ABSTRACT
Since its recent inception, young adult (or YA) fiction has changed as quickly as each new generation of its consumers. The creation of BookTok – an online community of readers and reviewers on the video-sharing platform TikTok – seems to have had the largest, and most direct, impact on the way publishers market YA titles. The community’s focus on a book’s “vibes” (it’s emotional effect) over the quality of its writing, such as with the critically panned and arguably problematic The Selection series (Cass, 2012), will lead to a change regarding which books get acquired and marketed. Although the definition of a “good” book is subjective, in recent years diverse authors have worked hard to legitimise the YA genre, crafting meaningful stories with reflective representation. There seems little doubt that publishers chasing the BookTok trend will likely result in an overall drop in the quality of young adult literature.
INTRODUCTION
Young adult literature has undergone something of a renaissance in critical opinion in recent years, but an unexpected social media phenomenon threatens to bring it down with the creation of one online community: BookTok. A subset of the video-sharing platform TikTok that reviews books from an emotional instead of an analytical lens, BookTok has had an unprecedented impact on the way publishers market and acquire young adult titles. This opens the way to a change in what readers can expect from newly released young adult titles in the future, and encourages a diminishing quality in the craft of published writing itself. This conference paper will first analyse BookTok as a unique online community to determine the reason for its unexpected rise. Then it will closely examine BookTok’s power over the publishing industry to reveal its long-term impact on professional publishing and marketing procedures. Finally, it will study an example of BookTok “clickbait” (Messina, 2022) to explain why its influence will likely lead to another slump in the young adult fiction genre’s reputation and quality amongst readers and critics.
BOOKTOK AS A COMMUNITY
BookTok was created in 2020 on TikTok as an online book club to discuss diverse YA books, but its hashtag rapidly and unexpectedly gained popularity (Boffone & Jerasa, 2021; Ledda, 2021). BookTok is what sociolinguist James Paul Gee (2017, p. 28) would call an “affinity space”: a place or series of places where people “connected by a shared affinity” – in this case young adult fiction – shape the space into a community where that affinity is its focal point. The space is experienced differently for every user, as each person utilises the space not just to talk about books but to express their identities in this “third place” (Kent & Azariah, 2023), this non-physical place of peer equality where they can be the ‘selves’ they keep hidden from other spaces, i.e., at school or around parents. Its sparsely-knit network (a network not structured around rigid social boundaries found in traditional, real-world communities) encourages individualism and freedom of thought, which especially attracts a younger generation of community members (Hampton & Wellman, 2018). BookTok has been named the “home for Queer teen readers” (Boffone & Jerasa, 2021, p. 11) and its most recognisable members are under the age of 18 (Flood, 2021). However, the freedom found in this non-traditional network is limited by BookTok’s nature as a persistent and pervasive community. It is persistent, meaning that people are in constant, active communication although separated by physical distance, and it is pervasive meaning that it’s always available whenever a community member may want or need it (Hampton, 2016). Though it’s sparsely-knit in that the rigid social boundaries of traditional, densely-knit communities aren’t immediately apparent, Wiederhold (2022, p. 157) explains that young people are using TikTok as a place to build a “sense of generational culture and identity” and such a thing isn’t possible without creating some social boundaries of their own (Hampton, 2016; Hampton & Wellman, 2018). This has a negative impact on the indirect purpose of an affinity space – namely, as a place for members to develop skills relevant to their affinity (Gee, 2017). BookTok is a community of readers – specifically, young readers of young adult novels – so it’s assumed they would develop in this space a sophisticated understanding of what makes a “good” novel within their target demographic. “Good” is, of course, highly subjective in the creative arts, and its definition lies beyond the scope of this paper. It is enough for now to say that many of the books lauded by BookTok are not critically well-received. What these community members are actually doing is improving their “influencer skills” – their capacity to use the platform to produce entertaining videos and project a specific version of themselves to others within the community. Though their love of reading is doubtless genuine, and is the heart of the identity of this generation’s subset of book lovers, it is in effect a vehicle to self-expression which bypasses the initial purpose of BookTok, which was to critically discuss young adult books.
