Silver Elite and BookTok Backlash
when the marketing campaign works too well
Hi friends!
Welcome back to another week in the wild world of BookTok. I don’t usually write about controversies, because if I did I wouldn’t have time to write about anything else. And for the most part, controversies of the week don’t interest me. I want to thoughtfully explore what is working in the world of romance and commercial fiction while taking it seriously. But by the time the third separate person had reached out to me wanting to know what the deal was with Silver Elite, I knew what my newsletter would be about this week (it helps that I had already started reading the book).
Silver Elite has been on my radar for the past several months (as I mentioned in my Q1 Trend Report). BooKTok creators have been sharing breathless ARC reviews since long before its release date last Tuesday, May 6.
It’s being called a dystopian romance, a sub genre on the rise in 2025. When Jenna Bush Hager announced her partnership with Random House in January, the marquis title in their collaboration was Conform, "the first novel in a sweeping dystopian romance trilogy of love and rebellion, set in a post-apocalyptic future.” Conform is set to be released in October of this year. (And spoiler for the rest of this newsletter sort of, but the plot sounds very similar to Silver Elite and I fear we might be having this conversation again in October).
This predicted wave of dystopian romance makes sense in the context of BookTok, which is dominated by readers that grew up with books like The Hunger Games and Divergent. But the rollout of Silver Elite has proven that it might not be quite that simple.
First, the book was written by an author using a pen name. This is fine! This is a longstanding tradition among writers in all genres but especially in romance. According to people on Threads and BookTok, the publisher described Dani Francis as a pen name for a best-selling author. But when I went to find something to link to here, I couldn’t find a definitive source for that information (not to say it doesn’t exist, but I can’t find it). All we really know is that Dani Francis is Canadian.
Whatever the source of this rumor, readers began sleuthing, determined to uncover her identity, wondering if it was a problematic author attempting to restart their career, wondering why the book would get such an extensive marketing campaign otherwise. And a lot of the speculation has shifted to wondering if this book was written by AI. For a moment, people were speculating that it was Ali Hazelwood, wild to me for many reasons (she blurbs the book, she already has so many books coming out this year it doesn’t seem humanly possible for her to have written another one, the voice does not line up).
All I’ll say is that there are plenty of reasons authors choose to write under pen names. Based on who Dani Francis’s agent is, the author probably started in the indie pub space and writes in a different sub genre.
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Next, Silver Elite was selected for Book of the Month, and one of their ads has readers up in arms:
Many readers and creators online have felt deceived by this marketing, as they don’t think Silver Elite rises to the level of dystopian narrative that Hunger Games does, or they find the insinuation that Hunger Games isn’t for grown ups insulting, or they would prefer that dystopian narratives not contain “smut.”
It’s interesting to me that this isn’t even language from the publisher, but from Book of the Month, that is causing such an uproar. I’ve seen this ad included in multiple videos and posted in multiple threads as being misleading. At the same time, this is pretty straightforward marketing. Of course people are going to compare a dystopian romance to the Hunger Games. Whether or not you think it rises to the level of the work of Susanne Collins (fresh in many people’s minds thanks to Sunrise on the Reaping) is a separate issue entirely. This campaign made a lot of people pick up the book and caused online discussion.
One of the one star reviews I found on Goodreads says “People and publishers need to stop comparing books to other books. It’s getting old lol.” -Maeghan. It is very difficult to market a book without comparing it to something, whether that’s evoking a sub genre, using comps, or creating a trope reveal graphic. The foundation of BookTok is the if you liked this, you’ll like this video. I don’t think this kind of marketing is going anywhere anytime soon.
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Interspersed with all of this is the allegation that the positive ARC reviews across BookTok and other platforms were an undisclosed paid campaign, leading creators who positively reviewed the book to share videos disclosing how they received the book and that they were not paid for their review.
