Is Booktok the Problem?

We’ve seen the articles claiming booktok is saving the book industry. And we’ve also seen the ones claiming booktok is destroying reading. Both are rather silly.

Booktok started at the perfect moment in order to receive whatever praise or ire a person has about the book world. The pandemic forced people inside at the same moment that TikTok gave people something new and unique to help pass the time, detach, and form communities – all while lowering the barriers of content creation. TikTok’s daily users went from some 300 million in 2019 to nearly 2 billion at the end of 2022. Booktok is just one of the many communities on TikTok, and its sudden and profound change to influence and the media landscape meant the cultural opinion pieces of yesteryears could all be repackaged in order to blame or celebrate TikTok for all the things that were being discussed before the app was even a thing.

The issue I have with a lot of the articles written about booktok is that normally all of them boil down to the same issue: from the outside, booktok is viewed as some homogenous place in which all content is the same. GQ recently ran an article on how booktok is all about aesthetics (an insane take when bookstagram exists). Countless articles and twitter discourse has revolved around the idea that booktok is only a place for “teenage girls screaming and crying about Colleen Hoover,” and of course a personal favorite of mine, “booktok is the same 10 books.”

Everyone of these hit pieces is from someone that seems to have spent a limited amount of time on what @pagemelt (in my opinion, one of booktok’s best creators) calls “factory settings booktok.” These are the videos that are popular and often by the biggest creators. A lot of these videos are really nothing more than memes, but when you’re on “factory settings booktok,” they seem like the totality of the community. People investigating booktok start with content made specifically to drive clicks … and based on their articles, that’s the only place they go. But to anyone that’s part of any online community, the most popular version of said community isn’t often how that community wants to be identified.

I’ll take a guess at why these articles all do this: the writers aren’t given enough time to research. Time is money. Time researching and investigating is a lot of money. And the issues of the book world are all about money (and maybe not literally all, but I feel safe saying 93% are). So, let’s take a quick look at the issues of money in the book world.

Colleen Hoover writes, from a critics view, mediocre books that make all the money.

First time authors get very little money and even fewer things that cost money (like advertisement – which I’ll come back to).

The workers of the publishing houses get enough money that they have to get a second job or rack up credit card debt to survive.

The big publishing houses are getting more money, and they use it to give huge advances to celebrities, politicians, and the top 20 authors that don’t need the money.

The small publishing houses survive knowing miscalculations of the money on even a couple advances could sink their whole business.

And the booktokers who are, in some real sense, sometimes the most powerful advertisement tool used by the publishing industry are making so little money that it’s hard to believe.

The money is always flowing up. That’s how it always works. In every industry, the workers create the profits that are seen only by the elite. In the book world it’s the CEOs and shareholders of the big 5, big bookstore chains and their billionaire owners, and a few authors. The profits our creative field make get thrown into an obscene advance for a literal fucking prince all while making ends meet is getting harder and harder (and actually in a lot of cases literally impossible).

And we’re upset. We’re mad that our labor is being so obviously exploited. And our industry is so small that we can see and trace where this money is flowing, but because class consciousness seems to be something people are almost inherently ignorant of and ideologically allergic to, we start fighting about how booktok is ruining an industry we only helped grow.

Here’s why most of the booktok articles are silly: the issues of the book world are almost all material, and the most exploited group is the one that we waste our time bickering about.

I know some people will raise issue with the idea that booktok is the most exploited group of them all, but let me give you some anecdotal information to maybe persuade you to not screenshot the previous paragraph, saying “can you believe this fucking guy.”

I’m one of the largest nonfiction booktokers. I’m big enough that I even sometimes get placed on that “factory settings booktok” I mentioned earlier. In just the last 30 days, I’ve had more than 5 million views and my pay out from TikTok has been $0.37. I’ve been responsible for many thousands of books sold. I’m really happy to know a lot of those sales have gone to small authors and small presses, and one author has been kind enough to list me in the reasons his book is still in print a few years after publication. If you get on Amazon and look up a book I’ve pushed, the suggested books will often be ones I have also recommended but that aren’t even the same genre. History professors, memoirists, morticians, textbook editors, magicians, horror movie aficionados, academics of food media, and researchers of cults have all benefited from me talking about how much I enjoyed their work.

I am a reviewer, but I’m also a marketer, and occasionally I am the best marketing tool a book is going to get. I’m not saying this with vanity. It’s sad to me how little we can do to help really important and incredible art get out on the world. But I know my value to the book world is more than $0.37. And so does the book world. But yet I’m one of the faces that gets blamed for what’s wrong with the book industry when the actual problem receives, what feels like, basically no attention.

If you don’t like what we on booktok create, that’s all fine and good. I’m not writing this in defense of every video on booktok or even on my own booktok page. We can go back and forth all day (and maybe we should) about the art of reviewing and creating content and influencer culture and every minute detail of what booktok is, but we’re all just people that love books that are desperately trying to make a living in a society, and in this specific industry, that’s making it more and more impossible. If you want to write media reviews of booktok, be my guest. But stop with the hyperbolic drivel about how we are the problem of an industry worth billions. Your intellectualizing about the problems in the book world show you lacking any ability to see both the problems and solutions.

Booktokers are trying to have fun talking about a hobby. We’ve caused millions of dollars to flow up, and the industry has done so little good with any of it that that somehow the new level of profit hoarding is viewed as our fault. Sadly we don’t have the solutions, but we sure as hell aren’t the problem.

The frustrations of the book world that nearly always have to do with money that are being directed at unpaid marketers that have a hobby talking about books is exhausting, repetitive, and silly – they should be directed upwards, but it’s of course easier and garners more clicks if journalists point their fingers at teenage girls. It’s worked for basically every industry in the past, so I guess we’ll keep it going.