With the resurgence of reading becoming mainstream in the social media sphere, many people feel like they’re falling victim to the aesthetics of pretty covers, the flagrant abuse of sticky tabs in novels that absolutely do not require that much citation, and the constant consumption of buying whatever popular romance novel has made its way onto the front table at Barnes and Noble. In the shallow world of BookTok, being a ‘reader’ is more important than reading.
Booktok has allowed a new generation of readers to gather in a single space and exchange information and ideas. But, like anything else, Booktok has some major problems.
Because it is an online space, Booktok is led by influencers. The role of the influencer is to convince you to invest your money and time in a product, and Booktok is no exception. When an influencer recommends a book, they are marketing to you. And because they’re marketing to you, they fall into the habits of an advertiser.
The problem with Booktok is that it encourages influencers to market books based on tropes rather than the books themselves. You might see someone online recommend a book based on the tropes it contains—“enemies to lovers”, “arranged marriage”, “love triangle”, etc—and not based on its plot or characters. It’s much simpler to invoke a catchy buzzword or two than it is to spend time constructing an attention-grabbing plot summary when you’re trying to convince someone to read something.
Because social media marketing is effective and cheap, many aspiring authors are on BookTok and can see the kind of content that generates mass hype. Authors notice these patterns. And worse, authors start to write books around tropes. There is a subsection of Booktok that seems to be primarily concerned with whether or not books have sex scenes or whether or not X plot point happens, and less concerned with the actual quality of the writing or whether or not these plot points make sense in the story.
Rather than writing a story and allowing it to flow in an interesting and organic direction, several TikTok-famous authors seem to treat books like checklists, shoe-horning in popular tropes for the sake of having them there. These books seem to focus less on constructing an engaging world or exploring a theme, and more on trying to make their books as appealing as possible for online audiences.
It is important to note that this does not apply to all of BookTok. Much of BookTok is people talking about their favorite reads, what classics are worth it, and their “literary hot takes” in relative peace. Many of the books that generate hype on TikTok are extremely high-quality and engaging reads, spanning genres and age ranges. The problem is that many of these fabulous books get overshadowed by discourse about books like the ones mentioned above. At its core, this is a publishing issue: when copy-paste fantasy series and sloppily constructed romances get big book deals, they begin to sideline and push out other stories, creating a self-perpetuating cycle where book quality and reader experience suffer.
The rise of hustle culture may be the root of this problem. Writing is becoming a side hustle for most authors, as the cost of living rises and book deals remain scant. Our culture is in an age obsessed with efficiency, optimizing, and “maxing” yourself and your abilities. Writing around tropes is certainly much faster than writing a painstakingly crafted original narrative. But in the world of literature, faster is not always better.
Which brings us to Booktok’s other problem: overconsumption.
Remember what I said about the role of the influencer being to sell public products? More often than not, this influencer-consumer relationship encourages not only consumption but overconsumption as well, as influencers (whether intentionally or unintentionally) push reading trends that require users to have a physical copy of a book to participate in.
BookTok is extremely concerned with aesthetics. Within the community, there is a subsection of highly stylized and tailored videos, where people use pastel highlighters and inky pens to mark up their favorite passages and post them to appropriately trendy music, where people show off their color-coordinated bookshelves full of special-edition books with embossed covers that they already own multiple copies of. This kind of content aims to romanticize reading. While I do not quarrel with aesthetically pleasing book-related content, there is something slightly sinister about every BookTok trend that seems to exclude those who use libraries over bookstores.
Another aspect of this hustle culture is FOMO (fear of missing out). This certainly relates to overconsumption as people buy a book simply because it’s popular and they fear that they’re missing out on something since everyone else is reading it. It’s as if reading is a competition, with many sites like Goodreads and StoryGraph encouraging this behavior. While it’s not wrong to read a lot of books, I think that cutting back on how much we read and retaining and applying what we learn from these books is more important than anything else.
Rarely does a platform so rife with pitfalls also have such easy ways to avoid them, and for that, Bootok is fortunate. At its core, Booktok is a positive thing. Despite its downsides, Booktok has become a place where book lovers can connect over something they love, and it’s one of the last online spaces where loving something deeply does not get automatically derided as “cringe”. Booktok has made getting into reading easier, more accessible, and most importantly, fun.