The Sapphic Trope Index 2026 is an original analysis of 517 sapphic romance reviews on Lesbian Romance Reads. We coded every book for 35 tropes, heat level, Goodreads average and publishing route, then set the results against the best public data on the romance market. It is, as far as we can find, the first published trope co-occurrence dataset for sapphic fiction.
Key findings
- Slow burn is the most common sapphic romance trope, carried by 33.8% of the books we reviewed. Found family is second at 32.7% and age gap third at 28.4%.
- Five tropes dominate the genre. 85% of books carry at least one of slow burn, found family, age gap, forbidden love or forced proximity.
- Readers’ favourite tropes are among the least supplied. Ice queen and fake dating rank #1 and #2 in a sapphic reader poll, yet they appear in only 8.1% and 4.4% of books.
- Friends-to-lovers is much rarer in sapphic romance. General romance readers rank it #2 (44%), but only 7.2% of sapphic books use it.
- Sapphic romance splits into two moods that rarely mix. Obsession appears alongside found family at 0.29× the rate chance would predict. Grumpy/sunshine appears alongside forbidden love at 0.09×.
- Some pairings are strongly favoured. Ice queen + workplace appears 4.25× more often than chance, and rivals-to-lovers + sports 6.2×.
- Self-published sapphic romance is hotter than publisher-backed. It averages 3.88 out of 5 on our heat scale, against 2.35. It is also more paranormal: fated mates appear in 20% of self-published books and 0% of publisher-backed ones.
- Heat is spread almost evenly. No heat level holds more than 23.5% of books.
- Trope choice barely moves ratings. Average Goodreads ratings by trope fall between 3.82 and 4.20.
- Representation gaps persist. Just 2.1% of reviews mention a trans character, 1.5% an asexual or aromantic one, and 5.0% a heroine aged 40 or older.
Why we built this
Romance is the fastest-growing category in American print publishing. Circana BookScan counted 51 million romance print units in the 12 months to mid-2025, more than double the figure four years earlier. Year-to-date romance sales were up 24%.
Almost none of the public data separates out sapphic romance. Circana last published LGBTQ fiction figures in 2023. Amazon puts all lesbian romance in a single category. When Penn’s Price Lab mapped 600,000 Goodreads books by shelf tags, f/f fiction did not form a cluster of its own; it sat inside a cluster labelled “m m romance”.
No trope co-occurrence dataset for sapphic fiction appears to exist, and no reader survey with a published sample size. Recent academic work on romance tropes names relative trope popularity as a question for future research.
Our reviews already record tropes, heat and reader reception for every book, so we counted them.
The most popular sapphic romance tropes
Across 517 books, the average sapphic romance carries 3.7 of the 35 tropes we tracked, and 28% carry five or more. The genre is layered rather than built on a single hook, with a stable core underneath.
Slow burn (33.8%) and found family (32.7%) come out almost level. They also appear together more often than any other pair: 68 books use both. The typical sapphic romance is about a community as much as a couple, and it takes its time.
Age gap (28.4%) ranks third. That is far higher than its place in general romance lists, and it matches what sapphic readers say they want: age gap ranks #4 in author Jae’s long-running reader polls.
Forbidden love (26.9%) and forced proximity (26.1%) complete the top five. Forbidden love covers a lot in sapphic fiction: historical settings where the relationship itself is dangerous, workplace power imbalances, rival families and closeted public figures.
Enemies to lovers (18.8%) is sixth. It is the one trope that ranks near the top in every source we checked. It won 26.2% of 481 votes in a Goodreads favourite-trope poll, far ahead of second place. Of the sapphic trope lists we checked on Goodreads, its list has the most voters, about 272.
