aurora light

booktok & you

if you’re seeing this post, you almost certainly already know what i mean when i say “booktok,” along with the maybe-less-aesthetically-pleasing “bookstagram.” a portmanteau of “book” and “tiktok”, “booktok”, a collection of book readers who use tiktok, has undoubtedly become a big source of market research and advertising opportunity for book publishers, traditional and indie alike.

in some ways, this is a fair assessment of the situation. i mean, i’m here, aren’t i? social media has become an incredibly important and effective tool for both people and companies who are looking for readers.

in other ways, however, the rise of the slang term “booktok” has led to a surprising number of people acting as though “booktok” is a single person with single preferences, making individual reading choices, rather than what it is: a collective of people, all with individual interests and reading preferences, sharing a variety of types of content.

lots of people, lots of opinions

if you start looking around “booktok” or “bookstagram,” you will indeed start learning that there are a lot of conflicting opinions within these areas.

this should be obvious, you would think, but the gradual building belief that “booktok is a single set of interests and reader type” has, it seems, convinced people to turn their brains off and start treating “booktok” as though it means “white 20-40 year-old woman who enjoys mostly romance.”

when you start looking into these circles, some of the opinions you’re expecting to be “booktok opinions” will be represented. but of the top 20 or so tiktoks that show up when you search “booktok”, six of them are giving contrary opinions, or just straight-up complaining about what they see as “booktok” reading habits.

oh, yeah, and about four of those are just people being weird about erotica existing.

moooomm people are being fucking weird about erotica againnnn

look, let’s be totally honest here: people have a weird purity culture obsession with what they see as “booktok” and its “obsession” with smut.

first of all: porn is a normal part of life. it does not inherently hurt your brain. you are parroting talking points from insane right-wing pundits who are glorifying a fascist view of the past where porn didn’t exist and everyone’s sex drives were “normal” (read: women didn’t care about sex, men only had sex for procreation, and everyone was happier). this is not a real thing. literally knock it off or else.

additionally, most of the books people are talking about are normal romance novels, not even erotica. people just get insane and weird about any amount of sex in a book, even if it’s easy to skip and isn’t integral to the plot. most of the “booktok darlings” could not in any world be classified as erotica because they’re not fucking often enough.

i’ve said it once, and i’ll say it again: erotica and romance are genres largely enjoyed by women. these genres are not frequently enjoyed by men. while there are assuredly men who enjoy these genres, they are primarily seen as “women’s literature” and therefore subject to much harsher assessment than “real” literature enjoyed primarily by men.

this isn’t some kind of fake boogeyman i’m making up in my head. one of the aforementioned top videos that show up when i search “booktok” on tiktok right now has the caption of “how booktok mfs look at me when i recommend an actual book instead of someone getting their back blown [out] every chapter.” this tiktok has 320k likes.

this comparison between “real books” and romance/erotica is misogynistic, deeply disturbing, rooted in right-wing purity discourse, and also dumb as hell. it’s the same idea that gets books banned for having “too much sexual content,” and it also tells me you’re too stupid to find any popular book without easy-to-avoid sexual content, when there are literally thousands of them!

the power of more voices with recs

the big positive of “booktok” is that it makes it a lot easier to find indie and less-represented books in the massive number of books out there. and it is a massive number: if you include self-pub, estimates range from 2-4 million books PUBLISHED per year, with between 700-900 million purchased.

if you genuinely believe that booktok is all colleen hoover and sarah j maas at this point, you’re an idiot. there’s no other way to say it. believing that all booktok readers must enjoy these very popular writers would be like looking at cable TV lineup and concluding that every american is deeply in love with the kardashians. something can be extremely popular and also only capture 5-10% of the market.

if you genuinely believe that booktok is all colleen hoover and sarah j maas at this point, you’re an idiot. there’s no other way to say it. believing that all booktok readers must enjoy these very popular writers would be like looking at cable TV lineup and concluding that every american is deeply in love with the kardashians. something can be extremely popular and also only capture 5-10% of the market.

if the booktok vids you’re seeing are never recommending you books with main characters of color or disabled characters or lgbt characters, that’s kind of on you at this point. there are booktok niches for all sorts of interests and preferences. just because you can’t turn on the radio and find hardcore grunge recommendations doesn’t mean hardcore grunge doesn’t exist.

some of the problem is just capitalism

you didn’t think you were getting out of this post without an explanation of how this relates to capitalism, did you?

“booktok” is a marketing structure, at the end of the day. it’s a good way for traditional publishing houses to get an idea of what’s currently selling. erotica and romance have ALWAYS been the backbone of the adult fiction market; in 2021, they generated $1.44 billion of revenue. a very small chunk of that, traditionally, is going to writers; most of it goes to publishing houses.

there is every reason for publishing houses to use free marketing & mostly-free market research from social media to push books and understand what the market currently wants. the market has ALWAYS wanted romance & erotica, but rarely have we seen people talking about it as we do now.

the idea being pushed that “booktok” somehow represents “the ideal reader” is just marketing. on a social media platform that rewards popularity with more popularity, marketing popular things again and again is a cost-effective way for publishing houses to make more money.

i promise, readers are varied

“booktok” is a thing, but not usually in the way i find people talking about it nowadays. “booktok” is literally millions of people, each with different preferences. the romance genre made up approximately a FIFTH of all adult fiction sales in 2021; you’re going to see a lot of romance recommendations anywhere people are talking about books, because it’s been a popular genre for literally centuries. don’t make me dig out the insanely taboo victorian-era smut to prove it to you.

when you go to talk about what “booktok” likes, take a quick step back. are you just talking about what a white american woman between the ages of 20-40 is reading right now? if so, you’re boiling “booktok” down to a specific archetype (and you might also be being misogynistic along the way), an archetype that it doesn’t always fit.

there are lots of readers out there. if you don’t feel like you’re being represented by the recommendations you’re seeing, put a bit of effort in to find the recommendations that are right for you. i promise, you can find them!