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All of this for a book that is, basically, fine. It has a plot familiar to anyone who has read Fourth Wing (which is most of you at this point). In fact, it was originally described as Fourth Wing meets X-Men when it was announced in Publisher’s Marketplace in 2023.
Wren Darlington is a “mod” (a person who, due to some kind of toxin in the atmosphere, has special powers, in her case, telepathy and mind control) who has been raised in hiding on a ranch by a member of an organized resistance. The government, run by the authoritarian General Redden, is determined to imprison or kill all mods. But when Wren’s guardian is caught and killed, she is forced to conceal her powers and take part in an elite military training program. In this dangerous and competitive atmosphere, she can trust no one (sound familiar?). Despite all of this, she finds herself drawn to the brooding and mysterious Cross Redden, Captain of the Silver Elite squad and also son of the general (sound familiar?).
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Now we are veering into spoiler territory so beware: I do think this book could’ve been better with improved character motivations - despite all of her training and skill, Wren isn’t a particularly strategic thinker. it takes until 50% into the book for her to realize that it makes sense for her to infiltrate silver elite and share their plans with the resistance. Similarly, it never occurs to her to use her connection with Cross strategically. Pillow talk can be a very valuable source of sensitive information, Wren!
The other issue people have had with this book is that it reads like right wing propaganda or it’s for girls with Republican boyfriends. Because this is another “enemies to lovers” story, Wren’s romance is with the son of her oppressor. The resistance is also not blameless and is difficult to root for. So whose side are we supposed to be on? Wren is also racially ambiguous, which feels like a lazy cop out:
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I don’t think this book is right wing propaganda because I don’t think it has coherent politics, which is part of what people are complaining about when they say it isn’t successful as dystopian fiction. And by the end, we come around to some kind of both sides are bad situation that doesn’t feel earned. I’m not sure what point the author is trying to make.
For me, the moral of the story here is: you don’t have to read this book if you don’t want to! It’s fine! What I don’t enjoy is when readers turn their dislike of a book into a proxy war about the relative intelligence of people on BookTok:
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Five-star review: “Silver Elite is what happens when Divergent, X-Men, and Minority Report get into an anonymous telepathic group chat moderated by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks from You’ve Got Mail, except with the spice levels turnt, and it's probably going to be one of the biggest books of the year. Hello debut author Dani Francis where have you been all our lives.” - Esta
One-star review: “and is the dystopia in the room with us right now?
if you’re looking for a book that prides itself in being a dystopian novel, while not interrogating any part of living under a totalitarian regime, it’s propaganda, and systemic violence then welcome!
This book does not care about dissecting anything, with this dystopian society simply a sexy backdrop for our two characters who experience violence on a semi-regular basis (to themselves and to those they care about) but are more than happy to forget all of that when it comes to their forbidden love” -Robin
Reading reviews for this one, it does feel (to me) like a lot of people have found the book to be a convenient foil to project their personal grievances about the state of romance or science fiction or romantasy or BookTok or politics or marketing onto.
Newsletter genius and guiding light Anne Helen Petersen of
wrote about the epidemic of consumer rage and articulated a lot of what I think is going on in the book community as well.“Their only outlet: public forums, and often in the form of preferences voiced as complaints (or, as I like to think of it, people who are mad that an orange isn’t an apple). You can see how a lot of small business owners become resistant or hostile towards online customer feedback: what, exactly, do you want from me?
Everyone’s angry and no one’s listening, and it’s only going to get worse.”
It’s easy to feel powerless in our current political climate and understandable that people might try to take back some of that power via online discourse.
Despite all of this (or because of it?), Silver Elite hit #5 on the New York Times bestseller list this week.
Have you read Silver Elite? Are you planning to? Do you think dystopian romance can exist as a sub genre? Let me know. And next week, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
xoxo
Related: I posted what I thought was a funny video practicing different pitches for my new novel and there are several comments telling me earnestly they don’t want books pitched to them. 🙄 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTj5Kke1H/
You’re exactly right about the rage. I feel it in publishing.