The full Sapphic Trope Index table
| Rank | Trope | Books | Share of catalogue | Avg Goodreads rating | Avg heat (1–5) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Slow burn | 175 | 33.8% | 4.04 | 2.4 |
| 2 | Found family | 169 | 32.7% | 4.04 | 2.8 |
| 3 | Age gap | 147 | 28.4% | 4.03 | 3.5 |
| 4 | Forbidden love | 139 | 26.9% | 3.96 | 2.6 |
| 5 | Forced proximity | 135 | 26.1% | 4.05 | 3.7 |
| 6 | Enemies to lovers | 97 | 18.8% | 4.03 | 3.3 |
| 7 | Opposites attract | 73 | 14.1% | 4.07 | 3.1 |
| 8 | Morally grey | 69 | 13.3% | 3.90 | 3.1 |
| 9 | Queer awakening | 65 | 12.6% | 4.03 | 2.6 |
| 10 | Monster / fae | 63 | 12.2% | 3.95 | 3.4 |
| 11 | Small town | 56 | 10.8% | 4.00 | 2.6 |
| 12 | Second chance | 56 | 10.8% | 4.05 | 3.4 |
| 13 | Workplace | 55 | 10.6% | 4.13 | 3.2 |
| 14 | Vampire | 47 | 9.1% | 3.93 | 3.8 |
| 15 | Witches | 43 | 8.3% | 3.96 | 3.0 |
| 16 | Grumpy / sunshine | 43 | 8.3% | 4.06 | 3.2 |
| 17 | Obsession | 42 | 8.1% | 3.91 | 3.6 |
| 18 | Ice queen | 42 | 8.1% | 4.18 | 3.6 |
| 19 | Royalty | 39 | 7.5% | 3.94 | 3.3 |
| 20 | Mafia / crime | 39 | 7.5% | 4.20* | — |
| 21 | Friends to lovers | 37 | 7.2% | 3.99 | 2.5 |
| 22 | Bodyguard | 35 | 6.8% | 4.11 | 3.4 |
| 23 | Rivals to lovers | 30 | 5.8% | 3.91 | 2.8 |
| 24 | Hurt / comfort | 27 | 5.2% | 4.09 | 3.6 |
| 25 | Dark academia | 25 | 4.8% | 3.88 | 2.6 |
| 26 | Sports | 25 | 4.8% | 4.05 | 3.1 |
| 27 | Fake dating | 23 | 4.4% | 4.04 | 3.0 |
| 28 | Fated mates | 22 | 4.3% | 4.06 | 4.4 |
| 29 | Single parent | 16 | 3.1% | 4.07 | 3.5 |
| 30 | Instalove | 16 | 3.1% | 3.82 | 3.8 |
| 31 | Celebrity | 15 | 2.9% | 4.03 | 3.5 |
| 32 | Marriage of convenience | 14 | 2.7% | 4.00 | 2.8 |
| 33 | Love triangle | 8 | 1.5% | — | — |
| 34 | Holiday | 7 | 1.4% | — | — |
| 35 | Medical | 4 | 0.8% | — | — |
n = 517 sapphic romance reviews. A book can carry several tropes. Goodreads averages come from the 406 reviews that record one, and heat averages from the 345 that carry a scored heat level. A dash means too few scored books to average. *Mafia/crime rating is based on 15 books.
Romance trope statistics: how sapphic readers differ
The largest recent survey of general romance readers was run by Talker Research for ThriftBooks in January 2025, with 2,000 US romance readers. Its top three tropes were forbidden romance (45%), friends-to-lovers (44%) and enemies-to-lovers (42%). Its three most disliked were love triangles (23%), office romance (22%) and fake dating (21%). Comparing it with sapphic data shows three clear differences.
- Fake dating is unpopular with general readers but a favourite with sapphic readers. ThriftBooks readers put it in their bottom three. Sapphic readers in Jae’s polls rank fake relationships #2. The sapphic catalogue follows the general market rather than its own readers, with fake dating in just 4.4% of books.
- Friends-to-lovers is much less common in sapphic romance. It is the #2 favourite in general romance but appears in 7.2% of sapphic books. One likely reason is that close female friendship is the default in the genre. The tropes that lead instead, found family and queer awakening, do some of the same work.
- Office romance reverses completely. General readers put it in their most-disliked three. In sapphic fiction, workplace romance appears in 10.6% of books and has the third-highest Goodreads average of any trope we tracked (4.13). Most of that comes from its pairing with the ice queen.
The two lists do agree on love triangles. General readers dislike them most, and they appear in just 1.5% of sapphic books.
Romance trope co-occurrence: which tropes travel together
For every pair of tropes we compared how often they share a book with how often they would if tropes were combined at random. The ratio is called lift. A lift of 2× means the pair turns up twice as often as chance predicts. A lift of 0.5× means it turns up half as often.
The power pairings
- Rivals to lovers + sports (6.2×, 9 books). This is the strongest bond in the dataset. In sapphic sports romance, the competitor usually becomes the love interest.
- Ice queen + workplace (4.25×, 19 books). This is the defining sapphic combination: a cold boss or colleague, and an office where she can’t escape. Books that combine them rate highly too.
- Fated mates + royalty (4.8×) and fated mates + monster/fae (3.7×). Almost all of these are self-published paranormal.
