BookTok, Explained

Love and loathing in the hashtags

There’s a scene in 10 Things I Hate About You where Kat’s father interrupts her reading. Before the intrusion, she’s fixated on a comically large hardback copy of The Bell Jar— the title font is so big you could catch it from down the cul-de-sac. She’s focused and respectfully pensive, as appropriate for a woman that has aspirations of attending Sarah Lawrence. When I saw the movie for the first time as a teen I thought: That is me. I want that.

Little did I know that I was approximating what Stephanie Danler, the author of Sweetbitter, refers to as “Lit Girl Aesthetic” in her musings about BookTok for Bustle. Danler’s “frustrating” experience on the app, which largely consisted of not being able to utilize the search function appropriately, (Danler said that accounts talking about authors like Yuko Tsushima, Hilda Hilst, and Shahrnush Parsipur “didn’t exist,” but searches I performed for each author yielded dozens of videos), is used as evidence for this now-infamous British GQ takedown of BookTok. “There is an uncanny falseness behind it all, a showy nothingness that only approximates bibliophilia” writes Barry Pierce, a former BookTuber and current literary critic.

“BookTokers scream, cry and throw up their way through books, sometimes live on camera.” writes Malin Hay in the London Review of Books. “Reading is pleasurable torture, and the public nature of the reaction adds an extra layer of masochism.”

These pieces scathingly denounce BookTok’s performativity: You all want to be Kat Stratford but none of you have read The Bell Jar. But filming yourself reacting to a book is just as performative as carefully fashioning yourself as a literary raconteur. Pierce’s GQ article is written with aspirations of iconoclasm, but cruelty without insight is just as shallow as he accuses BookTok of being.

The more serious allegation in these articles is that BookTok’s rainbow shelves and book hauls contribute to a culture of overconsumption, and that the aesthetic of being a BookToker, of being a reader, is more important than actually reading. Under the layers of derision here, there’s a valid point about social media and commercialism. They’re just aiming at the wrong target.

Screaming, Crying, Throwing Up

If you download TikTok and search #BookTok without interacting with any content, you’re likely on what my friend Mel, or @pagemelt on TikTok, calls “factory settings BookTok.” The most popular hashtags reign supreme, so you’re inundated with viral videos about multi-genre sensation Colleen Hoover and fantasy romance author Sarah J. Maas. It’s embarrassingly obvious that this is how most writers unfamiliar with TikTok do their research—their pieces are littered with references to emotional young women, romance tropes gone awry, and BookTok’s promotion of authors that they either imply or outright state are unworthy of their success.

Reacting to BookTok this way is the equivalent of typing “books” into Google and writing a culture essay about the top 20 results. You just got played by SEO! The real story is, as always, much more complicated.

There’s no one “BookTok community.” The app is partially siloed based on what you interact with, hence the phrase “I’m on the wrong side of BookTok” when you encounter disagreeable content. You can find content by genre (#littok, #SFFBookTok, #historicalromance) and community (#QueerBookTok, #BlackBookTok, #disabilitybooks), which means there’s a huge variation in how people experience the app.

BookTok is also inextricable from other bookish social media. There’s a substantial user overlap between BookTok, BookTwitter, Bookstagram, and BookTube. Discourse sometimes happens in waves, from one platform to the other, or simultaneously.

It’s not lost on me that so much criticism of BookTok smells like an extrapolation of the common TikTok pejorative “dancing app for teens.” Coupled with breathless reports that BookTok is massively influential for book sales, this criticism tends to get more biting, as though BookTok is responsible for the present state of traditional publishing. How dare you, you intellectual lightweights?

Gaming the Algorithm

“Factory settings BookTok” is that way for a reason. The more popular a hashtag, the more likely it is pushed by the algorithm. Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. Maas are touted as the most popular BookTok authors, but they’re also the most controversial. Each loving tribute (Screaming, crying, throwing up) is met with cutting analysis. When we continue to debate their place on BookTok, we perpetuate it.

Something that most BookTok pieces don’t hit on is how fast it is. Most of the feedback you receive happens immediately after you post, and after a certain period of time your video is dead in the water. Posts are ephemeral—to keep up you need to post more, more, more.

BookTok is often lionized for reviving authors’ backlists (more on that later), but because the For You Page (a feed where people who don’t follow you can discover your videos) moves so fast, and your videos have such a short shelf life, the focus for many is on what’s new. You want to contribute to an ongoing conversation, you want to keep up. Publishers have taken notice, leveraging BookTok’s algorithm to help sell their frontlist titles.

