen to paper, first ask yourself if you REALLY understand the trope you’ve picked. For example, roommates is a great trope. It’s an easy one to work into nearly any story, just put the two main characters into the same apartment, right? WRONG. The true appeal of the roommates trope is the sexual tension, the slow build of the relationship until it reaches a breaking point where they can’t keep their hands off each other, and then the inevitable awkward moment when it’s over and they realize they still have to live together. To write a trope effectively, you need to figure out what the reader is getting emotionally from that trope. What do they like about it? If the appeal of roommates is the sexual tension, and you don’t have any sexual tension, then your readers are going to feel let down. They might not even be able to articulate what they didn’t like, but they’ll know it didn’t make them feel the way they expected to feel.

So, how do you know what the appeal of a trope is? The best option is to make sure you’ve read a lot of it yourself. Ask yourself what you like about that trope, what keeps you coming back to it over and over? When you pick up a book with that trope, what do you expect to find? If you haven’t read anything like you’re planning to write, ask readers for recommendations! Ask author friends for recommendations! Go on a hunt and get yourself a stack of books to read so you can figure out what they have in common when it comes to that trope. Sometimes it even helps to read books that executed the trope poorly so you can see what to avoid. The other option is to ask! If you have a reader group, ask there what they love and hate about a certain trope. If you have a newsletter, include a Google Forms survey asking what they love and hate about that trope. It’s better to ask ahead of time than to put your book out and find out you missed the mark.

Even once you start thinking this way it can be easy to mess up. I thought I was ready to send a book to my editor last week and then it hit me that I completely missed the mark with the trope. I let myself pout for a day and even considered trashing the book all together and starting from scratch. Then, I sucked it up and started in on some major overhaul to fix it.

Now, get out there and start writing some trope-y fun 😉 !