Contemporary — Workplace: 24 trope pairings readers ask for, each with the counted reader asks in this lane naming both tropes together and the counted trope-tagged titles carrying both. 4 are open gaps. Free, no sign-up.
| Pairing readers ask for | Reader asks in this lane | Titles carrying both | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Banter + Boss / Employee separately: 9,186 and 160 tagged titles | 392 | 23 | Open gap 17.0 asks per published title |
| Boss / Employee + Slow Burn separately: 160 and 296 tagged titles | 595 | 45 | Open gap 13.2 asks per published title |
| Boss / Employee + Forced Proximity separately: 160 and 758 tagged titles | 1,303 | 123 | Open gap 10.6 asks per published title |
| Boss / Employee + Found Family separately: 160 and 345 tagged titles | 341 | 33 | Open gap 10.3 asks per published title |
| Boss / Employee + Second Chance separately: 160 and 309 tagged titles | 463 | 48 | Thin on the shelf 9.6 asks per published title |
| Boss / Employee + Enemies to Lovers separately: 160 and 383 tagged titles | 476 | 50 | Thin on the shelf 9.5 asks per published title |
| Banter + Slow Burn separately: 9,186 and 296 tagged titles | 425 | 54 | Thin on the shelf 7.9 asks per published title |
| Boss / Employee + Forbidden Romance separately: 160 and 338 tagged titles | 457 | 70 | Thin on the shelf 6.5 asks per published title |
| Banter + Enemies to Lovers separately: 9,186 and 383 tagged titles | 336 | 60 | Thin on the shelf 5.6 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Second Chance separately: 758 and 309 tagged titles | 934 | 232 | Thin on the shelf 4.0 asks per published title |
| Fake Dating / Fake Relationship + Forced Proximity separately: 92 and 758 tagged titles | 317 | 80 | Thin on the shelf 4.0 asks per published title |
| Banter + Forced Proximity separately: 9,186 and 758 tagged titles | 367 | 93 | Thin on the shelf 3.9 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Slow Burn separately: 758 and 296 tagged titles | 942 | 241 | Thin on the shelf 3.9 asks per published title |
| Found Family + Second Chance separately: 345 and 309 tagged titles | 403 | 105 | Thin on the shelf 3.8 asks per published title |
| Boss / Employee + Grumpy Sunshine separately: 160 and 227 tagged titles | 237 | 62 | Thin on the shelf 3.8 asks per published title |
| Found Family + Slow Burn separately: 345 and 296 tagged titles | 463 | 124 | Thin on the shelf 3.7 asks per published title |
| Second Chance + Slow Burn separately: 309 and 296 tagged titles | 291 | 78 | Thin on the shelf 3.7 asks per published title |
| Found Family + Single Parent separately: 345 and 154 tagged titles | 259 | 76 | Thin on the shelf 3.4 asks per published title |
| Enemies to Lovers + Slow Burn separately: 383 and 296 tagged titles | 388 | 120 | Thin on the shelf 3.2 asks per published title |
| Enemies to Lovers + Second Chance separately: 383 and 309 tagged titles | 249 | 84 | Well served 3.0 asks per published title |
| Enemies to Lovers + Forced Proximity separately: 383 and 758 tagged titles | 758 | 316 | Well served 2.4 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Found Family separately: 758 and 345 tagged titles | 560 | 236 | Well served 2.4 asks per published title |
| Forced Proximity + Grumpy Sunshine separately: 758 and 227 tagged titles | 252 | 194 | Well served 1.3 asks per published title |
| Forbidden Romance + Forced Proximity separately: 338 and 758 tagged titles | 220 | 240 | Well served 0.9 asks per published title |
Reader asks is a counted number: parsed reader requests — from Goodreads and Amazon reviews and Q&A, Reddit and BookTok — in which a reader writing about this lane named both tropes in the same request. 2,585,660 reader signals sit behind it. Titles carrying both is counted the same way over published titles tagged trope by trope: 114,151 distinct titles, 952,697 trope tags. Neither number is modelled, sampled or estimated.
Two things to be straight about. The supply count is registry-wide, not lane-scoped — our demand data and our title tagging use different subgenre vocabularies, and rather than fake a join we count titles carrying both tropes anywhere in the tagged registry. And a pairing is only listed when both of its tropes carry at least five tagged titles on their own (the two figures are printed under each pairing), so a zero in the “carrying both” column means the pairing really is unwritten in what we have tagged, not that we simply never tagged the trope.
The verdict column is a rule, printed here so you can apply it yourself: ten or more asks per published title is an open gap; three to ten is thin on the shelf; below three is well served; and a pairing readers ask for that no tagged title in the lane carries at all is called out as such. Pairings with fewer than three asks are not listed — too few to mean anything.
What it is not. It is not a sales forecast and it is not advice to write anything. A gap can be a gap because readers ask and nobody delivers, or because the pairing does not work. That judgement is yours; the counting is ours. Counted 2026-10-06 and restated whenever the corpus is recounted — the raw JSON behind any lane is one query string away.
Free to embed on any blog, newsletter template or author site. The widget renders the pairing board for this lane and must keep its visible “Data: Tropesmith” credit link — that link back to tropesmith.com is the licence, and it is written into the payload server-side so it cannot be shipped without it.
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