to anyone who wants to write about BookTok

I don’t know if he’d describe himself this way, but my father is a writer. I grew up watching him jot stories and musings down on napkins or scraps of paper. He’d often read his stories out to me, and whether or not I ever truly understood them, I tried to. It was important to me to understand them. To share with him in his love of storytelling. I know I can’t point to one thing that’s made me a reader, but I think that is a good place to start.

I’m a 1980’s baby, which means that I remember when we got our first home computer. I’ll skip reflections on dial-up and AIM Away Messages and head straight to some of my first Internet communities: Chathouse, Neopets, and a website I stumbled across run by librarians in New Zealand. My memories of it are a little hazy, but I have to imagine that I found it because I was searching for information on books I was reading in school. It was there that I published my very first book review.

I’ve been reviewing books ever since. For a while, on that website. Then, for my high school and college newspapers. Eventually, for Snark Squad. In March of 2015, I started my BookTube channel.

I was one of those Millennials that joined TikTok March 2020, the week I was sent to work from home because of COVID-19, and a couple of weeks before that same company would lay me off. For a while, I was using the app but skipping over book content. I already had BookTube and Book Twitter and Snark Squad, and the content the FYP occasionally tried to sneak feed me was of the kind I was not interested in; I’d read Sarah J. Maas and Colleen Hoover and hated every moment of it.

I gave in eventually, primarily because of the lure of creating short form content. Over the last two years, that space has grown into an amazing community.

Recently, I read an opinion piece about BookTok, another entry in a line of opinions about BookTok that come from people on the outside looking in. People who think they can jump into the shallow end of any community, look around and declare “this is shallow,” and believe that is some kind of reporting.

So, from someone who is a BookToker, from someone who has been participating in online book communities for decades, here is what I wish people reporting or opining on BookTok understood:

1. BookTok is far from perfect, but many of its problems are problems that all book communities face.
   
   Is the algorithm racist? Is it harder for authors and creators of color to get their work noticed on this platform? In my experience, yes, and that has also been true for every single social media platform I have ever been on. In fact, TikTok has allowed my content more discoverability. I’ve been languishing at about the same number of subscribers on YouTube for years now. I’m lucky if they even show my content to those subscribers. TikTok, however, keeps my content alive. While not always consistent, and sometimes frustrating to deal with the selectiveness of the algorithm, TikTok has given me a much larger audience than YouTube ever has.
   
   Publishing continues to be overwhelmingly white and book communities are constantly battling against that. That isn’t to say that I think we should give up or stop working to diversify our reading or quit being mindful about what we promote and recommend, but that work needs to happen in every book community. We are all working against sheer numbers, a straight and white default, regardless of platform.
   
   Is there a consumeristic aspect to BookTok? Yes, and this has been the case in any hobby community that I’ve ever been in that is built around things. BookTok isn’t unaware of this, as there are often discussions about libraries, hauls and unhauls, and whether book collecting and book reading are separate hobbies and what each of those things mean. TikTok is a visual media platform and so any critique of the “aesthetics” of BookTok need to at least acknowledge that visually appealing content is going to rule the day. It was and is the same on BookTube, where I also film with my color-coordinated collection of books in the background.
   

2. The entry point into BookTok does have a certain flavor, but ultimately, BookTok is a partially self-curated experience. It was rough going my first week or so in BookTok, trying to search out the content I wanted and engaging in a way that TikTok learned what to feed me.
   
   Again, the entry point into BookTok is very white and very straight and often young and focused on bestsellers. Anyone reporting that this is the totality of BookTok, however, is misrepresenting the community and inadvertently telling us something about how they are engaging.
   
   Beyond that entry point, there is a wide, rich world of readers and stories. Hearing that there is no X thing in BookTok is frustrating because that’s usually wrong and it completely erases the people who are doing X thing. It also discourages others from joining and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
   

3. BookTok is first and foremost a reading community, and it doesn’t have control over the way that the industry reacts to it. Here’s a bit of a newsflash: BookTok isn’t walking into bookstores and setting up BookTok tables.
   

4. We’ve been here before. I remember riding a shuttle at my first Book Expo America and a woman asked me in what capacity I was attending. When I told her I was a BookTuber, she promptly cut off the conversation and proceeded to bad-mouth BookTubers to the person she was with. It wasn’t the last time during that trip that I would hear librarians and book bloggers bemoan the arrival of BookTube, the newest platform that had publishing chomping at the bit to tap into new audiences.
   
