I have quite a background in BookTok, Wattpad, and romance novels, and I can be a real critic when it comes to most romance reading. I have probably read over 1,000 Wattpad stories and over 200 novels in the past four years, and I have to say some of the books that I have seen on Booktok SUCK.
Which ones?
Okay, don’t get me wrong, some of them, in my opinion, are amazing. For example, Pen Pal by J.T. Geissinger, Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton, and a few others were very good. However, many others are Wattpad stories that have been upgraded to paperback. Again, don’t get me wrong, I love my Wattpad stories, but when are we as a generation going to realize that Wattpad is for authors who are having fun or building their skills, not for the books to be published?
Plots being ABused.
The thing I judge most about in Booktok books is that they are literally Wattpad stories. They take a couple hours to read and are often very poorly written. I most recently read King of Wrath by Ana Huang, and it was a super-fast read with a plot that was exactly like several hundred other Wattpad stories. The saddest part is that I will always be sucked into the stories, even if I have read them hundreds of times. I just want to see new creativity in the romance department and for people to promote books that all of us have already read a million times, just with a different title.
I’m a fool for all kinds of romance and smut, but Booktok books tend to always be the same repetitive CEO/Mafia Boss kidnapping love story; there’s nothing new. We, as readers, need something new from these authors, or we need our Booktok influencers to influence something more worth all of our time.