BookTok is dead. Long live BookTok. (Misshelved #12)
Close your eyes and picture a forum. No, not the kind at your town hall, with the uncomfortable folding chairs and microphones that only work half the time. Picture the digital kind.
Maybe you’re imagining a LiveJournal group. Maybe you’re picturing one of those free message board websites that were all inexplicably light blue. Maybe you’re picturing the AOL chatrooms of the ’90s. Maybe you’re picturing the Neopets boards. Maybe the closest thing you can picture is the chaos of Tumblr.
Forums like these offered places for fans to congregate in digital spaces and talk about the things they loved. Crucially, they were talking about the things they loved away from the people who created those things. Yes, in the early days, some authors would join chatrooms to talk with enthusiastic readers, and fantasy authors would network through LiveJournal, and Diane Duane and Neil Gaiman still sometimes pop in on Tumblr posts. But the publishing companies that created their books did not maintain official presences in those spaces. It would have been considered ludicrous. Those spaces were made by fans, for fans.
Ah. The good ol’ days.
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I began writing this essay more than two years ago. Over those two years, the landscape of contemporary social media began to hemorrhage, transform and contort grossly as it drew closer to death’s doorstep.
Now, Twitter is dying, a supernova in the social media space. Although Hive and Mastodon and Pillowfort are experiencing huge influxes of users fleeing Twitter, they do not yet have strong community hubs. Instagram and Facebook suffer substantially under a parent company hyperfixated on a virtual universe that just got its legs—literally. BeReal still only allows updates once per day. Snapchat is—well, around, I suppose. Tumblr was, at the time of one of the drafts of this essay, busy creating lore around a fictional Martin Scorsese film. MySpace and LiveJournal are still buried deep in the ground. Reddit has eliminated some of the more virulent elements from its website, but the culture you encounter there still depends heavily on which subreddit you’re interacting with. YouTube isn’t really a social media site so much as a content creation platform, though it’s trying to compete with YouTube Shorts.
And then, of course, there’s the platform YouTube is trying to compete with: TikTok.
Book publishing loves TikTok. Numerous articles have explored how BookTok, the book-loving community of TikTok, has been integral in creating bestsellers. In 2022, Colleen Hoover sold more books than the Bible. Taylor Jenkins Reid and Ali Hazelwood seem to live permanently on the New York Times bestseller list. Thanks to BookTok, an obscure 90-year-old puzzle book became an overnight sensation. Even YA is, almost, having a moment again. (Almost.) Thousands of videos a day are posted with the #BookTok tag, and they’re posted by authors eager to reach readers, influencers eager to share books and publishers eager to reach consumers.
But here’s the secret: BookTok is dead.
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When I started drafting this essay, I was going to draw parallels between changes in the digital book community at large and the growing BookTok community, on the one hand, and a digital community with a surprisingly similar story on the other: BeautyTube.
BeautyTube is the makeup and beauty subculture of YouTube. As long as digital spaces exist, they will be filled with people talking about the things they love, so BeautyTube has existed as long as BookTube has—but with far larger numbers and far greater cultural impact. At first, there might not seem to be obvious comparisons between the two communities, but astonishingly similar scandals and drama have plagued each of them over the years.
Take the early days of both communities. In 2010, the beauty community’s jaws dropped when Lime Crime founder Doe Deere led a harassment campaign against a blogger who did not like her lipsticks—much like how, in 2014, author Kathleen Hale stalked a blogger who had negatively reviewed her YA novel, even going so far as to follow the blogger to her home. Unlike the bloggers they harassed, both Deere and Hale profited after the controversies: Lime Crime makeup drops still regularly sold out, even with Deere attached to the company through the summer of 2020, while Hale eventually published a book with Grove Press called Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker. Both makeup brands and large makeup community influencers have been accused of stealing looks from smaller makeup artists, while publishers and book community influencers often rip off ideas and art from smaller creators. (I’m old enough to remember when The Story Siren plagiarism scandal rattled the book-blogging community.) As time passed and BeautyTube experienced Dramageddons 1 and 2, as well as many smaller-scale scandals, Book Twitter focused on its varying Person of the Day, for better or worse: Jay Kristoff, Lindsay Ellis, that woman who tried to copyright the Omegaverse, that time Tomi Adeyemi accused Nora Roberts of plagiarizing her book title . . .
