The radar watches search interest, reader shelves and BookTok for tropes gaining reader attention, gates out noise, and tells you which trope is rising now — and which is likely to soon.
Beta. The radar is in calibration while we widen the data behind it; forecasts show direction and confidence only, no lift claims yet.
Refreshes continuously as new forecasts clear the strength gate. Free shows the call; members get the evidence behind it.
The free board tells you what's rising. The full radar tells you why, how strong the signal was, and the measured lift for that specific forecast.
Members (any active Live Board subscription, or a Map credit balance) get the full active radar — every forecast's lift, its evidence line, and the current backtest headline.
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See Live Board membership →For authors starting out, authors mid-career, and authors running a big pen name like a business.
A weekly-refreshed list of tropes whose reader search interest is rising right now, or measured to rise within the next few weeks, ranked by how strong and how reliable each signal has been historically. It answers one question: what will readers be searching for by the time this book is ready?
No. Every forecast reduces to one line you can act on: a trope name, whether it's rising now or rising in N weeks, and a confidence word (low, medium or high). The free board shows exactly that, nothing else, for the top 10 tropes each week.
Use it to shortlist, not to decide alone. A rising trope with high confidence is a reasonable tiebreaker between two ideas you're already excited about; it is not a substitute for writing a book you can finish and defend. Pair it with a Tropesmith Map for the full demand-vs-supply read on the exact lane you're considering.
It varies by trope, and by how strong and how fresh the signal is. Some signals resolve in a week or two; the radar states the specific lead time per forecast rather than one number for everything, and we're widening the data behind those estimates before we publish a headline figure.
Watch your own lanes specifically. If a trope you already write is showing "rising now" or a short lead time, that's a signal to bring forward a book you were planning anyway, or to lean into that trope in your next release's marketing, rather than chase an unrelated lane cold.
The Trope Pulse reports what's already moving this week. A Map reads today's demand-vs-supply for a lane you specify. The Trend Radar is the leading-indicator layer underneath both: it exists to catch a rise before it shows up in either of those.
Treat the radar as a scheduling input, not a pivot command. Check it when choosing which of your next contracted books to write first, or which trope to lean into for a launch dated a couple of months out.
Each forecast tracks how often a search-interest spike for a trope has been followed by that trope actually rising in reader demand, versus tropes with no spike. We're still widening the data this rests on, so today the radar shows direction and a confidence word, not a lift figure.
The radar is in calibration. Our current backtest runs on a thin, mostly search-only signal history, and we'd rather widen that data than publish a precision number that doesn't hold up as more signal types mature. When it does, we'll show our work.
Free: the top 10 active forecasts, refreshed continuously — trope, rise label, lead time and confidence, no signup required. Members (any active Live Board subscription, or a Map credit balance) get the full active radar, the measured lift for every forecast, the evidence line behind it, and the current backtest headline.
Search-interest signal: Google Trends. Screen-adaptation evidence lines, when shown, carry data from TMDB (themoviedb.org) — this product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Directional guidance from a live, continuously re-tested model — not a guarantee for any single forecast.