Hidden Gems
From Jane Friedman’s blog:
The Hidden Gems list excludes Big Five publishers (including acquired properties like Rodale and Hay House), as well as other publishers of significant size, like Norton and Scholastic. We let you know every month what we’ve excluded, or how we’ve changed list compilation. For July 2025, we’ve excluded maps and atlases, Bibles and Bible studies, compilations and box sets, kids’ school workbooks, and test prep guides.
Here’s what they’ve put together:
Top Fifty Small Press Titles
Top Fifty Self-Published Ebooks
Top Fifty Self-Published Print Books
It’s a straightforward post: just the lists with minimal commentary. It’s looking at best selling titles, with no assessment whatsoever of quality or (genre, or category) genre. If they’re bestsellers, I’m not sure they’re really hidden gems? But they’re not out from Big Five and other bigger publishers. Let me just scan down the lists … okay, Freida McFadden is on here TEN times! Hidden gems my foot.
Relatively small proportion of fiction. How to Draw Everything: 300 Drawings of Cute Stuff, Animals, Food, Gifts, and Other Amazing Things by Emma Green. Moms on Call: Basic Baby Care 0–6 Months by Laura Hunter. Lots of books like that — nonfiction of all kinds.
How about the ebooks? Those are all fiction, as you’d expect. What proportion of these are romance? Lots, I think. How many are series novels? A BUNCH. Oh, here’s a fantasy novel: Gild by Raven Kennedy.
Gold. Gold floors, gold walls, gold furniture, gold clothes. In Highbell, in the castle built into the frozen mountains, everything is made of gold. Even me.
King Midas rescued me. Dug me out of the slums and placed me on a pedestal. I’m called his precious. His favored. I’m the woman he Gold-Touched to show everyone that I belong to him. To show how powerful he is. He gave me protection, and I gave him my heart. And even though I don’t leave the confines of the palace, I’m safe.
Until war comes to the kingdom and a deal is struck. Suddenly, my trust is broken. My love is challenged, and I realize that everything I thought I knew about Midas might be wrong. Because these bars I’m kept in, no matter how gilded, are still just a cage. But the monsters on the other side might make me wish I’d never left.
This is a quote adult novel unquote. Oh, here’s a trigger warning: This book contains explicit content and darker elements that may be triggering to some, including mature language, violence, manipulation, Stockholm Syndrome, and non-consensual sex.
So … it’s abusive erotica with a fantasy veneer? I’m guessing, but that’s what this looks like to me. 300,000 ratings on Goodreads; a mere 75,000 ratings on Amazon. You know, I’m going back to saying, Hidden gems my foot.
I guess it would be tricky to do a post about actual hidden gems. How would you find them? They would be by definition relatively unknown, after all.
How about this: Go to the Amazon book page of some novel you think is wonderful but has fewer than 5000 Amazon ratings. Look at the also-bought titles on that page. If you go to the page for Body and Soul by Conroy, you will find a book called Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton. This book has fewer 240 ratings on Amazon. I would call this book relatively little known, but if readers who buy the Conroy book by this one, maybe it is beautiful.
Leonard Schiller is a novelist in his seventies, a second-string but respectable talent who produced only a small handful of books. Heather Wolfe is an attractive graduate student in her twenties. She read Schiller’s novels when she was growing up and they changed her life. When the ambitious Heather decides to write her master’s thesis about Schiller’s work and sets out to meet him—convinced she can bring Schiller back into the literary world’s spotlight—the unexpected consequences of their meeting alter everything in Schiller’s ordered life. What follows is a quasi-romantic friendship and intellectual engagement that investigates the meaning of art, fame, and personal connection
I have to say, I think this sounds a lot more appealing than the King Midas story.
Or how about this one: The Finest Hat in All the World by Colleen Parkinson. The title made me click through. It’s got 600 Amazon ratings.
A life-changing gift arrives at Des Stewart’s doorstep in early January 1917. Her name is Phena, and she is nine years old, troubled, temperamental, and desperately in need of someone she can trust. That someone is her Uncle Des.
That sounds charming. It’s only $2.99. Fine, Amazon, send it to my Kindle app.
Anyway, I think this might be a good way to put together a list of actually less-well-known works. Any such list would wind up curated to specific tastes, of course, because you start off saying, “I like this book; it seems special to me; what are other books I might like given I like this one?” That’s totally different from saying, “Statistically, what’s selling the best right now?”
Please Feel Free to Share:
The post Hidden Gems appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.