   A lot of the conversations that we are having about BookTok have happened before. A lot of the conversations BookTok is having about itself, BookTube had about itself in its early days. Whatever comes down the line to replace BookTok will likely have these same conversations. And they’ll probably also face the same condescension born of bitterness and jealousy from those who came before them.

   

5. When painting BookTok in broad strokes, the people erased are typically the marginalized. I’m in the trenches of holding BookTok accountable and helping to spread the message of the importance of decolonizing your shelves, responsibility to your audience, and being mindful consumers of media. And yet, the reason that I’m the first to jump up to also defend BookTok is because when people dismiss the community wholesale, they are also dismissing me.
   
   They are dismissing the other Black women on the app who make thoughtful and passionate content, despite the exposure to microaggressions and outright aggressions. They are dismissing the LGBTQIA+ community who are doing and facing the same. They are dismissing disabled readers, the nueroatypical, and everyone who wasn’t captured in an outsider’s 5 second view.
   
   Can BookTok be more diverse? Absolutely, and I’ll continue pushing for it because there is a way to encourage that without erasing the people who are already overlooked.
   

6. No one is faking reading, my God. Whenever someone (typically a man) has something to say about how someone else (typically a young woman) is engaging with culture, out come the “they must be faking it” allegations. It’s ridiculous to assume that hundreds and thousands of women would come together to lie about hobbies on the Internet. Thinking so speaks to the fact that these men have decided there is a right way to engage with the hobby that makes them feel special. They take women doing things differently, and visibly, as a personal affront. Get a grip.

7. It’s hard out here for an author. I think one of the most interesting things we’ll continue to see develop is the way authors interact with BookTok. As a more nascent community, readers, authors and writers all kind of came up together to build it. As it grows, however, there will continue to be bigger questions about what constitutes a review space, how authors are interacting with reviews and their readers, the transition from reader or writer to published author and how that blurs these lines.
   
   I think the biggest challenge for authors, however, is pressure from the industry to conquer social media, to be not only authors, but marketing and brand experts. To dedicate time to unlocking an algorithm that most people don’t in fact understand. I get why authors get jaded by the need to be on BookTok, but that isn’t BookTok’s fault.
   
   My number one advice to authors is to understand that most of you are approaching from a place of “what’s the secret to selling my book here?” and very few of you are looking to understand or enter into or participate in BookTok as a reading community. Readers are having a conversation here and sometimes authors enter in with an energy that is the same as a door-to-door salesman.
   

8. There is room for improvement. Here are the things I’d love to see BookTok get better at, understanding that I cannot speak for the whole community and this is informed by the content I interact with:
   
   a. There is a circular conversation about “negative reviews” that makes me worried about the rise of anti-intellectualism in the community. To be clear, this has nothing to do with aesthetics, the kinds of books people read, having large collections, or tabbing up books, which all speak more to how people incorporate reading into their lives and social media. I’m talking about the sentiment that choosing to read a book solely for entertainment frees that book from critique. It’s walking further into an idea that we should consume any media uncritically, to passively accept whichever messages media is happy to deliver.
   
   b. I’d love for creators to understand the difference between the things they choose to read for themselves and the things they actively choose to platform. It took me a while to come to terms with the responsibility I felt for my content and to my audience, particularly because this is all still a hobby for me. But there is a responsibility there, and a lot of things that we are talking about in terms of diversifying BookTok and breaking free from the general perception of it won't happen until people understand that what we choose to promote matters.
   
   c. “Reading diversely” isn’t just about reading books but learning how to consume media that doesn’t center you and being mindful of the language we use to review said books.
   
   d. TikTok is still kind of a terrible platform, especially when it comes to compensating creators. It is also notoriously bad for transferring users anywhere outside of the app. I think the real question becomes what kind of investment into TikTok makes sense if we are entering into its initial descent.
   

There is such a long history of gatekeeping in publishing. The legacies of literacy and what is considered reading and who is considered a reader are obviously still alive and well amongst us. I know that as long as there are people having fun with reading online, there will be snobs around to tell us that, actually, we are doing it wrong.

And so, to anyone considering writing about or reporting on BookTok: that snob doesn’t have to be you.

Inspired By:

My favorite/least favorite part of this piece is the author being baffled by why you would tab up a book that doesn’t need that many citations.

My second favorite/least favorite part is him talking about BookTube in the past tense. It’s the kind of self-importance that indicates that something stopped existing to him the moment he was done with it.

0 stars. Do not recommend.

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Currently:

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Elsewhere:

I recently got bit by the bug to start recapping on Snark Squad again, and the show that inspired it was The Last of Us. If you are watching too, come watch along with us.

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