Booksology In January, my colleague Kelly Jensen wrote about the unbearable whiteness of the Goodreads Choice Awards. It was even worse during the award’s first five years, with only 11% of winning stories written by writers of color. Queer book sales haven’t been all that great, but things have been changing in recent years. But in 2025, it feels like we’re going backwards.
The first thing I noticed is that, as far as I know, queer romance doesn’t exist in the category of romance or romantasy. Please let me know if I missed anything. However, they all seem to be romances between cis-heterosexual men and women. Last year, Romantacy published Romance by Casey McQuiston and Faybound by Sahra El Arifi, along with two other queer books.
The next thing I thought was that self-proclaimed TERF JK Rowling is on this year’s longlist in the form of a new Harry Potter audiobook. Rowling now seems to be spending more time disenfranchising transgender people than writing. As such, I feel little need to explain why it’s a shame that her book has been thrust into the spotlight. She makes money directly from her books, which she uses to inject herself into anti-trans organizations.
However, it’s not just Harry Potter audiobooks that are in the works. In fact, never before has a series and its author been so prominently celebrated with this award. There is also three There is a long list of different books based on Harry Potter fan fiction. alchemized Written by Senlin Yu, rose chained Written by Julie Soto An irresistible urge to fall in love with your enemy Written by Brigid Knightley. Alchemized is featured in three categories: Romantacy, Audiobooks, and Debut Novels.
Although there is debate over the ethics and publishing of Harry Potter fan fiction, all of these books use references to the original work in their marketing. They are keeping Harry Potter relevant, which improves the brand and gives the creators more attention and money. By mentioning Harry Potter when promoting this book, they are also promoting the book and JK Rowling.
The one-two punch of a lack of queer romance books and a celebration of Harry Potter in this year’s awards means that most of them are in the speculative and YA categories, whether or not some queer and trans books are included. (Books by and about transgender and non-binary people include Woodworking by Emily St. James, Hamajan Luck by Makana Yamamoto, and I Wasn’t Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White.)
There are plenty of good reasons to ignore the Goodreads Choice Awards, from the uniformity of the winners to the fact that the site is owned by Goodreads. If you don’t want to promote JK Rowling’s brand, this year adds another reason.