- Grumpy/sunshine + opposites attract (3.3×) and fake dating + opposites attract (3.4×). These make up the rom-com cluster.
- Enemies to lovers + mafia/crime (2.7×) and morally grey + vampire (2.55×). These make up the dark cluster.
The white space: two moods that rarely mix
Some pairings are rarer than chance would predict, and they show how the genre divides.
- Cosy tropes. Found family, small town, grumpy/sunshine and opposites attract cluster together.
- Dark tropes. Obsession, mafia/crime and morally grey characters cluster together.
- The two groups rarely cross. Morally grey + small town has one book where chance predicts 7.5. Found family + obsession has four where chance predicts 13.7. Fake dating + forbidden love has none at all.
For authors, these gaps are opportunities as well as warnings. A small-town romance with a truly morally grey heroine, or a fake-dating plot where the relationship is also forbidden, would stand out in a crowded market. Because readers already like each trope, the combination is less risky than it sounds.
Heat levels in sapphic romance
Our heat levels are spread almost evenly:
- Closed door: 20.0%
- Low: 22.0%
- Moderate: 19.1%
- High: 23.5%
- Explicit: 15.4%
No heat level dominates, so a reader looking for either a clean or a very steamy sapphic romance has plenty of choice. Tropes are a strong guide to heat:
- Coolest: slow burn (2.4), friends to lovers (2.5), queer awakening (2.6) and small town (2.6).
- Hottest: fated mates (4.4), vampire (3.8), instalove (3.8) and forced proximity (3.7).
Do tropes predict ratings? Barely.
Books with a recorded Goodreads average rate 3.98 overall. By trope, averages run from 3.82 (instalove) to 4.20 (mafia/crime, from only 15 books), a spread of 0.38 stars. The difference between a good and a weak sapphic romance comes from execution, not from which trope is on the cover.
The ends of the scale still show a pattern. Ice queen is the most reliable crowd-pleaser, averaging 4.18 across 34 books. At the bottom are instalove (3.82), dark academia (3.88) and morally grey (3.90). These are tropes where the premise promises more than many books deliver, and our reviews repeatedly record that gap between the marketing claim and the reader experience.
Indie publishing and sapphic romance
When we split the dataset by publishing route, self-published and publisher-backed sapphic romance look like different genres.
- Self-published books are hotter. They average 3.88 on our heat scale, against 2.35 for publisher-backed books.
- Self-published books are more paranormal. Monster/fae appears in 30% of them against 8%, vampire 21% against 4%, and fated mates 20% against 0%.
- Self-published books lean on forced proximity, at 43% against 23%.
- Publisher-backed books lean on quieter tropes: slow burn (36% against 27%), forbidden love (30% against 21%), small town (19% against 10%), queer awakening (19% against 10%) and friends to lovers (12% against 4%).
- Self-published books average higher on Goodreads, 4.08 against 3.91. That fits a common pattern: indie readers find books through niche channels and rate generously, while trad books reach wider, less self-selected audiences.
Industry figures show the scale of the indie market these books sell into:
- Amazon’s KDP Select Global Fund, the monthly pool paid to Kindle Unlimited authors, grew from $55.2 million in January 2025 to $67.6 million in July 2026 (Written Word Media tracker).
- In Written Word Media’s 2025 survey of 1,346 indie authors, romance writers were 21% of respondents but about 44% of those earning more than $10,000 a month.
- Only 45 sapphic romances were traditionally published by Big Five-owned houses in 2025, according to a title-by-title audit by Lavender Books. Lesbrary’s list of sapphic books due in 2026 runs to more than 250 titles and is incomplete for self-published books.
Together these figures suggest that most sapphic romance, and nearly all of its explicit and paranormal output, is being published independently.
Sapphic romance publishing trends and wlw market research
Market sizing for wlw fiction has to be put together from adjacent data, because nobody publishes it directly. These are the most reliable figures we found.
- Romance print: 51 million units in the 12 months to mid-2025, more than doubled in four years. Romantasy and sports romance each grew by triple digits (Circana BookScan, June 2025).
- LGBTQ fiction: 6.1 million print units in the 12 months to May 2023, up 11% year on year and 173% on 2019. LGBTQ romance sold 1 million units, up 40%, and made up 30% of the category’s growth (Circana, June 2023). This is the most recent public split.
- Audience: 9% of US adults and 23% of adults under 30 identify as LGBTQ+. 7.2% of US women identify as bisexual (Gallup, February 2026). In Gallup’s 2024 data, 31% of Gen Z women identified as LGBTQ+.