In the London Review of Books, Hay opines that “the financial aspect of BookTok is so opaque. Nobody seems to know if, or how much, the top BookTokers are paid to promote new titles” and that “the line between a complimentary post and an ad is blurred.”

While I don’t care about how much BookTokers are paid for ads (whatever it is, it probably isn’t enough) this dances around a salient point. The Big Five publishing houses don’t even like paying their in-house staff, and paid ads notoriously perform poorly on BookTok, so why pay for an ad with a BookToker when they can mass distribute ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies, provided in exchange for a review) and achieve a better result for a fraction of the cost?

“The publishing industry is watching us, and they want us to work for them for free,” according to @pagemelt on TikTok “so they’re sending our popular creators ARCs of the books they want us to promote… When suddenly the most visible creators are talking about the same book that puts very real pressure on smaller creators to be included in the conversation and use their actual cash money to buy the book when they otherwise might not have.”

There’s no downside to distributing ARCs to BookTokers. Even a negative or mixed review contributes to the hashtag and boosts engagement. Then the next frontlist title rolls around: rinse, repeat. Not all BookTokers are reviewers either, (It’s not necessary for them to be! This is their hobby) so some ARC videos end up essentially being a recitation of the book jacket (the BookTok equivalent of “great gowns, beautiful gowns”) which… does feel a little bit like an ad, right?

“[There’s] all this talk about BookTok’s power when what BookTok accomplishes is in line with the goals of Big Five publishing, which is selling books, selling new books.” says Emma, or @emmkick on TikTok. “It doesn’t feel like BookTok is this renegade, user-driven power space as much as an arm of Big Publishing.”

The BookTok Bump

There’s a common saying that genre romance is a billion dollar industry, but as Andrea Martucci of the podcast Shelf Love points out on Twitter, this statistic is based on old, unverifiable data. This is largely how I feel about grandiose claims about BookTok’s influence on book sales: citation fucking needed.

Did you know that the bulk of book sale data is essentially paywalled by a subscription service? In Melanie Walsh’s excellent piece Where is all the Book Data? she reports that the book sale numbers that journalists report are mostly spoon-fed from a single source, NPD’s BookScan.

Walsh notes that “all the major publishing houses now rely on BookScan data, as do many other publishing professionals and authors. But, as I found to my surprise, pretty much everybody else is explicitly banned from using BookScan data, including academics.” [Emphasis my own.]

Unless you’re working in the publishing industry and have shelled out something to the tune of $2,500 to $750,000 for a subscription, you only have access to the data that NPD chooses to give you. Their dinky little flyer about BookTok’s effect on book sales in 2021 is annoyingly vague, if predictable. Authors that got the BookTok bump include Colleen Hoover (who first hit the NYT bestseller list with her debut a decade prior, she’s best known for 2016’s It Ends With Us) Taylor Jenkins Reid (already a bestselling author for 2017’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and 2019’s Daisy Jones and the Six), Madeleine Miller, (Orange Prize winner for 2010’s The Song of Achilles, also a bestseller), and Leigh Bardugo (already a bestselling YA author for her Grishaverse books, including 2012’s Shadow and Bone and 2015’s Six of Crows). Emily Henry alone seems to have a more interesting trajectory, her YA romances did fine, but it was 2020’s adult romance Beach Read that put her on the map.

It’s not quite as thrilling to say that BookTok made popular authors more popular, is it? While it’s undeniable these authors are successful on BookTok, the pandemic is also a huge variable in backlist sales, as the New York Times points out in this article from 2020: “The pandemic altered how readers discover and buy books, and drove sales for celebrities and bestselling authors while new and lesser known writers struggled.” Take the name “BookTok” off the NPD flyer, and it could easily apply to changing pandemic buying habits as well.

The second dubious claim is that BookTok is saving Barnes & Noble. Formerly regarded as the brick-and-mortar harbinger of death to independent bookstores, the retail chain has recently undergone major image rehabilitation. Barnes & Noble looks like an NGO compared to the popular alternative, Amazon, and they’re the only physical bookstore around for many people who live outside of major cities, who are therefore understandably invested in their longevity.

But the Barnes & Noble x BookTok collaboration is dicey. Three notable things happened for the chain in 2019-2020, around the same time as the rise of BookTok: 1) Barnes and Noble was purchased by the hedge fund Elliot Management, who put Waterstones CEO James Daunt in charge, 2) Barnes & Noble went private, and 3) a global pandemic.

Barnes & Noble touts BookTok as the reason for their recent success in certain circles, but in others, the credit all goes to Daunt, their new CEO. Ted Gioia’s essay, What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround is needlessly sycophantic, stating: “[Daunt] wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions. This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.”

