From the Newsroom to Prime Video
Seven years ago, Carley Fortune was an editor at Refinery29 Canada, sharing a co-working cubicle in Toronto with colleagues who bonded over romance novels and the firm conviction that a good love scene should be, above all else, horny. That office is a long way from where Fortune sits now: a New York Times bestselling author, five books deep, and executive producer of Every Year After, the Prime Video adaptation of her debut novel, Every Summer After.
The series has been streaming for only a couple of weeks, and it is already generating the kind of passionate, fractious online debate that signals a fandom operating at full pressure. Whether that noise has been good for Fortune’s mental state is a different question entirely – one she has already answered by logging off.
What the Discourse Is Actually About
Every Year After arrived on Prime Video as part of a growing wave of romance novel adaptations finding screen life – Heated Rivalry, Off Campus, and Maxton Hall among the most recent. That context matters, because readers arriving at these adaptations carry very specific expectations, and Fortune’s fanbase is no exception. The show follows Percy and Sam, the central couple from Every Summer After, and it is set in Canada – Barry’s Bay is still Barry’s Bay – but one of the main characters has been Americanized, a creative choice that has ignited a specific, very Canadian grievance among viewers who wanted a more faithful translation of the source material.
The identity question is the loudest argument circulating, but it is not the only one. Fans are simultaneously weighing whether the series honors the emotional texture of Fortune’s novel at the level of plot, character, and feeling. These are the kinds of debates that only happen around books people genuinely love – no one stress-tests a mediocre adaptation. The fact that viewers are demanding fidelity is, in its own way, a measure of how much Fortune’s writing matters to them.
For what it is worth, the adaptation does capture the spirit of the novel. The expansion of secondary characters – Chantal and Jordie, specifically – gives the show room to breathe in ways that a single-focus romance adaptation often cannot. That expansion was a deliberate choice by the production, and it reads on screen as necessary rather than padded. Fortune served as executive producer on the project, which means her fingerprints are on those decisions even when the final product does not satisfy every reader’s checklist.
The Post-BookTok Reality for Authors
Publishing in the social media era means watching your work get processed in real time, by millions of people, across platforms designed to surface the most heated version of any reaction. BookTok specifically has reshaped how romance novels find audiences – it has also reshaped what authors experience the moment a book, or now a show, drops. For some writers, staying visible and engaged is the strategy. For Fortune, the calculus went the other way.
She stayed off social media when Every Year After came out. The decision was deliberate and self-protective, a way of managing the experience of having work she cares about become the subject of arguments she cannot control or resolve. That is a relatively rare admission in a moment when author platforms are treated as almost obligatory, and it points to a tension that sits underneath the entire BookTok economy: the same machinery that builds a fanbase also delivers its fury directly to your phone.
Five Books In, Still Building
Fortune’s fifth novel, Our Perfect Storm, is either already out or forthcoming depending on where you’re reading this – the book follows the same approach that made Every Summer After land so hard with readers: summer settings, emotional stakes, and a willingness to be genuinely, unapologetically romantic without softening the tension that makes romance actually work. The description “reliably dreamy and horny” is not an accident. It is a brand position that Fortune has earned over five books, and it is consistent enough that readers know what they are getting.
The jump from novelist to executive producer is not a standard career arc, and it carries real exposure. When you write a book, the gap between what you intended and what a reader experiences is largely invisible. When you produce a television adaptation, that gap gets projected on a screen, clipped into TikToks, and debated in Reddit threads with timestamps. Fortune is navigating that exposure as someone who built her career on emotional intimacy – the kind of writing where readers feel like the story was made specifically for them.
That feeling of personal ownership is exactly what makes adaptation discourse so volatile. A reader who spent a summer with Percy and Sam, who found something in that novel that felt private and specific, is not going to receive a changed character nationality as a neutral creative decision. They are going to receive it as a loss. Fortune knows this. It is probably part of why she stayed off the timeline.
She also built her entire readership on that same intensity of feeling. The readers arguing loudest about Every Year After are the readers who pre-ordered Our Perfect Storm. The anger and the loyalty are running on the same current, and Fortune, currently offline, is presumably aware that the two cannot be fully separated.
The show has been streaming for two weeks. The debate about whether it’s Canadian enough, faithful enough, good enough, is still going. Fortune, for now, is not watching.