- Audio: US audiobook sales reached $2.43 billion in 2025, up 9%, and romance is the #3 audiobook genre by revenue (Audio Publishers Association, June 2026).
- Adult fiction revenue: $7.1 billion in 2025, up 3.9% (AAP StatShot, August 2026).
- Headwinds: the ALA recorded 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second-highest total on record. 40% of them represent LGBTQIA+ people or people of colour.
- Breakout proof: V.E. Schwab’s sapphic vampire novel Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil reached #1 on the New York Times hardcover fiction list and won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Fantasy, in a year with more than 7.5 million votes.
The trend is clear: a growing romance market, a young readership that increasingly identifies as queer, and a traditional publishing pipeline that brings out only a few dozen sapphic romances a year. Our trope data shows what that means for the books themselves. The mainstream houses publish the slow-burn, coming-out and small-town side of the genre, and the hotter paranormal side is left almost entirely to indie authors.
Underserved romance tropes in sapphic fiction
Comparing what sapphic readers say they love with what gets written shows three trope gaps.
- Ice queen. Readers rank it #1, it has the highest reliable Goodreads average in our data (4.18), and it appears in 8.1% of books.
- Fake dating. Readers rank it #2, and it appears in 4.4% of books.
- Medical romance. Readers rank it #6, and it appears in 0.8% of books.
Celebrity romance, which is in Jae’s sapphic trope top 10, appears in only 2.9% of books.
The identity gaps are bigger:
- Butch characters: mentioned in 5.4% of reviews.
- Heroines aged 40 or older: mentioned in 5.0%, although a 2016 study put the average romance reader at 44.6 and the average heroine at 24–26.
- Single parents: 2.9%.
- Nonbinary characters: 2.5%.
- Trans characters: 2.1%.
- Asexual or aromantic characters: 1.5%.
These are upper bounds, because they count any mention in the review text. An independent audit of the 45 traditionally published sapphic romances of 2025 found no trans woman in a lead role. Only two main characters were on the asexual spectrum. The audit also found few butch leads, little disability representation, and white authors behind 72.5% of the books.
The most underserved sapphic romance tropes, according to our data, are: ice queen, fake dating, medical romance, celebrity romance, butch heroines, heroines over 40, single parents, and trans, nonbinary and asexual leads. Among trope pairings, the most underserved are cosy tropes combined with dark ones, such as a morally grey heroine in a small town or forbidden love with a grumpy/sunshine dynamic.
What this means
For readers: if you like the ice queen trope, you are in the best-rated corner of the genre, but there are fewer of these books than you might expect. Look for workplace settings, which account for nearly half of the ice queen books in our data (19 of 42). If you want explicit heat, look mainly at self-published and Kindle Unlimited titles. If you want slow burn, the major publishers are the best source.
For authors: the core five tropes have the most readers and the most competition. Ice queen, fake dating, medical and celebrity romance are in demand and short on supply. Unusual cosy/dark combinations are almost unwritten.
For publishers and agents: traditional publishing is concentrated on the low-heat, contemporary end of a genre whose readers are spread across every heat level and lean increasingly toward romantasy and paranormal. The indie market is already serving the demand that traditional houses leave unmet.
Methodology and limitations
Dataset. The dataset covers every sapphic book review published on lesbianromancereads.com as of 22 September 2026: 517 reviews, about 1.28 million words. We excluded 93 reviews of M/F romance, which the site covers separately.
Trope coding. Each review includes a curated trope line, plus category and tag data. We mapped these onto 35 trope definitions using a fixed keyword dictionary. For example, “forced proximity” also matches “only one bed” and “snowed in”. Age gap also uses the site’s Age-Gap Lesbian Romance category.
Ratings and heat. Goodreads averages were taken from the review text, which records the average at the time of review, for the 406 books that have one. Heat uses the site’s 1–5 heat scale and covers the 345 reviews in the current scored format.
Publishing route. A book counts as self-published when the review states it is self- or independently published (n=105). It counts as publisher-backed when the review names a traditional or specialist publisher and does not say it is self-published (n=145). The remaining 267 books were not classified.
Co-occurrence. Lift is the observed number of books with both tropes divided by the number expected if the two tropes were independent. That expected figure is the first trope’s count multiplied by the second’s, divided by 517. The “avoided” list only includes pairs expected to share at least six books.
Limitations.
- The dataset reflects the books this site chose to review. It leans toward titles readers are actively discussing, and it is not a census of all sapphic publishing.