TikTok is a platform best suited to short-form videos that aren’t the “curated, picture-perfect aesthetic of Instagram”, but that encourage an air of “messy authenticity” (Giller, 2022; Wiederhold, 2022, p. 158). This reflects the values of the newest generation of social media influencers, and is paralleled in TikTok’s nature as a refracted public, which Abidin (2021) describes as a community of members who behave according to the expectations of that community because they are aware that they’re being observed. TikTok shuns the carefully curated, “hyper-competitive attention economies” (Abidin, 2021, p. 10) of social media influencers on Instagram or YouTube in the early to mid 2010s. BookTok especially is different from these sites – and even the rest of TikTok – because its power comes from its the members serving the community, instead of the community propping up any particular community member over the other. However, this has a knock-on effect where many voices of equal value contribute to the problematic issues that will be discussed later.
BOOKTOK’S POWER OVER THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY
BookTok has had an unprecedented impact on global book sales since its inception. Not only did it help sell 20 million paper books in 2021, the sales rose by 50% the following year (Harris, 2022). Bloomsbury, the company that became internationally renowned for being the original publisher of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997), reported a recent 220% rise in profits, which they partially attribute to BookTok (Wiederhold, 2022, p. 158). Books almost a decade old are being brought to new light on the app and becoming bestsellers years after their initial publication. This is unexpected in a market that primarily measures its sales by week, with relatively few intellectual properties maintaining steady sales over the course of years, and even fewer resurfacing such a long time after their debut (Harris, 2021; Harris, 2022; Wiederhold, 2022). E. Lockhart, author of We Were Liars (2014), who had enjoyed bestseller status when her book was released, was confused when she learned that her book had once again returned to the bestseller list in 2021. Her confusion is understandable, as there doesn’t seem to be a predictable rule for which book is going to be the next to be highlighted on the app. All publishers and booksellers can do is follow the trends closely. Booksellers even set up “As Seen on BookTok” display tables – something that isn’t done for works publicised on Facebook or Instagram (Harris, 2021), simply because their online book communities don’t have the same community power as BookTok.
The key to BookTok’s phenomenal selling power lies in its reversal of orthodox review priorities: BookTok influencers review a book by the emotions it creates in the reader (known in the community as the “vibes”) over the sensibility of the plot or the quality of its writing (Harris, 2021; O’Sullivan, 2021). In short-form videos often accompanied by upbeat or theatrical music, users show clips of themselves reacting dramatically to scenes or characters in the book they’re discussing, or compile clips and images that match the book’s vibes. O’Sullivan (2021, p. 1) calls it “emotional engagement”. The genres that suit this format most are young adult and fantasy with their emphasis on character development and immersive world building, and the statistics show that these are indeed the books with the most sales and online buzz. Because of this hype, books like the faerie romance The Cruel Prince (Black, 2018), the supernatural dystopian Red Queen (Aveyard, 2015) and the other (probably more well-known) faerie romance A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas, 2015), though already popular at the time of their release, have gained statuses (at least amongst the BookTok community) akin to the Twilight craze of the late 2000s (Harris, 2021). Indeed, it seems likely that, comparable to the oversaturation of supernatural romance in the fiction market after Twilight’s success, future bestseller lists are going to be flooded with pale imitations of those books made popular by BookTok, and in ever decreasing quality.
Of course, entertainment value and “quality” writing are not mutually exclusive. Books with an emphasis on entertainment serve a valid purpose and should not be dismissed, as many things relating to teenagers often are, a phenomenon that leads to internalised discrimination (Cook et al., 2022; Tillman, 2016). However, because of the priority of vibes over in-depth story development, the negative messages and arguably “bad” (read: problematic) writing contained in these stories is likely to slip through to a wider audience. This is most evident in the meteoric rise of Colleen Hoover’s career – in October 2022 alone, she had written six of the top ten books on the New York Times bestsellers list, and the top three best selling books of the entire year were produced by her (Alter, 2022). Her work is often accused of objectifying women, glorifying toxic masculinity and encouraging co-dependent, sometimes abusive, relationships (McKellar, 2022; Terasaki, 2022). Teenagers who are unexperienced in life and love read these books meant for older audiences because “#BookTokMadeMeReadIt” (Wiederhold) and they will come away thinking this behaviour is acceptable and, indeed, desirable in a romantic partner. A less obvious, more insidious example is the recent re-popularity of The Selection series (Cass, 2012), an allegedly ‘dystopian’ world with a The Bachelor-like premise aimed at very young teenagers. All the characters bar one are white, the female protagonist is “not like other girls” – implying that said other girls are somehow inferior because of the protagonist’s implied moral and social superiority (TV Tropes, 2023) – and there’s not even a passing mention of any orientation other than heterosexual. The series’ romanticised portrayal of traditional gender roles and absence of diversity (in race, gender or orientation) is exactly why online movements like “#weneeddiversebooks” – stories written by non-white, non-cis and/or non-hetero authors about those topics – have become an important point of representation to younger demographics of readers (Lavoie, 2021).
