📬 just a neat new little side blog to let out all my incoherent bookish thoughts, that no one appreciates in real life quite as much as I’d want them too 💌
can’t wait to scream into the void about all this! ☎️
As someone who by and large dislikes BookTok, I hate these handwringing BUT WHAT OF LITERATURE takes more, because
--"Books are fast fashion" is empirically ridiculous. It misses the actual deep issues with fast fashion and why it's bad for society. The fact that you're buying cheap clothes that fall apart quickly is really only the surface level problem that affects you the buyer in the (relative) short term.
The actual serious problems with fast fashion is that the clothes are made in highly unethical factories that exploit and actively harm people. It's more accurate to compare fast fashion to fast food than to BookTok, and let's say the quiet part loud here--what these takes are often critiquing is not actually "BookTok books" (what is that), particularly when they use the terms "fast fashion". They critique certain types of books that BookTok focuses on. Particularly romance novels; particularly indie romance novels.
These books hurt... no one. Worst case scenario, you spent like $5 on a book you don't like. "But the art"; well, I'll get into why I, so snobby about art that I once got an (undergrad, I'm not made of money here babes) degree in art history, do not care. "But the influence on society" oh yes, the books are what is affecting the self worth of women today, not the ever-eroding rights we have, actually sliding backwards in the US at least. It's not the radical far right and the school systems that won't allow us to teach girls about birth control, it's the Ana Huang book.
--Again, to be clear: I'm not a big fan of BookTok. Most of the books I love are not popular on BookTok--I will say, though I alluded to indie books (which are probably popular in part, yes, because they are cheaper in E and often available on the seemingly cost efficient Kindle Unlimited) I have seen... basically any type of book get big on BookTok. I've seen traditionally published ("trad") books that came out a decade ago have a delayed blowup. I've seen old indies have delayed blowups. I've seen new trad books have blowups (see: The Love Hypothesis, one of the few BookTok faves I did like).
One legit issue with BookTok, and here there are people whose lives are actually negatively affected by it directly, is the way it can impact marketing and acquisition of titles. Publishers are desperate to save cash in any way they can. As such, they will pretend that they can pass the buck on to BookTok. No need to give your debut author a marketing budget--tell them it's on them and make sure they hustle over to BookTok. No need to acquire fresh authors when you can buy out an indie book that blew up on BookTok, tack on an extra chapter or so, and sell what used to be $5 for $18.99. But to be frank, this isn't even really BookTok affecting authors and the trends negatively; this is publishing, the big guy in the sky who keeps books from being "made like fast fashion" exploiting BookTok and using it as an excuse and a cost-saver.
All of this being said... There's a very decent likelihood that BookTok will be absolutely irrelevant in 5-10 years. On a social media level, TikTok ain't that old. There was a time when Myspace owned this town. Where is it now? Facebook used to be tHEEEE network for everyone. Marketing that primarily targets teens doesn't even mention Facebook. Or Twitter, sorry, X; and that was before it became X. It was already losing relevancy because the younger gen did not give a flying fuck. (Shit: we are discussing this on TUMBLR DOT COM.) BookTok is a trend within a trend. Right now, a lot of eggs are being put in its basket, and y'all notice this more because the entire point of TikTok is to be LOUD. It will probably be... not a thing anymore... at least in terms of its relevancy to publishing? Sooner than you'd think.
I say this because Bookstagram was everything authors were told to put proverbial eggs into like... frighteningly recently. And Bookstagram is still relevant? But not nearly as relevant as BookTok. When was the last time you saw anything mentioning Bookstagram? It still sells books, but it's not LOUD.
So it's no wonder that authors, including established authors, use BookTok. It's no wonder that publishers use BookTok. It does have an influence, yes, but I get a bit eye-roll-y at it being pointed to as the root of all evil, because I don't think it has that kind of sauce, and I think that the things people hate so much about BookTok books existed long before it and were bound to grow anyway.
Like, for example: so much is made of fanfic-turned-books, and so much of it is thrown onto these romances that blow up on BookTok. But lmao, that shit existed well before TikTok. Cassandra Clare did it with her YA series. Obviously, 50 Shades did it with Twilight fanfic, and Christina Lauren's original debut was also based on Twilight fanfic. There is an entire wave of authors whose origins are rooted in Twific. These things have long existed, but BookTok makes it easier for y'all to notice.
--In the same sense.... This idea of "fast fashion" books was always going to take off when indie publishing became easier. When you no longer needed to engage with an small press and sell your indie books in paperback like the "wanna buy a sundial" guy in Disney's Hercules (king shit) but could simply upload a file to Amazon, edited or not edited as you saw fit, and make it accessible to kindles and tablets and eventually phones.
Look at Amazon. I speak as a romance reader who loves all types of romance novels and likes to learn about its history as a genre. There was a huge boom for certain indie romance authors after the 'zon made self publishing something almost anyone could do. For a brief period, a few authors made a fuckton of money off of it, and while they often couldn't maintain the income stream, it was well-publicized, creating this idea that you could make a lot of money off short, hot, less edited books. And every time there is a boom in any genre, there are authors clustering to get in on it--take the YA Fantasy boom. Booms come and go; generally, the authors that can maintain and stabilize in between the booms not only have a strong backlist of titles, but the kind of quality and distinctiveness that keeps people interested after the boom ends. But until that boom does end (and yes, to an extent after too, depends on the author and their goals), the name of the game for many authors is cranking out titles written to market.
