Everything below runs on the same engine our paid Maps run on, and every one of them is free to use. No sign-up wall, no trial clock, no credit card. If you only take one thing from this page, take the lane score for the subgenre you are about to write in.
Pick your subgenre and get three lists: the tropes gaining momentum but not yet crowded, the ones everyone is already writing, and the ones cooling off. Plus this month’s top five trending tropes in that lane.
Check my subgenre →What romance readers are actually asking for, lane by lane — read out of 721,971 reader requests we classed as underserved or novel. The gaps nobody is filling, and the ones already crowded.
See reader demand →Paste an Amazon link or ASIN and see every category that book ranks in and where it sits in each one. The free, always-updated replacement for the retiring BKLNK category checker.
Check a book →One number that answers “is this subgenre worth writing?” — opportunity score and rank, greenlight band, typical list price, Kindle Unlimited share, 30-day reader demand, the heat level readers expect and the length that sells. Available as a page or as JSON.
Score my lane →One script tag puts a live lane board on your site — your blog, your newsletter template, your author page — and it refreshes itself as the market moves. No libraries, nothing to maintain.
Get the snippet →An auto-refreshed economics page for every lane we cover: typical price, Kindle Unlimited share, how many new titles are entering, and which tropes are rising inside that lane.
Browse the lanes →Know how readers react to a hook before you post it, instead of finding out from a flat launch.
Try a hook →Why readers put books like yours down — read out of the complaints real readers leave on books in your lane.
Run the radar →Two complete Maps, free to read end to end, so you can see exactly what you get before you spend anything. See pricing for what a Map costs.
Read a full Map →A weekly read on what moved in the market this week — which tropes climbed, which cooled, and what it means for the book you are drafting.
Read this week →The Live Board is embeddable, free, and free to use commercially. Paste this where you want the card:
<div id="tropesmith-live-board"></div> <script src="https://tropesmith.com/embed/live-board.js?lane=romance.dark" async></script>
The only condition is attribution: keep the visible “Data: Tropesmith” credit link back to tropesmith.com. Do not strip it, hide it or nofollow it — that link is what pays for the data. Full options, themes and the iframe version are on the embed page.
Counted, not estimated, and recounted as the corpus grows: 2,679,139 Goodreads reviews, 1,564,365 shelf signals, 1,819,684 parsed reader demand signals and 72,641 BookTok videos across 554 tracked hashtags — 6,135,829 reader signals in total — against a registry of 231,291 titles, 11,575 of them tagged trope by trope across 4,422 distinct tropes and 138 demand lanes. Nothing on this page is a guess or a round number typed in by hand.
These tools answer one question at a time. The 2026 Romance Demand Report answers the whole year at once — where romance demand is heading, which lanes have room, and what readers are asking for that nobody is writing. Free, from the same engine.
Build my Map →