A girl between the ages of 17 and 21 finds out she has magical powers or that she’s connected to a prophecy. She has to go on an adventure to fulfill the prophecy, and then she finds a magical, six-foot-tall male love interest. And maybe there’s a magical animal.

Sound familiar? Currently, this is nearly every single novel in the YA section.

Walking into a Barnes & Noble bookstore, most teens head to the horror or YA section. There they will find dozens of books with almost the same exact plotline.

Novels used to be individual, but original literature has become scarce to find lately.

This problem is especially prominent in the fantasy and dystopian category. Most of the books are just reincarnations of The Hunger Games. While that was a revolutionary book series, readers don’t want to read it over and over again.

Older YA, fantasy, and mystery books, while sometimes offensive and odd, at least used to be original.

The Harry Potter series was the first of its kind and it was a global success. J.K. Rowling was able to bridge fantasy and magic in the children’s section – but since then there have been hundreds of books just like it. While series like Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Keeper of the Lost Cities are wonderful reads, both are like Harry Potter and copy plots and character types.

TikToker Lauren Roberts’ novel Powerless directly copies Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard. Go to Goodreads or read the back of the books’ covers and they are almost word for word the same. While Roberts seems like a wonderful content creator, the art of writing a novel requires different skills, and copying another’s ideas for profit is diabolical.

However, for all of these genres, there are novels that stand out among the crowd, such as a fantasy romance by Rebbeca Ross called Divine Rivals. This wartime romance connects the two main characters through a magical typewriter. The protagonists have real personalities and have lives and conflicts outside of each other, which is a rare find in today’s fantasy romance world.

For readers who are willing to go outside of their comfort zone, Taylor Jenkins Reid is the author of Daisy Jones & The Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, masterful examples of historical fiction. Reid is able to capture the timelessness of the decades that these books take place in.

So there are books that are completely independent from the rest of the genre – they just don’t have the popularity or proper marketing. To combat this, readers should try to pick up a novel that they have never heard of before just to read the back cover. Maybe they will find one of their new favorites.

But for those authors who are getting huge book deals with thousands of dollars of marketing, think about writing something original that won’t bore readers to sleep