A shelf, a search box, and a lot of counting

What it is

SmittenSpines is a romance book finder built around one idea. You should be able to describe the book you want in your own words (slow burn, no third-act breakup, she's the one with the power) and get back books that actually match, with a reason attached to each one.

That turns out to be harder than it sounds, and why it's hard is why this site exists. Recommendation tools are very good at producing a confident-looking list. They are bad at producing a list where every book on it really does have the thing you asked for. A tool that invents the detail that makes a book fit is worse than no tool at all, because you only find out three chapters in.

So the work starts underneath, with each book read down into its parts: heat level, tropes, character types, conflict, the shape of the ending, the content warnings. That way a match can be checked instead of asserted.

What exists right now

The search box isn't open yet. What's here today is the reading room: three pieces of data journalism drawn from a working corpus of 65,510 romance and romance-adjacent novels, which is the same groundwork the finder is built on. Publishing it does two jobs. It's genuinely interesting if you read in this genre, and it puts a checkable account of what this data can and cannot say out in public.

Every number on this site is computed from that corpus by scripts described on the methodology page, which also lists what the corpus is bad at. There is quite a lot in that second category.

Who

SmittenSpines is made by Christo Wilken, trading as 9592 Solutions UG (haftungsbeschränkt), a company registered in Düsseldorf and run from Berlin. It is a small independent operation, not a publisher or a retailer, and not owned by either.

SmittenSpines is the romance face of Book-Space, a longer-running project about book discovery across genres. It starts with romance because romance readers are the most precise readers there are about what they want. The genre already has a working shared vocabulary for exactly the things a search engine ought to understand.

What we don't do

• We don't take money to place a book higher, from authors or from publishers. Paid placement inside recommendations is also flatly illegal where we operate, which makes the decision an easy one.
• We don't sell searches, reader profiles, or trend reports built out of what people typed. See privacy.
• We don't review books, rank authors, or tell you what's good. The corpus describes. You decide.

How this gets paid for

Eventually, retailer links that earn a small commission, disclosed on every page that carries one and never allowed to influence what gets recommended. Nothing on the site earns anything today. The affiliate disclosure sets out the arrangement as it will work once it goes live.

Getting in touch

Corrections are especially welcome. If a number here looks wrong to you, it may well be. Write to hello@smittenspines.com and say which one.