These days, both the beauty community and the book community have found fresh, new homes on TikTok, with many new faces occupying prominent positions in each community. TikTok is so vital to the beauty industry that making TikToks properly was a challenge on recent seasons of Netflix's Glow Up. TikTok has become a necessity of publishing culture too, with multiple education sessions about it taking place at conferences for authors, booksellers and other aspiring publishing professionals.
So when I began working on this essay, I wanted to write about how intracommunity incidents like these feed into promotion loops perpetuated both by companies and influencers, in both the BeautyTube and BookTok communities. I wanted to assert that negative community input like morally motivated network harassment makes the average community participant feel more and more invited into each industry’s behind-the-scenes areas. And I wanted to write about what publishing and the book community could stand to learn from the beauty community.
Despite differences in size and scope—my favorite beauty commentator, who is considered a small-to-midsize influencer, has around 400,000 subscribers, while major BookTokkers and BookTubers top out at that same number—the parallels between both industries and communities remained fascinating to me.
But BookTok kept growing, and social media kept changing, and my underlying interest in BeautyTube and its influencers began to pull me in a new direction as publishing continued to beat the drum of BookTok’s influence.
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What is an influencer? The word (alongside synonyms like content creator) gets thrown around a lot these days, but at its core, an influencer is a person who builds a considerable following by using their (apparent) expertise to speak about products and issues within a community in an engaging and interesting way.
The depth of expertise you need to be considered an influencer varies from digital community to digital community. Lifestyle influencers, for instance, need very little “expertise” to be considered influencers—anybody can live a life!—so they tend to be more heavily valued for creating engaging content rather than sharing expertise. The book community, on the other hand, values expertise alongside engaging content, and bookfluencers prove their expertise in one of two ways: consistency or professional affiliation.
To demonstrate consistency, influencers regularly create content over time, which shows that they’re both involved in their community and know what they’re talking about. In the beauty community, this often means showing makeup being applied on screen. For the book community, it’s a little bit harder. You can read a lot without necessarily being great at reading comprehension, so historically, the easiest way to show that you knew what you were talking about was by writing book reviews. The early 2000s saw a huge boom in book blogging about every genre, across platforms such as LiveJournal, Blogger and WordPress.Though many of those blogs have now vanished entirely, some heavy hitters are still updated. As the wider internet began to prioritize consumer ratings, and Amazon’s and Goodreads’ rating systems grew in prominence, so too could any book lover establish themselves as an influencer, as long as they posted consistently enough on social media and used an easy-to-understand rating system.
Professional affiliation, however, enabled influencers to grow audiences without having to post consistently over a long period of time. Instead, you could establish your expertise by revealing that you were, say, a professional makeup artist who, in their spare time, wanted to share tips on how to apply makeup for free—or that you were a librarian who wanted to share their favorite books. You were a professional adjacent to your chosen community, but not someone who would directly profit from the products that your viewers or readers might buy.
When the book and beauty communities first formed on blogging platforms and in the early days of YouTube, influencers only influenced those within their communities. Though professional trade magazines and websites existed, influencers operated outside of those venues. In the book world, influencers were not publicists or authors or professional reviewers, but everyday readers speaking to fellow everyday readers. Even if they had professional affiliations, influencers didn’t profit from the products they promoted. They shared them because they loved them, and their followers responded with enthusiasm.
During this time, you could reasonably compare influencers to the fandom concept of Big Name Fans. There was no real way to profit off of influencer content besides building word-of-mouth reputation as a tastemaker and, maybe, earning some AdSense money on the side.
