By Sharanya Tissera
Saturday afternoons are meant for a languid mood and an endless doomscroll through sometimes randomly generated TikTok or Instagram reels. But have you ever come across a reel teasing the plot of a novel similar to a fanfic you read in middle school? It was a regular Saturday morning, same as any other when I accidentally discovered the literary media iceberg that was book Tiktoks, or familiarly known as booktok. If this is your first time hearing the term “booktok”, it refers to a subcommunity of readers, writers, and creators on the social media app TikTok. With the tag #booktok garnering around 224.6B views on the app, the community has rapidly transformed the publishing industry and skyrocketed its sales. A majority of young adults and teens create content about literature by using varying trends, such as filming themselves crying after finishing a novel, reacting to out-of-context scenes or quotes, or posting compilations of aesthetic photos that glamourise a novel. If you ever walk into an Indigo or a Barnes & Noble, you might find displays or bookcases entirely dedicated to trending novels on booktok, such as Icebreaker by Hannah Grace.
Via Tiktok, accounts from left to right: @cassiesbooktok, @giuliasbookcorner and @sivanreads
The entertaining element of booktok comes from the several trends that creatively incorporate multiple aesthetic subcultures boosting the popularity of the community further. There is an aesthetic novel for every unique subculture, for instance dark academia, which idealises higher education at schools like Oxford or Cambridge. Some popular books within this niche community can revolve around the cultish elitism of academia, like The Secret History by Donna Tartt, or the chaotic sisterhood of a creative-fiction club, like Bunny by Mona Awad. Booktok offers suggestions based on any niche community you belong to, a key quality of this literary community is their flexibility and openness to any and every kind of taste!
Kat McKenna, a marketing and brand consultant, explains why the community built on these short videos is essential to the publishing industry. “These ‘snapshot’ visual trailers are making books cinematic in a way that publishers have been trying to do with marketing book trailers for a really long time. But the way TikTok users are creating imagery inspired by what they are reading is so simple and so clever. It’s that thing of bringing the pages to life, showing what you get from a book beyond words” she tells The Guardian.
Amongst the rising popularity of many authors and novels, one genre seems to be staying in the spotlight for good; romance. The community for romance novels on booktok is huge, and subgenres within the genre are increasing in popularity, such as dark romance, romantasy (fantasy + romance), and classic period romances. The content for these categories seems endless, books are constantly recommended and tarnished on romance booktok. There are some key aspects to a romance novel that achieve instant popularity in the booktok community, that is, the level of spice, an online term, ABC reports, refering to high-stakes drama, brutal action and sex.
Popular romance-genre books on booktok. ©Sharanya Tissera
Users will often promote books by rating the amount and/or quality of spicy scenes in a novel, based on these ratings demands for those books will go wild. Colleen Hoover is one of the most popular names on booktok and hearing it usually incites strong reactions, both positive and negative. Her romance novels created quite an eruption in the publishing world. The addictive element behind Hoover’s novels is her fast-paced and easy-to-read writing style, a 336-page novel sounds dreadful if you’re not a bookworm, but Hoover’s It Starts With Us sold over $2M units in 2022 (Publisher’s Weekly).
Hoover’s fans, self-proclaimed “Co-Horts”, praise the content of each novel especially due to its character-driven plot. With likeable characters who are also relatable to a modern audience, Hoover creates a world that readers can escape to when reality becomes a bit heavy. Popular themes in her novels are romance, mental health, self-discovery, abuse and addiction, some of those themes are expected although worrisome for some readers. While corny romantic lines were the butt of the joke at the beginning of Hoover’s rise to fame, her promotion of a lack of self-worth for women and toxic masculinity soon followed. Her novels incline towards a dramatised showing of domestic abuse and family trauma, there is also little regard for the well-being of female characters and their empowerment. While harmless to most readers, the lack of support for the women in Hoover’s novels can create an unhealthy understanding of what a relationship should look like to younger people.
