Smutty novels are blowing up BookTok – but why are their covers so discreet?

It was George Eliot who, in the mid-19th century, first wrote about not judging a book by its cover. But it still rings true. At first glance, Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis seems like any other romcom novel. There’s a cartoon image of a man and a woman kissing, with an array of science equipment in the background. To the unassuming reader, it would seem like it was a book about a pair of scientists falling in love. Little would they know that it’s secretly smut.

The word, describing something obscene or indecent, was once associated with the moral outrage of campaigners such as Mary Whitehouse (“Ban this filth!”) who was known in the Sixties and Seventies as Britain’s “smut-buster”. But now it has been reclaimed and reframed with positive connotations for a younger generation. These days, in literature, smut is generally used to describe a book of any genre that includes one or more sexually explicit scenes. This can be anything from a romcom novel to science fiction and fantasy – monster smut is predicted to be the next big thing. Smut-filled novels have been gaining traction on social media, specifically TikTok – or BookTok, I should say – where the hashtags #smut and #smuttok have 3.7 billion and 3.2 billion views respectively.

The Love Hypothesis begins innocently enough, with several will-they, won’t-they chapters – then, suddenly, comes the onslaught of smut. “The way he parted her with his tongue, it was as though she was butter and he meant to slice through her like a hot knife,” Hazelwood writes in one of the less graphic moments. Several pages and sex acts later, she adds: “Her insides opened to him without warning. They welcomed and pulled at him until he bottomed out, until he was wedged deep and stretching her to a point that should be breaking, but just made her feel filled, sealed, perfect.” Hazelwood’s descriptions are a bit extravagant, yes – but it’s the details that are important when it comes to vividly illustrating a smut scene for the reader.

It’s little surprise, then, that the inclusion of smut in The Love Hypothesis has had the novel sitting pretty in Amazon’s top 10 erotic fiction books for the better part of this year. It’s wildly popular, with nearly 660,000 reviews on Goodreads and an average rating of 4.31. While it may not be the smuttiest book around by a long way, it joins the ranks of romcom novels with innocent-looking covers such as Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient, which sees a woman hire a male escort to help her check off her sexual tick-list, and Rosie Danan’s The Roommate, where the protagonist moves in with a male porn star, both of which appear to be smut in disguise.

“Smut book covers that used to look like Harlequin’s Mills & Boon novels are being rebranded for our current generation,” Dharma Bizier and Mikayla Stradiotto, who run the smut-filled Not Your Mother’s Book Club podcast, tell me. “They are clean, cute, sleek designs, with brighter colours that draw you in, making them discreet, yet eye-catching. The old Harlequin covers seem to be tacky, gaudy and kitsch, but the new generation don’t want that. Smut consumers now want a more tasteful, sophisticated look.”

While smut in literature may now be associated with the Mills & Boon covers of yesteryear, which generally depicted a barely clothed couple embracing in some kind of sexy setting – be it a bed or a barn – the romance giant didn’t actually introduce explicit content to its repertoire until 2012, following the huge success of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. Even then, Harlequin changed how it marketed its explicit novels to mimic EL James’s bestsellers, which included dark tones and just one element on the cover such as a tie, a mask or a pair of handcuffs. While these covers were a distinct marker to the reader that the book contained smut in some form, a decade on there has been a tide change in how smut is marketed – at least in the romance genre.

Rita Frangie, senior director of art and design at Penguin imprint Berkley, alongside editorial director Cindy Hwang, worked on Jasmine Guillory’s 2018 raunchy romance novel The Wedding Date. One reviewer of the book said they were “shocked” about the amount of sex scenes in the book, given the cover was “charming, not sexy”. However, it was Guillory’s illustrated cover, with its bright hues and romantic silhouettes, that kickstarted a trend.

open image in gallery

“Trends are cyclical and illustrated covers had been hugely popular 20 years earlier with the ‘chick lit’ boom,” Hwang says, explaining that although it wasn’t a new approach, younger readers weren’t familiar with it “so it was new and fresh to them”.

Frangie, who also designed the illustrated cover for Guillory’s new novel Drunk on Love, describes the current approach to designing romance novel covers as “approachable, flirty and fun”, but she says there will come a time when the reader will “look for something new”, which will result in a new trend.

open image in gallery

Bizier and Stradiotto say they have seen an uptick in the popularity of smut. “We started this podcast at the beginning of the pandemic, when smut wasn’t being talked about,” they explain. “Since we started, erotica has become mainstream again. Whether this was due to the isolation, lack of dating, or just an influx in erotic writers, we think the joining of that and our generation’s willingness to talk about sex created this new voracious consumption of smut.”

BookTok certainly has its part to play in the popularity of smut, and there are now hundreds of accounts dedicated to #smuttok and its many subsidiaries. Hillary Henderson is the owner of one such account. Henderson goes by the username @bookishhill on TikTok and has more than 188.9k followers. She says she’s seen an influx of new readers to the genre, particularly among Millennials and Gen Z.

“I think the pull of erotic fiction is recognising one’s own desires and pleasures and being unafraid of enjoying them,” Henderson explains. “There’s a reason publishers have turned their marketing efforts to BookTok, and that’s because it’s effective. Once readers found their community with other readers who enjoyed smutty romances on TikTok, it’s easy to see how the popularity of the genre grew.”

Another user, who wants to only go by her username @smutbooksarelife, says that she found comfort in smut books during the pandemic. It was only when she found BookTok in November 2020 that she realised she was not alone in her new obsession. “BookTok helped us find a safe community to share our hobby,” she explains. “I know many people have read books like these for years, but now they feel safe talking openly about them.”

She adds that she’s seen a lot of consumers openly asking authors to change their book covers and make them more discreet so that they can buy them and read them openly. “I see this discussion on my timeline at least once a month,” she explains. “Readers want a cartoon or discreet cover that doesn't shout ‘I’m reading smut!’ to anyone that walks by.”

The contrast here is plain to see: younger generations appear to be more openly enjoying smutty books, yet they prefer the covers to be more discreet.

“Discreet covers are more palatable to a wider audience,” Henderson explains. However, she thinks that there will be a return of the Mills & Boon-type cover in the near future. “What I find exciting is the growing demand for old-school clinch covers,” she says. “There’s an air of nostalgia to them, but we’re looking at Millennials and Gen Z readers who are unashamed to talk about the spicy books they read. Discreet covers will always have a place in this genre, yes. Many, however, gladly own their reading pleasures and want their covers to match that.”