And titles written to market have always existed, and always will. Authors do, in fact, need and want to make money. If you write something and just do not care if it makes money at all--you're either dashing shit off with no effort just for a bit of fun and don't care if it sells (and that ain't these "fast fashion" writers, they're cranking it out because they want to make money ASAP) or you're incredibly privileged and don't need to worry about devoting a job's worth of time to something that won't offer any kind of income. That is not the vast majority of writers. While most know we won't get rich, we sure would like to see some kind of return, if possible. Writing to market isn't a sin. I mean, penny dreadfuls were written to market.
What makes it more complicated is the fact that Amazon, which dominates publishing, is both exploitative and poorly regulated. Arguably one of the best ways to get the attention of readers early in your career, especially for true genre categories like romance and fantasy, is to publish your first books in KU. Your book is accessible to a huge range of people who won't spend $5 on an unknown author's book, but will "borrow" it on KU. However, aside from the other things that make KU sketchy, it also pays by the page read. So if you're an author, it's tempting to stretch your 300-page book to 350 pages, creating a flabby read. OR you convert your single fic into three books.
Again--all Amazon issues, all existed before BookTok, all will exist when it withers into nothing. Or into Tumblr. We'll see.
--I would also say, because again, let us be real and admit again that the BookTok books people largely get upset about are romance, that we're in a romance boom that is proooooobably beginning its downturn, and would exist with or without BookTok. Because romance does tend to do exceptionally well in times of great crisis. Check out when the 50 Shades books took off. Think about what was happening then. Now? We are crisis-ier than ever. Romance took off during the pando, and publishing grabbed it and ran with it and slapped "romance" labels on books that are objectively not romance (see: Colleen Hoover's biggest books, but publishing sure would like you to think otherwise).
Obviously, publishing marketing books that aren't in-genre within a genre that's currently popular predates the pandemic and BookTok and all that. It's certainly happened with romance before (hello: Diana Gabaldon).
--So the thing is, I think people would be upset about all of these issues whether or not BookTok existed. BookTok is just the monster they can blame at the moment.
And there are a lot of shitty romance novels out there, don't get me wrong. (Also: a lot of amazing ones.) In general, there are a lot of shitty indie books, because anything can indeed be published within indie.
On the flip side, indie is an equalizer that I would never, ever have taken away. Because for all that we can uphold the "standards" of the old publishing system a) they still let a lot of subpar shit get published across genre b) publishing is uh, super straight and white. Indie empowers people who typically would not be allowed a seat at the table (primarily poc and people who aren't cis/het) to publish their books without interference from the white people who run Big 5 publishing. And I think that's pretty fucking great. And I think that any amount of influx or low quality books is worth it if we have that outlet available.
Let me acknowledge--BookTok? Skews heavily towards white reads about M/F (and to a lesser extent M/M) pairings. I won't deny that, ever. But to me, a lot of the language surrounding these types of posts and vids about BookTok are actually about indie. If the worst that comes from indie is that I need to make a somewhat bigger effort to find books that work for me... Well, I'm good with that.
--Honestly dude, whenever you get into the hyperbolic "I would've read this at 13", "this is like Wattpad" thing, I do have to wonder about how well-read a person is. Because that's such basic, meaningless critique. What does it even mean? Wattpad is a website. Yes, there are certain types of content that tend to be more popular there. I also know of an author who's been published across a wide variety of genres and won a Lambda Literary Award and posted some shit she'd written on Wattpad... why? Accessibility? Shits and giggles? I don't know. I don't really care.
(It's Tiffany Reisz, by the way, and the stuff she's made available on Wattpad is fire.)
It's also just so incredibly edgelord to act as if what 13-year-olds read is inherently low quality, that again, the critique begins to lose merit to me because I have to wonder about the experience of the original poster and their relation to their experiences. When I was 13, my favorite book was Wuthering Heights. I also went to see Twilight like, 5 times in the theater and owned several copies of each Twilight book. 13-year-olds can have vast experiences and tastes, like anyone. So again... this kind of criticism means fuck all and just suggests a level of shame that I find clouds an individual's ability to give good critique. Are you looking at shit objectively when you're comparing it to things you clearly once enjoyed and are ashamed to admit you enjoy? It confuses me.
--And maybe people's standards are "I just want to feel good when consuming something". I don't... super care if that's the case. Do some of the books people love read as... garbage... in terms of quality to me? Yeah. Do I worry much about their standards clogging up the publishing market? No.
--Let us also be super clear: the books people often consider "quality literature" (professionally edited, often not super genre) are not competing in the indie marketplace. (If they were, they'd absolutely get crushed, but that's another thing--I mean, how much can you really force people to open something they're just not interested in unless you have a trad publishing house's marketing team behind it?)