Nowadays, influencers are closer to promoters.
Many industries employ promoters to invite customers to parties, post about events and products on their individual social media accounts, and work directly with talent who need a little extra TLC. But for the purposes of this essay, I want to talk about promoters in a very specific industry: professional wrestling. Throughout the history of pro wrestling—no, don’t you dare click away!—one of the most important roles has not been the wrestler, or the wrestler’s manager, or the wrestling company’s booker. It’s been the promoter. While the word promoter is now usually used to describe the owner of the wrestling organization, historically, it was just . . . some dude.
Some Dude worked with the wrestlers and wrestling companies to hype up upcoming matches, and in exchange, they received a cut of the revenue or a small prearranged fee. Though a promoter’s actions could involve things a publisher’s publicist might do, like hanging up posters and taking out ads on radio stations, the most popular way for a promoter to get wrestling fans excited for a match was by building up a brand of their own. To wrestling fans, Some Dude was a figure who wasn’t a wrestler, but rather a fan like them, whom they could follow, whose opinion they could trust. If Some Dude said a match was something to watch, something not to be missed, fans trusted them, because fans trusted the vibes and energy and personal brand of Some Dude.
It doesn’t take much effort to see the parallel here. A promoter has to love wrestling (or a concert tour, or whatever) but they don’t just promote a match because they’re excited.
Being a promoter is a job.
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At the beginning of a beauty drama commentary video called “My Thoughts: Marlena Stells ‘Dear Influencers’,” Hannah (aka SmokeyGlow) makes a throwaway comment about the beauty community being profitable as part of her setup to the discussion:
“I do think, and I think that this is a pretty popular opinion, that the beauty community and the beauty space has definitely changed since it started, and it’s kind of gotten away, in a sense, from its original purpose. I think the original purpose of the beauty community was obviously to talk about makeup, to share your love of makeup, to talk about things like this, and then I think people came along and realized how profitable—it’s kind of like most things! [laugh] It starts off really pure and innocent, and then people profit, and then it turns into something else. This isn’t like a new thing. This isn’t just happening with the beauty community. It’s with all good things.”
The beauty community, or at least many of the influencers within it, spend quite a bit of time eyeballing the presence of people who seek to profit from their community. They have to. Once beauty influencers found success, the early days of their community were rife with opaque relationships between influencers and brands, as well as failures to disclose paid advertising content, including profitable affiliate codes. Now the community must navigate poorly made palettes foisted repeatedly upon them, either by brands themselves or by large influencers paid by those brands to be excited (or to stick their name on the product). It’s part of the reason why unhauling and a more minimalist approach to beauty products have become so popular.
But while the book community might acknowledge the toxic effect of social media on its community, I don’t think it has yet to reckon properly with what it means when publishers and authors (often at the behest of their publishers) interfere in what was once a fan-driven community space.
Before the rise of social media, intermediaries existed between the average reader and those creating books. Professional reviewing outlets, like newspapers and magazines, allowed the average reader to discover new books without receiving advanced copies of those books themselves. Independent bookstores provided spaces where readers could talk to booksellers who were unbeholden to individual publishers or authors, which enabled a wider variety of backlist and midlist, as well as smaller presses. In the early days of the online book community, participants in nonprofessional community spaces reviewed books they bought or found at the library, and organic and enthusiastic bookish content spread without the promoted titles being hand-picked directly by publishers. Even when larger nonprofessional reviewers began to receive galleys, they would mix in content about those titles with other fan-driven content—and the reviews were never paid for, because they would not be trusted if they were.
During this time, while readers could still be marketed to using traditional methods, such as advertisements and arrangements with big-box bookstores, fandom and publishing remained separate. Authors weren’t engaging with readers every time they tweeted about their books. Publishers weren’t commenting on readers’ TikTok videos. Readers could read without being forced into an endless game of direct marketing.