TikTok creates a space to be shared with users of all ages, content like Hoover’s that can be read as satirical and humorous to an older teen and adult audience may not be perceived the same by younger audiences. Popular tropes within the community, such as enemies-to-lovers, can be twisted from being harmless academic rivals to put up with the physical abuse of a criminal for the sake of the “plot”. Yet again, tropes that would be understood by older audiences can easily be misinterpreted by young girls. Originally, the trope of enemies-to-lovers was popularised through older novels such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy despise each other based on poor first impressions but ultimately fall in love, the plot is riveting and fans of the novel are in love with the idea of falling for one’s enemy.
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy ©filmgrab
While a harmless trope in theory, some popular novels on booktok diverge from creating healthy relationships to portraying abuse and toxic romances as the standard instead. An author popular for her enemies-to-lovers plots is Sarah J. Maas, who wrote the infamous fantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR). Based in a fantasy world, a teenage human girl, Feyre, discovers that the reality of being a fae (a fairy person) is far different from the fairytales. After committing a crime, she is taken captive by a mysterious fae and hostility soon turns to romance. While there are multiple complaints about the content of the book, the age rating has come under fire for being accessible to the wrong audience. ACOTAR includes explicit sex scenes that should be for adult audiences, Maas claimed in 2019 that the series would be under the “new adults” genre for those ages 19-25. However, the marketing under the genre did not work out and ACOTAR claimed a space on YA shelves, meant for ages 14-18. There is a great difference between being under either genre in terms of selling units, but there’s a greater difference morally when you allow a 14-year-old to read something sexually explicit.
The novels in the ACOTAR series also contain their problematic content besides the pandering to young girls. Similar to Colleen Hoover’s books, Maas’ includes the themes of abuse, addiction and mental illness in the series to develop the stories of the characters and push the plot further. However, simply adding these themes to the novel won’t do much if they’re not applied well and this is a common complaint seen about the ACOTAR series. The series introduces the character of Nesta, the protagonist’s mean older sister and her dynamic with her family isn’t the greatest. Both characters struggle with mental illness, yet Maas portrays the protagonist’s battle with depression in a positive light because she is a “good” character who does not let the depression affect other people. But, when Nesta struggles with her mental health, she’s seen as having an attitude and being rude. Maas tries to give Nesta a redemption arc later in the series though the attempt flopped with the lack of plot planning on Maas’ part. Readers picked up on the obvious contrast and found that the portrayal of mental illness in the novel was both patronising and very surface-level.
Above all, Nesta is also a victim of abuse and is constantly pushed around to do things she doesn’t want to do. While Maas’ fans claim that the men in the series are feminists and proudly support the female characters, they’re often seen doing more harm than good. Plus, there’s a lot of double standards for the characters. While being a female sexual predator, in the case of characters like Amarantha and Ianthe, is punishable by death, male predators like Rhys are given a redemption arc instead. Rhys was Amarantha’s victim, yet he makes a victim out of the protagonist which doesn’t make much sense. Survivors of abuse never become abusers, and the glorification of Rhy’s actions gives the wrong message to younger audiences. Maas downplays the abusive behaviours of Rhys by making him look like an overprotective bad boy, when in reality he’s manipulative and controlling. These types of actions can easily be overlooked by an excited teen who’s caught up in the action, and subconsciously, they might look for these behaviours in a partner.
Meera Kumar of The Michigan Daily offers insight into the reaction to Maas’ novels and the positive portrayal of abuse, “It may seem silly or pointless to analyze these relationships so deeply, but these books make a tangible impact, especially on their young readers. Young readers, more than anyone else, internalize ideas about romance and sex… I’ve seen countless TikToks where people half-jokingly say they’re unsure of how to get into a relationship without being mean to someone, in hopes that they receive their own Enemies to Lovers romance. In their eagerness to appreciate the trope, many readers eschew or ignore worrying plotlines.”