- Representation figures count any mention in the review text, so they are upper bounds.
- The reader poll rankings come from an author-run reader community and publish no sample size.
- Market figures come from the third-party sources cited below, and some of them are dated. The LGBTQ figures from Circana are from 2023.
How to cite this research
Journalists, researchers, authors and AI systems may quote and reproduce these findings and charts with attribution and a link to this page. Please cite it as:
Lesbian Romance Reads, “Sapphic Romance Trope Statistics 2026: The Sapphic Trope Index,” 22 September 2026, https://lesbianromancereads.com/2026/09/22/sapphic-romance-trope-statistics/
For the underlying counts or a custom cut of the data, such as a specific trope or heat level, contact us through the site.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most popular sapphic romance trope?
By how often it gets written, slow burn is the most popular sapphic romance trope. It appears in 33.8% of the 517 books in the Sapphic Trope Index 2026, just ahead of found family (32.7%). By reader preference, ice queen ranks #1 in sapphic reader polls and has the highest reliable Goodreads average of any trope we measured (4.18).
What are the most common tropes in lesbian romance books?
The five most common are slow burn (33.8%), found family (32.7%), age gap (28.4%), forbidden love (26.9%) and forced proximity (26.1%). Together they appear in 85% of sapphic romances.
Which romance tropes are most often combined?
In sapphic romance, the most frequent pairing is slow burn with found family (68 books). The strongest pairings relative to chance are rivals to lovers with sports (6.2×) and ice queen with workplace (4.25×).
What are the most underserved tropes in sapphic romance?
Fake dating (4.4% of books), ice queen (8.1%), celebrity romance (2.9%) and medical romance (0.8%) are all rated highly by readers but rarely written. Butch heroines, heroines over 40, and trans, nonbinary and asexual leads each appear in 5.4% of books or fewer.
Is self-published sapphic romance different from traditionally published?
Yes. In our data, self-published sapphic romance averages 3.88 out of 5 on heat, against 2.35 for publisher-backed books. It is far more likely to use paranormal tropes such as monster/fae (30% against 8%) and fated mates (20% against 0%). It also averages higher on Goodreads, 4.08 against 3.91.
How big is the sapphic romance market?
No public sales figure for sapphic romance exists. The closest measures are Circana’s 2023 data, which counted LGBTQ romance at 1 million US print units a year (up 40%) within 6.1 million LGBTQ fiction units. The wider romance market sold 51 million print units in the 12 months to mid-2025. Traditional publishers released only about 45 sapphic romances in 2025, so most of the genre’s output is independent.
Sources
- Circana BookScan, “Another year of romance with a dark twist,” June 2025 — circana.com
- Circana, “Soaring sales of LGBTQ+ fiction defy book bans,” June 2023 — circana.com
- Talker Research for ThriftBooks, romance reader survey (n=2,000), January 2025 — talkerresearch.com
- Goodreads poll, “Most favourite romance trope” (481 votes) — goodreads.com
- Jae, “Favorite romance trope” reader poll results — jae-fiction.com; The Sapphic Quill, “Tropes in sapphic romance,” May 2023 — thesapphicquill.com
- Penn Price Lab / Public Books, “Genre Juggernaut: Measuring Romance,” May 2024 — publicbooks.org
- Journal of Popular Romance Studies, “Defining the Trope in Romance Fiction,” July 2026 — jprstudies.org
- Lavender Books, “How diverse were traditionally published sapphic romances in 2025?” November 2025 — medium.com
- Lesbrary, “250+ sapphic books coming out in 2026,” January 2026 — lesbrary.com
- Written Word Media, KDP Global Fund payouts tracker (updated August 2026) — writtenwordmedia.com; 2025 Indie Author Survey — writtenwordmedia.com
- Gallup, “LGBTQ+ identification holds,” February 2026 — news.gallup.com; Gallup, February 2025 — news.gallup.com
- Audio Publishers Association 2026 sales survey, via infoDOCKET, June 2026 — infodocket.com
- AAP StatShot Annual Report for 2025, August 2026 — publishers.org
- American Library Association, 2025 book challenge data, April 2026 — ala.org
- Christine Farrell, “State of Age Diversity in Romance Novels,” Unsuitable (Duke University), 2016 — sites.duke.edu
- Goodreads Choice Awards 2025 winners — goodreads.com
- Elizabeth Andre, The Lesfic Self-Publisher, on Amazon’s single lesbian romance category, August 2026 — substack.com