Now, however, it is no longer enough to just love books. Readers are consumers. Readers are micro-influencers. Readers must network with their favorite authors and promote their books. Readers must create content. Readers must be engaging. It is not enough to read. You must read early, read often, push the next big thing. Forget about backlist. Nobody cares about backlist. Have you heard about this book coming out in two weeks? Preorder it, preorder it! That book that came out a month ago? It’s already old news—unless, of course, it hit the New York Times bestseller list. Keep up!
If you love books and you’re online talking about them, odds are that the publishing industry is treating you like an influencer—or, more specifically, as a potential promoter. It’s not entirely the fault of the publicists and marketers reaching out to readers or encouraging authors to do the same. They, too, are trapped in a very broken system.
But the dynamic has changed. There’s no place readers can go to talk about books where authors and publishers won’t be lurking on the edges, inching ever closer, hoping they can borrow a tweet—or, uh, whatever the Hive equivalent is going to be—to slap into marketing materials, to push a similar book into your hands, in the hopes that your BookTok video will go viral. If you want to position yourself as an influencer—promoter—whatever in the bookish social media space, with the goal of eventually curating a strong enough presence to make it a career, you’re competing against every other single reader, whether they want to be competing against you or not.
This inherently changes how we treat books.
This inherently changes how we treat the people who make books.
And this makes it all . . . so much less fun.
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As I write this draft of this essay—the fourth, or fifth, or sixth draft; I’ve rather lost track—I’m on doctor’s orders to relax. Two doctors, technically, and one therapist. See, I’m an anxious workaholic with a chronic pain disorder, and in the run-up to the 2022 holiday season, my back finally gave out on me. The worst pain I’d ever experienced in my life arrived, inexplicably, while I was in the middle of shampooing my hair on a Saturday afternoon. It was nauseatingly ill-timed. The most annoying part hasn’t been my pain, or the drowsiness caused by the various pain medications and muscle relaxers I take: It’s been my inability to do much of anything “productive.” I can’t do most things at the bookstore. I can’t look down for more than five minutes at a time, which makes tasks like “doing the dishes” and “cleaning the house” really difficult.
I have to focus, instead, on my hobbies.
Whatever those are.
In Four Thousand Weeks, author Oliver Burkeman assesses the concept of hobbies. They’ve “come to signify something slightly pathetic; many of us tend to feel that the person who’s deeply involved in their hobby of, say, painting miniature fantasy figurines, or tending to their collection of rare cacti, is guilty of not participating in real life as energetically as they otherwise might. Yet it’s surely no coincidence that hobbies have acquired this embarrassing reputation in an era so committed to using time instrumentally. In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. [...] This also helps explain why it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a ‘side hustle,’ a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with a profit in mind.”
There is no shame in having a hobby. There is no shame in being a hobbyist.
Yet in the era of social media, “side hustles” win over hobbies. Everybody must be engaging on a pseudo-professional level. Every fan, on every level of nuance and knowledge and thought, gets to lay claim to what works in their industry, because they’re not just a fan, even if all they’re bringing to the conversation is fandom wank.
But what other choice do fans have? There are no longer spaces for them to talk among themselves where authors aren’t watching, where literary agents aren’t scoping out potential new clients, and where publishers aren’t looking for the next unpaid promoter. Reviewing books on Goodreads often enough means publishers will notice and send you galleys. Talking about books on social media is now a professional job. The only time it wasn’t was, briefly, on BookTok.
BookTok flourished under fandom.
Now BookTok has been noticed by the industry beast.
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I know this essay makes it sound like I hate BookTok. I don’t. As always, my feelings live in that complicated neutral zone of nuance.
