The Romance Racket

How Fictional Love Became a Tool of Social Programming

Let’s talk about romance—specifically, how mass-market books, movies, and media have programmed generations to chase illusions about love, identity, and fulfillment.

From the torrid drama of Harlequin paperbacks to the cinematic "happily ever after," romance fiction has done more than entertain. It has embedded a narrative operating system into our emotional code:

• Love is something you "fall into" irrationally, not build through wisdom and discernment.

• Relationships must be dramatic, painful, or wildly passionate to be real.

• Completion comes from being chosen by someone else, not from inner sovereignty.

These tropes aren’t just bad storytelling—they’re engineered falsehoods that keep people emotionally disoriented, distracted, and endlessly seeking validation from external sources.

Who Benefits from These Narratives?

The mass-market romance industry is a multi-billion-dollar system, propped up by platforms that profit from repetition, fantasy, and addictive emotional arcs. They condition consumers to confuse intensity for intimacy, chaos for chemistry, and "fixing someone" for love.

In truth, most popular romance plots are trauma reenactments in disguise. And they’re sold as aspirational.

What We’re Looking For at Aananda

At Brooklyn Indie, we don’t publish dystopia or vampires—and we’re not here for romance as fantasy either. But we do want authentic stories of emotional transformation:

• Real connection over melodrama

• Inner wholeness before union

• Narrative healing instead of narrative hypnosis

You can submit romance. But it better be honest. It better be true. And it better make us rethink what love even means.

Historical Fiction or

Historical Fiction™ ?

Why We Don’t Want Another Reenactment of the Official Narrative

History, we’re told, is written by the victors.

But what we aren't told is that it’s also ghostwritten

by publishers,

politicians, secret societies,

and public relations offices.

When you pick up a piece of "historical fiction"

at your average bookstore, you're not just reading a story—

you're absorbing a carefully engineered version of the past designed to reinforce a very specific view of reality.

Let’s be clear: Most historical fiction is propaganda in period costume.

• Colonialism is softened.

• Empire is sanitized.

• Mysticism is erased.

• Dissent is villainized.

• And the great manipulators? They’re nowhere to be found.

Mainstream narratives flatten entire civilizations into caricatures. They reduce rich spiritual traditions into “superstitions,” portray resistance movements as disorganized rage, and conveniently gloss over timelines, technologies, and truths that don’t align with the approved version of reality.

So What Are We Looking For?

In all our imprint we’re calling for writers to go deeper—to challenge the idea that the past is settled and that the stories we’ve been told are sacred.

We want:

• Fiction that investigates what history might really have looked like

• Stories rooted in alternative timelines, suppressed discoveries, and unexplained genius

• Works that explore what was left out of the textbooks, not what was cherry-picked for public school scripts

• Thoughtful reframings of major figures, empires, belief systems, and breakthroughs

We’re not here for costumes and castles. We’re here for narrative archaeology.

The Truth is Stranger—and Better—Than the Fiction

Whether it’s the buried technologies of ancient civilizations, the occulted connections between empires and banks, or the spiritual systems that predate today’s religions by millennia—there’s a vast, untapped reservoir of human truth just waiting to be reimagined through responsible, daring fiction.

Historical fiction doesn’t have to reinforce the matrix. It can break it open.

What Fiction Are We Actually Looking For?

Let’s clear something up right away: Aananda isn’t anti-genre. We’re anti-programming. We’re not here to shame tropes—we’re here to call out the ones that condition readers to accept a false reality. There’s a difference.

We’re open to almost any genre—Young Adult, Mystery, Thriller, Speculative Fiction—as long as it’s done with purpose. But if your book reads like a screenplay written by an algorithm with a minor in trauma porn and a major in plot contrivances… this might not be the right home.

What We Don't Want

• YA stories that reinforce victimhood or emotional instability as identity

• Thrillers where trauma is entertainment and violence is aestheticized, which glorifies three letter agencies, or doesn’t glorify them for the wrong reasons.

• Mysteries that are convoluted for the sake of being clever, but don’t ultimately illuminate anything real—about the world, the self, or the human condition.

• Spec fic that’s just a metaphor for hopelessness, dystopia, or nihilism

We’re not saying you can’t write intense stories. You absolutely can. But we ask: what are you really offering the reader?

