14 Lessons from Amazon’s top 20 Lesbian Romances, June 2025 Edition
What I learned about writing and publishing by analyzing Amazon’s top 20 lesbian romance books
I’ve always been told that when trying to be more successful you should identify those who are successful and figure out how they did it. To that end, I analyzed the top 20 lesbian romance books on Amazon on June 4. I previously did this in December 2024 and 2023. Those analyses were clearly affected by the holiday season. I know Amazon is currently tweaking its ranking algorithm, but my review is still interesting. This is my first time doing this analysis in summer, and here’s what I learned:
All of the top 20 lesbian romance books were in Kindle Unlimited (KU).
Four were published in June. Seven were published in May, and two were published in April. One was published in March. Two were published in 2024, and one was published in 2023. One was published in 2022, and two were published in 2021.
I see complaints all the time from readers in Sapphic fiction Facebook groups about illustrated covers, but they are not going away anytime soon. Seven of the covers featured an illustration of two women, one illustrated cover had only one woman, and one featured an illustration of a lesbian family. There were seven covers with some kind of abstract photo or illustration and one with a skyline. Three of the covers had a photo of one woman.
Prices ranged from 2.99 to $12.99, with an average price of $6.99. The most common prices were $4.99 and $6.99.
Length ranged from as long as 589 pages to as short as 254 pages.
The most common tropes were forced proximity, opposites attract, and enemies to lovers, which featured in 7 books each. Five books were about second chance romance and three were friends to lovers. Many of the books were contemporary romance, but one book was high fantasy and one incorporated fantasy elements. Two books focused on crime, mystery, or suspense.
Eighteen of the books were self-published. Two were from large publishers.
Nine were part of a series, and 11 were stand-alone.
The number one book in this category had an Amazon store rank (all books) of 741. The book ranked at 20 in this category had an overall rank of 8,955.
I analyzed the online presence of the 20 authors.
15 of the 20 have their own website, and nine of those have their own email newsletter.
I couldn’t find any online presence for two authors.
Of social media platforms, 17 authors were on Instagram, 15 were on Facebook, and 13 were on Twitter. Two authors were on TikTok and two were on Blue Sky. Three were on Threads.
11. Two of the authors were named Clare.
12. A total of 16 authors mentioned pets in their biographies.
The number of books published by the authors in the top 20 ranges from two to 133 with a median number of 35 books per author.
The debate over who can write Sapphic fiction periodically flares up. I don’t find that debate that interesting because anyone can write Sapphic fiction. Readers can choose to read your book or not. No author should be required to disclose information that they don’t want to.
My concern and my interest is who gets to be successful at writing Sapphic fiction. In my ideal world, everyone would read Sapphic fiction. Everyone who wants to write Sapphic fiction would be successful at it and sell lots of books. Unfortunately, the reality is that success can be limited, and the presence of those from non-marginalized communities in marginalized communities can have an impact that isn’t always positive, even when that less than positive impact is unintentional.
The good news is that the books in the top 20 of the lesbian romance category are written by a diverse bunch of fabulous writers. This information was gleaned from their Amazon biographies, their own websites, and other public sources. Eight authors are women engaged to or married to women. For six of this group the sexual orientation is unknown. Two are lesbians. One author is married to a man, sexual orientation unknown. One author is non-binary and married to a man. One is bisexual and married to a man. One is a member of the LGBTQ+ community. One is bisexual, nonbinary, trans, agender, polyamorous, and queer and has a wife. One is bisexual and non-binary, marital status unknown. Two are Latino, and two are Black. Identity information is not available for six authors, and that’s okay. It’s clearly none of our business.
So, what should you do?
The takeaways from this analysis for those of us writing and publishing Sapphic romance fiction (or hoping to do so):
Many authors do well publishing wide, but you may want to consider making your books exclusive to Amazon and available in KU, especially when first published.
An illustrated or abstract cover appears to be the way to go.
$4.99 and $6.99 are pricing sweet spots.
If you write short, you need to get wordier. There’s a definite preference for longer books, and lesbian romance books are getting long. Three of the books in the lesbian romance top 20 had more than 500 pages.
Self-publishing dominates lesbian fiction on Amazon. Traditional publishing still doesn’t give us enough to read. The two trad books on the list were several years old. Caveat: Small presses dedicated to publishing lesbian fiction have robust mailing lists and most likely sell a lot of books directly. These sales are not accounted for in this analysis.
Series are popular, but don’t hesitate to write stand-alone novels.
Having your own website is important, and don’t forget to set up your own email newsletter. If you have time for only one social media platform, choose Instagram.
If you have a pet, you should probably mention them in your author biography or on social media, but don’t feel you have to change your pen name to Clare.
There’s a lot of room within Sapphic romance for various sub-niches, a wide variety of characters with different identities, and authors of all sorts of backgrounds. Let’s keep it this way.
Some authors are wildly successful with only two books. Others hit their stride around book 100. If you haven’t found success as you define it yet, that may be to come. Keep going. Keep writing.
Using the Write to Market formula from Chris Fox’s book of the same name, the overall ranks for lesbian romance indicate a market that is still hungry and not saturated. There is a market for your lesbian romance novel.
Let me know what you learned from this analysis, and if you have any questions. I look forward to discussing this further.
This is great data! Thanks for compiling and sharing. Saw this first on Threads and excited you’re on Substack!!