BOOKTOK’S FUTURE IMPACT
A hint of BookTok’s future impact on the industry – and itself – can already be seen in the increase in readership amongst younger demographics, figures which had been in steady decline until 2020 (Wiederhold, 2022). Teenage hype birthed and raised the genre of young adult, and as publishers have proven by chasing the supernatural romance and dystopian trends into death, they tend to cling to the zeitgeist without thoroughly understanding what makes it popular or compelling. Evidence of this is the recent publication of Lightlark by Alex Aster. After struggling to find a publisher for her novel, Aster pitched it on BookTok in March of 2021 where it went viral. In August of 2022, it was professionally published and on sale in bookstores. However, the image Aster portrayed of herself as a struggling debut novelist stumbling into success was shaken by the revelation that she was already a professionally published author misrepresenting her status as a newcomer for the publicity. Initial bad reviews also claimed the story was not what was promised – scenes she had teased in the viral video were not present, the diversity she had claimed was a focal point of the novel was weak and the ever-important vibes were simply non-existent (Messina, 2022). Not only do these actions throw the authenticity of publishers into question, but it undermines the authenticity of BookTok itself, as it starts the community questioning the legitimacy of its own members.
This may be a simple case of publishers responding to direct consumer interest, but it has set a dangerous precedent. Publishers are trying to anticipate what will be the ‘next big thing’, and authors are commonly Googling “how to make a book go viral on TikTok” (O’Sullivan, 2021, p. 2). Lightlark itself was, in many reviewers’ opinions, a victim of this shift in priority. Their main arguments are that it was poorly planned, derivative and felt like a first draft with good potential that was sadly missed (Messina, 2022; Shanna, 2022). In the unusually quick rush to publish – just over a year from TikTok to bookstores – the craftsmanship of what could have been a great novel was sacrificed to fleeting popular interest. This is a dangerous practice that will lead to a market once more flooded with meaningless cash-grabs, undoing the work diverse authors have done to make YA a valid literary genre. Similarly, as a result of this reader-led publicising initiative, the bulk of marketing work has shifted away from the industry professionals onto the authors themselves, with the expectation that they will market themselves to readers via social media. As publishers and sales statistics will attest, however, there is little authors can do to make a significant impact on their sales this way (O’Sullivan, 2021). Even authors who became known on social media, including BookTok, are decrying this recent trend. Xiran Jay Zhao, YouTube influencer and author of sci-fi fantasy young adult novel Iron Widow (2021) says in O’Sullivan (p. 4): “Publicity is our publishers’ job – they should be the ones putting in the work. Or why are they making all that money from our books?” Ultimately, it is a method of marketing which undermines the quality of an already denigrated genre and, based on BookTok’s expansion of taste into more mature genres like historical fiction, it is a method that looks set to be applied to many, if not all, other areas of fiction.
CONCLUSION
Since its very recent inception, BookTok has been a phenomenon in young adult fiction marketing that publishers are keen to master. What started as an affinity space for young readers quickly became a driving force in book sales, with its power derived from its unusual reviewing practice of emotional engagement, or an emphasis on the emotional reaction a book leaves the reader with over a critical analysis of its quality of plot or writing. This can be simply referred to as “vibes over plot”. The messy, vernacular online culture of the BookTok community is designed to be above the hyper-competitive, carefully cultured influencer styles of the last decade, however its apparent lack of hierarchy amongst its members disguises an echo chamber of approval of problematic themes in the books. Altogether this will lead to a future where the young adult genre loses much of the credibility that has been hard-earned by diverse authors in recent years and will result in a distinct drop in quality when publishers utilise this new method of acquiring and marketing books.
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Hi L, The thing is the paper is mainly concentrated on the African continent particularly.If you make an analysis of…