If your work:

• Elevates discernment over drama

• Challenges assumptions instead of reinforcing mainstream emotional archetypes

• Leaves the reader more awake than when they started

…we’re here for it.

All Our Fiction Should Be Literary—But Not Elitist

We aren’t labeling any of our books as “literary fiction,” because every book should be written with a level of creative intention, insight, and linguistic artistry. But that doesn’t mean perfect grammar or academic structure.

Broken English? Sentence fragments? Stream of consciousness? Great—if it serves the voice and story. What matters is the transmission of clarity, emotion, and truth.

What We Do Want

• A YA book that deconstructs the high school caste system and replaces it with spiritual self-respect

• A mystery that reveals hidden history or suppressed knowledge

• A thriller that dismantles mind control tropes instead of recycling them

• A speculative fiction novel that imagines post-deprogramming—not post-apocalypse

Whatever your genre, make it feel like revelation, not repetition. Surprise us—not with plot twists, but with depth. Teach us—not through didacticism, but through storytelling that wakes us up.

(Spoiler: Not Your Formulaic Mystery or Another Angsty YA Clone)

We Really Don’t Need Another Guru Book

You’ve seen the covers:
“The Gut Fix That Changes Everything”
“How I Manifested My Soulmate and Lost 30 Pounds Doing It...”

It’s not that these books are wrong—it’s that they’re not always original. They're part of an industry that thrives on recirculated insight, repackaged clichés, and feel-good placebo.

At Arelian Press, we’re not looking to publish:

• Rewrites of the same yoga-is-life memoirs

• Repetitive weight-loss journeys repackaged as spiritual awakenings

• Plant medicine books that are not bringing new wisdom forward

• One more “energy work” manual that reads like a Buzzfeed quiz

• Wellness influencers-turned-authors selling symptom-chasing disguised as inner work

We’re not dismissing the importance of healing, health, and spiritual growth—we’re calling for depth, originality, and genuine transmission.

What We Are Looking For

• A book on the spiritual implications of bodily symptoms that reframes illness as evolutionary signal, not failure

• A deep dive into the history and misuse of fasting, not a cookbook with spiritual hashtags

• An analysis of how diet culture mirrors religious shame

• A personal narrative that explores how cult dynamics live in all of us, not just the ones who joined them

• A work that breaks down how the self-help movement became the new priesthood, and how to step outside of it

If you’re writing about healing, energy, food, body, or soul—it needs to go beyond your personal transformation. Tell us what it means. Challenge the frame. Create space for actual evolution, not just another affirmation.

Arelian Is for Thinkers, Witnesses, and Disruptive Wisdom Holders

Your work doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be honest, lived, and vital. We don’t need another certified coach with a PDF funnel—we need the voices that don’t get past gatekeepers because they refuse to conform.

Why Arelian Press Isn’t Publishing Repetition—We’re Here for Real Breakthroughs

Bippie Doesn’t Do Indoctrination

What We Do (and Absolutely Don’t) Want in Children’s & Tween Books

Let’s get real about children’s publishing: too many books for kids and tweens are either fluffy distractions or covert indoctrination manuals.

Some are wrapped in cute illustrations but push confusing identity politics, corporate-sponsored ideologies, or adult-level anxieties that kids were never meant to carry. Others are so neutered and sanitized that they offer zero nourishment for the inner life of a growing soul.

At Bippie Books, we’re not here to tell kids what to think.
We’re here to help them remember how to feel, imagine, and discern.

What We Don’t Want

• Books that overcorrect childhood emotion

• Preachy moral lessons (we trust kids to get the deeper point)

• Identity-centered checkboxes wrapped in virtue signaling

• Dystopian fiction for 12-year-olds that teaches them the world is broken and unsafe

What We Do Want

• Stories that help kids feel safe being curious and bold being themselves

• Picture books that awaken wonder, inner strength, joy, and quiet insight

• Tween fiction that deals with real questions—death, meaning, friendship, fear—without giving them canned answers

• Characters who grow from within, not just ones who get rewarded for "good behavior"

• Books that encourage discernment, imagination, and the courage to think independently

We love whimsy, fantasy, animals, nature, magic—but we want it to do something real.
Make the kid laugh, yes. But also make them pause.

Bippie is for authors and illustrators who remember what childhood really felt like—not what the adult world told us it was. Submit your work if it’s alive, soulful, and true.