Spicy books–aka, sizzling romance reads that are heavy on all things touch and temptation–have been all the rage on #BookTok for several years. Many credit finding a community of readers via TikTok vital to kickstarting their passion for all things books and reading, especially as it allows them to indulge in romantic fantasy. #BookTok has close to 33 million posts on Goodreads and #SpicyBookTok alone accounts for 1.2 million posts.
Pour Moi, a lingerie company, dove into the data around the books that #BookTok ranks among the spiciest titles. Pulling from Goodreads book lists titled BookTok, Romance, and Romantasy, the company analyzed the titles to determine which books readers deemed as the hottest. Pour Moi used data scraping tools to compile number of ratings, reviews, average review scores and spicy keywords in reviews to rank the books on a scale of 1, the least saucy, to 5, the hottest of the hot.
Books needed to have at least 10 reviews on Goodreads to be included in the data. A total of 2,511 reviews were analyzed for a count of words such as sexy, hot, smut, spicy, and more. Those counts, in addition to the number of reviews and ratings, were used to create the scores in May 2024.
Pour Moi then created three distinct lists of books that are hot with spicy readers. The first is their list of “sauciest” books–think erotica, dark romances, and frank, anything-but-vanilla on-page sex–then most popular spicy romantasy reads, followed by the sexiest romances.
Here are the top 10 spiciest books, according to BookTok:
Here are the top 10 spicy romantasy reads:
Finally, the sexiest romance books according to BookTok right now:
It is a little unclear what differentiates the sexy romances from the spicy romances, given that the top title in sexy romance has a higher sauce score than the top title in the spiciest category. But for readers, perhaps it doesn’t matter much–they’re going in for a good time and leaving satisfied.
Like #BookTok more broadly, the titles of the books deemed spiciest tend to be pretty white and pretty straight. As more books are written with this voracious audience in mind, it is likely this list will become more diverse and inclusive over time.
You can dive deeper into the data and find some spicy book recommendations on Pour Moi’s blog.
Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.