About Readark

Why Readark exists

Dark romance is the one corner of the genre where "surprise me" can genuinely ruin a reader's week. The same shelf holds a broody billionaire and a book that opens with torture. Retail listings flatten that difference: the cover art looks similar, the marketing copy uses the same adjectives, and the reviews that would warn you are buried under spoiler tags.

So we built the thing we wanted — a catalogue where every book carries two separate ratings and a set of content warnings, and where "bestseller" means an actual sales rank rather than someone's favourites list.

What the site actually does

• Two ratings, not one. Every book gets a 1–5 spice rating (explicit content) and a separate 1–5 darkness rating (subject matter). They are independent, because heat and darkness are different things.
• Content warnings you control. Books are tagged from a fixed list of warnings, collapsed by default so you decide when to look. See the content warning guide.
• Tropes as a real filter. A controlled vocabulary of dark romance tropes, so filtering actually returns everything that matches. See the trope guide.
• Bestsellers from real data. Rankings come from Amazon Best Sellers Rank, not editorial preference or payment.

The full method — every rating level defined, the ranking formula, and our limits — is documented on How We Rate.

Who runs it

Readark is built and operated by Revoba, a small independent studio. It is not owned by a publisher, a retailer, or an author collective, and no author or publisher can pay to appear, to rank higher, or to have a rating changed. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before anything else.

You can reach us at info@revoba.net. We read everything, and reader corrections are applied by hand.

How Readark is funded

The site is free and carries no subscription. It is funded by affiliate commissions: as an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases made through links here. Every book in the catalogue carries the same affiliate relationship, so there is no title we are paid more to recommend — and bestseller position is computed from Amazon's ranking data, not sold.

Our editorial standards

• We do not copy descriptions. Editorial notes on Readark are written from factual metadata — title, author, subgenre — in our own words. We do not reproduce publisher or retailer copy.
• We do not invent detail. No fabricated plot events, quotes, awards, or sales claims. If we do not know something, we leave it out.
• We do not manufacture urgency. No countdown timers, no "only a few left", no invented scarcity.
• We say when we are uncertain. Our ratings are machine-assisted and directional, and we say so plainly rather than implying a human read all 6,000+ books.
• We correct things. A wrong rating or a missing content warning is a real problem, not a cosmetic one. Report one and we will fix it.

What Readark is not

We are not a review site — we do not publish opinion pieces or scored critiques. We are not a shop; every purchase happens on Amazon, and prices and availability are theirs, not ours. And we are not a substitute for an author's own content notes, which are always the most authoritative source for a specific book.

Frequently asked questions