On one hand, TikTok is a horrid app. It’s intentionally addictive, furthering the attention collapse that many people are experiencing. Its algorithm prioritizes white, nondisabled people and makes it harder to create with privacy and anonymity. It treats its employees abysmally. It spreads harmful health and beauty information and trends and dangerous challenges at a faster rate than other social media platforms. It shares and sells data more than any other app. Its influence leads to bad artistic decisions: Musicians are cutting bridges from their songs because they’re not TikTok-friendly as some people in publishing are designing covers and acquiring books based on the hope that BookTok will like them, leading to poorer products across the board. I had to finish this essay quicker than I anticipated because TikTok might be banned by Congress soon (though the move itself seems less targeted toward an actual fear of how TikTok controls its data and more toward monitoring the internet usage of American citizens).
On the other hand, BookTokker and once-aspiring book publicist Cecilia Beard is right: “With its more diplomatic entry point, a phone and an account, BookTok creates opportunity for those intentionally pushed out of traditional publishing—for one, those unable to take on multiple unpaid internships or low-wage entry-level jobs in New York, a city with an ever-increasing cost of living. BookTokkers effect real market change, and they’re forcing the industry to meet readers’ demands.” Readers who have never come into my bookstore before are coming in for Colleen Hoover books and coming back for more. Bookstores found audiences and financial success through BookTok at a time when it’s increasingly harder for them to connect with their communities. Charities like the Project for Awesome were able to utilize the high visibility of its creators on the platform to raise a record-shattering amount of money for good.
I was talking about the state of the book world with a friend recently, and I described publishing as dogs at a dog park who are all chasing one another. The park is a big circle. There’s lots of dogs. One starts chasing another, and then they all start chasing one another, and now there’s this ouroboros of dogs in the park. People who brought the dogs or want to pet the dogs can’t get near them–and they certainly can’t get to the delicious, forgotten bones in the middle of the hungry, exhausted, endlessly chasing circle.
BookTok didn’t die because people stopped using it. BookTok is dead because publishers have invaded it. What once was a place for fandom is now a place where everything feels like a shill. I miss spaces that felt authentic and enthusiastic. That’s the feeling that BookTok originally captured, and that’s what sold books. It’s a feeling Rayne Fisher-Quann reflects on in her Internet Princess newsletter:
“i remember the feeling of teenage obsession, and i miss it desperately. few things about our everyday lives are more genuinely magical to me than the way that loving something with commitment can rewire your understanding of time: instead of dates or semesters, i can place moments of my early life inside the year where i only read vonnegut, the month i first loved the smiths, the autumn i spent with that rilke poem. it manages to make time physical — it turns it into something that can be tasted and touched. i want my life to be textured by the periods i spent perfecting a stone fruit hot honey cake or watching murder mysteries. wouldn’t it be wonderful to one day taste a cake and remember how you felt in september?
i have many criticisms of rapid-fire, non-stop consumption, but none are so personal to me as this: when we submit to a cultural landscape that tells us to never stop looking for the new shiniest thing, we lose a kind of language for understanding ourselves and others. loving is a muscle that’s been strategically atrophied by a culture of manic consumption and constant availability.”
There has been some pushback to publishing’s attempt to take over BookTok, though whether it’s out of creators’ pure desire to talk only about what they love or frustration at not getting paid for their promotion is unclear. But that lack of clarity epitomizes the problem: You can no longer tell who loves books for the sake of loving books, and who loves books because they think it might help them become the next Alex Aster.
BookTok briefly allowed people to unabashedly love the things they loved.
Now, to paraphrase what somebody on Tumblr once wrote: When someone on Tumblr shares a book that encourages stealing human bones for a magic ritual, it’s because there is genuinely something wrong with them. If someone on TikTok does it, it’s because they’re trying to sell you the book.
Nicole Brinkley has short hair and loves dragons. The rest changes without notice. Her opinions are her own. Follow her on Instagram at @nebrinkley. If you want to hear her giggle about 90s and 00s children's books, check out her new podcast Novelstalgia.
This essay was edited by Stephanie Appell. Read more of Stephanie's work at bookpage.com, where she is the children's and YA editor, or say hi on Twitter @noseinabookgirl. Her opinions are also her own.