And when we look at the trad marketplace... I mean. The high lit books that fewer people organically want to open just of their own volition? Are able to happen, in part, because genre fiction pays the bills. I mean again--look at romance. Nora Roberts sells more books than God, her publisher reaps the benefits, and her publisher has the money to pay for a book called like "The Secrets of Fruit Flies" which is about a confused libertarian college professor discovering a secret crack in the moon, and critics love it and ultimately it's about the Vietnam War or something. The house can also afford to throw all the marketing power behind that book, because they're using BookTok to push their commercial work AND find them indie books to acquire.)
(And of course, there are books people consider "high quality" that sell a lot of copies in trad. Often these are YA books. Often, I don't actually personally consider them high quality, but that is the issue we run into when we discuss quality and standards and the incredible subjectiveness of.... all of the above. One series I can think of that is frequently held up as a standard of quality... well. I enjoyed it in the beginning. Let us say that as the books continued to release and the quality, in my opinion, dropped steeply--my hunger for them dipped. But again, such is the nature of standards. I could tell you why I became less and less impressed with those books, beyond "I didn't like them". However, my reasons, however much I can back them intellectually, will never be objective. Art never is.)
--So basically: we blame BookTok for ~ruining publishing~ when a) I don't think the content is ruined, I just think you as the reader have to be more discerning when finding things that work for you b) I think these critiques are more about coming for genre work that has always been derided by those who prefer certain types of litfic, regardless of BookTok c) publishing is doing just fine imploding itself without the help of BookTok d) the issues people blame on BookTok existed before BookTok and will exist after BookTok, and it's honestly kind of insane to me to think that a single group of people that has existed for so little time could so dramatically change publishing, when KDP has existed since... what....? 2009? And trad publishing is still figuring out how to respond to the absolute game changer it turned out to be.
And ultimately, again--I'm really not super worried, because the amount of good books getting released hasn't changed (you do have to look harder for them, yes). If anything, there are more of them out there. But the trade off is that less qualified people are also publishing more. They aren't always publishing For The Art. Amazon doesn't have its house in order, so you will also have to contend with AI.
But also: this is a very boring critique, familiarize yourself with your own tastes to ensure that you pick up books you enjoy more often than not, and otherwise... Look to trad publishing and Amazon with your critiques of the industry as whole, if your issues are truly INDUSTRY-DRIVEN, and worry less about what other people enjoy otherwise.
Working was out of the question. He had retrieved his spectacles and put them on to read through some reports from his estate managers -- and then he had caught a glimpse of Matilda's face.
Her mouth had fallen open. "You... wear spectacles?" she said faintly.
He glared at her through them. "Yes. To read. Because I am old."
He had, in fact, worn spectacles to read since he had first learned to read, but he did not tell her that.
She had nodded, her lips still parted, the daft woman. And then he'd felt the heat of her fixed stare as he'd tried to work. It was impossible not to feel it. He rubbed the back of his neck, stared blindly at the reports, and then yanked off his spectacles and shoved them brutally into his jacket pocket.
Matilda had let out the tiniest, breathiest sigh.
In Which Matilda Halifax Learns the Value of Restraint by Alexandra Vasti
I’m currently reading Alexandra Vasti‘s In Which Matilda Halifax Learns the Value of Restraint and I cannot wait for her full length debut next year oh lord
Our mmc Ashford just got out the reading glasses for some light work and had to ("brutally"!!) pack them away again until further notice because Matilda would not stop staring at him. Just getting absolutely hot and bothered for this old man with his spectacles that she starts making him uncomfortable. Real
Finished up and all I have to say is that this was lovely beyond words. I grew so fond of the characters, their dynamic was delightful and real and honestly I can’t find the right words to do this justice 💀 I just genuinely liked it a LOT.
I’m currently reading Alexandra Vasti‘s In Which Matilda Halifax Learns the Value of Restraint and I cannot wait for her full length debut next year oh lord
Our mmc Ashford just got out the reading glasses for some light work and had to ("brutally"!!) pack them away again until further notice because Matilda would not stop staring at him. Just getting absolutely hot and bothered for this old man with his spectacles that she starts making him uncomfortable. Real
I’m currently reading Alexandra Vasti‘s In Which Matilda Halifax Learns the Value of Restraint and I cannot wait for her full length debut next year oh lord
Our mmc Ashford just got out the reading glasses for some light work and had to ("brutally"!!) pack them away again until further notice because Matilda would not stop staring at him. Just getting absolutely hot and bothered for this old man with his spectacles that she starts making him uncomfortable. Real
I’m currently reading Alexandra Vasti‘s In Which Matilda Halifax Learns the Value of Restraint and I cannot wait for her full length debut next year oh lord
Our mmc Ashford just got out the reading glasses for some light work and had to ("brutally"!!) pack them away again until further notice because Matilda would not stop staring at him. Just getting absolutely hot and bothered for this old man with his spectacles that she starts making him uncomfortable. Real
I’ve also started to seriously read more manga this year and two I have not stopped thinking about are The Artist and the Beast by Coda and Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You by Jinushi. Verrrry different dynamics but both so good.
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