You could read this as one man’s misguided (albeit popular) essay, but the New York Times already primed us to see Daunt as a literary disrupter in their 2019 article Can Britain’s Top Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble?

Daunt started working for Waterstones in his if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em era. By 2011 his own bookstores, Daunt Books, were in danger of being put out of business by Waterstones, so he signed up (at the top level, thanks to a connection with billionaire Alexander Mamut) in an act of self-preservation. Since then, he’s made a name for himself for by helping Waterstones mimic the independent bookstore aesthetic. (Are we talking about performativity again? Screaming, crying, throwing up.) “He’s essentially created a series of independent bookstores with the buying power of a chain.” said Tom Weldon, the chief executive of Penguin Random House Books U.K. to the New York Times.

Since the Daunt takeover, Barnes & Noble has reported a substantial increase in sales. If it’s from BookTok, Daunt’s ingenuity (independent bookstores, but corporate!), or the global pandemic that shifted how we consume media, it’s difficult to say, although that doesn’t stop people from trying. A private company doesn’t have to disclose financial information to the public, so any information Barnes & Noble gives us at this point is because it paints them in a flattering light.

Who Killed Publishing?

Every glowing trend piece about BookTok has one major caveat: We are aware that we are mostly talking about white authors. Then the natural follow-up: How do we get BookTok to promote authors of color better?

How do you get BookTok—which is not a cohesive community so much as a fragmented group of hobbyists with different ideologies—to accomplish something that requires structural change? Never mind that there’s no dearth of BookTokers sharing work by authors of color and advocating for others to follow suit, they’re just not boosted by the (notoriously racist) algorithm with the same buoyant frequency as Colleen Hoover fans.

Framing the problem this way is a smokescreen, a convenient hand-waving away from tangible actions that publishers could be taking in favor of something nebulous that lets them off the hook. The demographics of the authors that got the “BookTok bump” are very similar to that of traditional publishing—overwhelmingly white women. That’s not really a coincidence, is it? Tracy Sherrod, former Executive Editor at Amistad and current VP and Executive Editor of Little, Brown, told the New York Times in 2020 that “there’s a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing and the number of books that are published by authors of color.” #PublishingPaidMe illuminated a staggering pay gap between authors of color and white authors, it makes sense that the amount of marketing money, support, and everything else that it takes to make a bestseller, or a “BookTok book” would be disproportionately allocated to white authors as well.

“It is likely that books end up much more racially homogenous—that is, white—as a result of BookScan data, too.” according to Walsh in Public Books. “For example, in McGrath’s pioneering research on “comp” titles (the books that agents and editors claim are “comparable” to a pitched book), she found that 96 percent of the most frequently used comps were written by white authors.” Walsh explains that a big component of a comp title is promising sales history, so publishers, agents, and editors get stuck in this loop of referencing what has sold well in the past, which staggers innovation and “reinforce[s] conservative white hegemony in the industry.”

I think publishers need to take a good hard look at how they uphold the status quo. If they don’t pay authors a living wage, who can afford to tell their story? If past sales are the barometer for future success, who doesn’t even make it as a data point? If they compensate their staff in prestige instead of a respectable income, who gets neither?

If they tell you to look at BookTok as a driving industry force, will you remember to ask these questions?

It's (Just?) Another Platform

I’ve written before about how before I joined BookTok I became obsessed with For My Lady’s Heart, Laura Kinsale’s classic medieval romance between a noble knight and an inscrutable princess. I won’t spoil it for you, but there’s a reveal about halfway through that made me scream in shock. I didn’t know anyone else that read Kinsale, so I was sorry, so sorry, that I had no one to tell. I felt like I was bursting.

Last May I recorded a TikTok video about how Kinsale’s audiobook company has For My Lady’s Heart ringtones on Soundcloud. I found people to tell.

But this is a two-way street! Please, tell me about the most disgusting book (complimentary) you’ve ever read. I want to know what YA series shaped you, or why you DNF’d (“did not finish”) four books in January. I want to see you lipsync to that new Pedro Pascal edit with a timely book rec. These are my favorite types of BookTok videos.

BookTokers know that we’re under a microscope from publishing, retailers, and journalists. Depending on who you ask, we’re either saving the publishing industry or the reason why it’s so bleak right now.

I think it’s neither. Most of us joined BookTok to find someone to talk to about a shared hobby. They did this on their own.

[Special thanks to Sanjana for letting me use her photo of the BookTok table, and to Beth for sharing Walsh’s article on TikTok!]