Sep 22, 2026 · 37 min · 15 segments
What happens when you drop a high-stakes murder mystery into the middle of magical medical school final exams? In this episode of the *Write Club Podcast*, we chat with Hugo Award-nominated author…
Freya MarskeGuestBethHostAnd so obviously, we know that romanticism, magical realism, dark academia, they are all hugely popular for writers and for readers.
But obviously, you've been crafting these subgenres for years.
So do you have any advice for writers trying to write within any of those genres without just chasing market trends?
So my first book that I ever wrote was Swordcrossed, which was the fourth book I ever had published.
And it's got a secondary world and too much random mercantile politics in it to be romance.
So we couldn't sell it to either romance houses or fantasy houses because nobody had come up with the word romantic yet.
And so when I was writing A Marvelous Light, my agent said, look, you have to decide what shelf you want this to be on, because we have to know how we're going to try and market it.
And luckily, even though it's a very similar kind of book in terms of the balance of romance and fantasy plot, because it was recognizably historical fantasy, we could sell it as that, despite all the gay sex scenes in it.
Or perhaps because of! And by the time that trilogy had finished coming out, Romandasy was a buzzword.
You know, people were talking about it, people were saying, oh, you know, there's a market for this.
And so it was very easy then to sell Swordcrossed because we could describe it as Romandasy.
And also because I had an existing readership by then, and the publisher was happy to bring out another book that's similar enough to the ones that I already had.
It's one of those things where it's been happening for a long time and people have started applying the label in different ways.
And I think looking at Bodies of Magic, it's not quite as dark as many of the Dark Academias are.
And so obviously, we know that romanticism, magical realism, dark academia, they are all hugely popular for writers and for readers.
But obviously, you've been crafting these subgenres for years.
So do you have any advice for writers trying to write within any of those genres without just chasing market trends?
So my first book that I ever wrote was Swordcrossed, which was the fourth book I ever had published.
And it's got a secondary world and too much random mercantile politics in it to be romance.
So we couldn't sell it to either romance houses or fantasy houses because nobody had come up with the word romantic yet.
And so when I was writing A Marvelous Light, my agent said, look, you have to decide what shelf you want this to be on, because we have to know how we're going to try and market it.
And luckily, even though it's a very similar kind of book in terms of the balance of romance and fantasy plot, because it was recognizably historical fantasy, we could sell it as that, despite all the gay sex scenes in it.
Or perhaps because of! And by the time that trilogy had finished coming out, Romandasy was a buzzword.
You know, people were talking about it, people were saying, oh, you know, there's a market for this.
And so it was very easy then to sell Swordcrossed because we could describe it as Romandasy.
And also because I had an existing readership by then, and the publisher was happy to bring out another book that's similar enough to the ones that I already had.
It's one of those things where it's been happening for a long time and people have started applying the label in different ways.
And I think looking at Bodies of Magic, it's not quite as dark as many of the Dark Academias are.
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