6,000 Fans, 220 Tickets: Sarah J Maas Novel Sparks Midnight Mania

Six thousand people tried to buy 220 tickets for a masquerade ball at a Leamington Spa bookshop celebrating the new Sarah J Maas novel. The Spicy Librarian sold out in 13 minutes, and its website crashed the moment tickets went on sale, according to co-founder Ali Maynard James.

The ball, held at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, marked the release of A Court of Splendered Harmony's true title, A Court of Splintered Harmony, the first instalment of Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses series in more than five years. The book, the sixth in the series fans call Acotar, went on sale at 12.01am on Tuesday. Riders dressed as "fae warriors" carried torches on horseback at the stately home. Tickets cost £149, the shop repeated the event the following night to another sell-out, and ordered about 750 copies to cover both balls and its pre-orders.

"We gave everyone the books at midnight, and people started reading them immediately," Maynard James says. "Some people stayed up and devoured the whole thing in a few hours."

How big is Sarah J Maas?

Few living novelists carry this commercial weight. The first Acotar book, a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast, appeared in 2015 and follows the adventures of Feyre across the faerie lands of Prythian. By 2021 the series had sold 13 million copies. Across her three interlinked fantasy series, Maas has now sold more than 75 million books in 40 languages.

Romantasy, the genre blending fantasy and romance, has grown from an online niche into one of publishing's most lucrative categories. Last year, Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros had the biggest first week for a UK hardback novel since Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman in 2015. In 2024, booming romance and fantasy sales helped push UK fiction revenue above £1bn for the first time. The readership is largely young women, and much of the growth has played out on TikTok.

What happened at midnight?

Bookshops across the UK opened past midnight on Monday. Starlin Marot, owner of Bad Girl Books in Oxford — the UK's first romantasy-only bookshop — planned to open for just half an hour for a few readers who had asked on Instagram. A queue formed outside instead.

"It was just crazy, like a flurry of people came in," Marot says. "I was honestly not expecting that many people just for half an hour. But it shows how popular these books are!"

Her launch doubled as a pyjama party with Acotar-themed cakes and drinks. "It was cute and cosy vibes," she says.

In London, Main Character Books skipped the midnight opening, served breakfast to pre-order collectors and held an evening party for 45 people. "In early October we had more pre-orders than we expected … we doubled our order at the publisher," owner Cassie Simmons says. After Tuesday's sales, the shop ordered again. "We're going through stock even faster than we expected."

Why the frenzy now?

"I think it's definitely the five-year wait and the hype that's been going up online," Simmons says. Marot agrees: "For so many of us, the series has been like a gateway drug into the genre, or into reading itself."

Maynard James, who says Acotar restored her pleasure reading after she became a mother, points to the heroines. "They aren't women that are damsels in distress that need rescuing or saving," she says. "They almost prioritise themselves before they prioritise love. We want the women to be the centre of their own story."

The tills are recording the boom. "Sales are so much higher than I even anticipated for the year already," Marot says.

The story is not finished. A Court of Splintered Harmony is the first part of a four-part story; A Court of Forgotten Melody, out on 12 January, contains the next two parts, and the last is still being written. A Hulu adaptation announced in 2021 will not proceed as planned — Maas has bought back the rights, saying in March: "I want to see everything adapted the way I envision it, and the way I know fans want it."