https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/books/review/831-stories-romance.html
The latest attempt to co-opt and monetize fandom by people who know nothing about it just got fawning coverage in the New York Times! Of course it did, because the NYT is trash, and because white women venture capitalists with social connections get this kind of attention.
Two women with no experience in publishing or editing, and who only started reading romance novels a few years ago, have received more than $4.5m in VC funding thanks to such amazing ideas as:
Readers of romance novels want plain covers so no one knows they're reading yucky girl books; they want identikit colour-blocked books that can be "brandished like fashion accessories" (I know I want to purchase books published by people who sneer at my gauche tastes!)
Recruiting authors who aren't romance writers (who needs knowledge of and affection for the genre when you can have literary cred amirite ladies)
Shilling "curated" merchandise related to the books ("the real version of a fictional necklace pivotal to the plot sold online for $195")
No royalties to authors, apparently
No physical descriptions of the characters. (“When you leave out those physical descriptors, it does open the opportunity for people to personalize stories,” Mazur said." Or does it create bland-as-fuck y/n works that default to the most normative possible characters?)
"Self-actualized" protagonists only
But wait, there's more! Our insufferable founders have also hit on an idea that apparently no one in the history of publishing has ever thought of before.
Wowwww. Interconnected works of fiction, serialised to some extent, centering romantic relationships and drawing on a shared setting or premise—why has no one thought of this before? We could call it... a series.
You also can't deliberately engineer something that creates a fandom, folks. But they're clearly trying to do just that. First, they have a page on their website which they use to host "fan fiction" about their books. (My sense is these are all better understood as commissioned tie-in short stories.)
(As an aside: their website is also eye-searingly awful. Dark pink text on a bright pink background? Who hurt you as a child?)
Then they're cross-posting these works to @ao3org, with such entirely natural and organic-sounding summaries as "831 Stories is a new romantic fiction company that prioritizes pleasure reading and celebrates the genre’s joyful, enthusiastic fans."
How do you do fellow kids dot gif.
Anyway, I hate these shallow grifters and how they and their ilk keep trying to monetise and bastardise a space of shared communal creativity, and what they do to my blood pressure and any lingering shreds of faith in humanity, and I am reporting them to AO3 for TOS violations.
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