Via Tiktok, accounts from left to right: @quinthebooks, @grapiedeltaco, @mrsrhyslarsen and @thetaintedhearti
A quick scroll through TikTok after searching up Maas’ novels finds that most users complain about the lack of smut or spice in ACOTAR, rather than the toxic ideals for romance. The tag “toxic romance books” instantly pulls up videos of users sharing lists of novels that have obsessive infatuations, cheating or relationships with the mafia, to name a few. While these interests may remain only in the realm of booktok, these recommendations still have the power to normalise relationships that should not be condoned for their younger audience i.e. large age gaps, tolerating emotional manipulation, isolating oneself from social circles for their lover.
Booktok has the power to help authors connect with larger audiences and can help publishing companies promote up-and-coming novels at a faster rate than written reviews. While building up a community that promotes the healthy habit of reading, sometimes booktok does go overboard with romance recommendations that are either too mature or toxic for their young audience. A social media platform, of course, cannot exist without both negative and positive media, but there should at least be an age rating for the type of content included in novels and dissuasion from celebrating manipulative relationships.
Booktok has the power to help authors connect with larger audiences and gain the recognition they need to sell copies of their novels. A promising and well-liked feature of apps like TikTok is outreach, and many people become famous overnight for an array of talents and skills. The audience behind this attention varies in age and knowledge, and the type of information being funneled out to them can sometimes be harmful. Authors like Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. Maas write a lot of content indulging in themes that are too violent or sexually explicit for a young teen to read. Yet, this sort of content will inevitably show up on their feed and be seen as a “harmless book”. How can you prevent a young teen from accessing novels that are for older audiences? Is such a thing possible in this day and age when all forms of media are accessible to anyone?
Marketing novels with accurate age ratings on TikTok and Instagram can be a start for novels that are gaining popularity. A simple “14-18” or “mature audiences only” can clarify who should and should not read the novel. For books being sold in stores like Indigo, workers should clarify for parents when they see their young teens browsing certain aisles that some books aren’t age-appropriate. Maas’s age rating dilemma with ACOTAR can be harmful to a child by exposing them to sexual content at a young age, but parents might not know this information. While these methods seem a bit over-the-top and old-school, there’s only so much you can do to control the media. While the romanticisation of abuse and toxic romances have been hyped up for decades now, the ages that are exposed to it are getting lower and lower. While booktok has created some of the biggest authors of this decade, it has also created a generation of young readers who believe some of the wildest tropes imaginable. The standard today for high schoolers might be to date a dark fairy prince with anger issues, when a decade ago it was a brooding vampire who shined in the sun. While tastes never change, the appropriate ages shouldn’t either and kids in middle school should be allowed to enjoy a sex-free novel that doesn’t glamourise domestic violence.
References:
“#booktok.” TikTok/BookTok. Accessed February 9, 2024. https://www.tiktok.com/tag/BookTok.
Dellatto, Marisa. “Colleen Hoover Dominating 2022 with 6 of Year’s 10 Best-Selling Books.” Forbes, December 26, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2022/12/21/colleen-hoover-dominating-2022-with-6-of-years-10-best-selling-books/?sh=6e4ea275186b.
Flood, Alison. “The Rise of BookTok: Meet the Teen Influencers Pushing Books up the Charts.” The Guardian, June 25, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/25/the-rise-of-booktok-meet-the-teen-influencers-pushing-books-up-the-charts.
Kumar, Meera S. “Unpacking Booktok’s ‘enemies to Lovers’ Obsession.” The Michigan Daily, April 20, 2021. https://www.michigandaily.com/arts/unpacking-booktoks-enemies-to-lovers-obsession/.
Riga, Jessica. “Spice, Escapism and a ‘Refreshing Lack of Shame’: Why Romance Novels Thrive on TikTok and Dominate Bestseller Lists.” ABC News, December 26, 2023. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-27/why-romance-and-romantasy-novels-are-so-popular-on-tiktok/103198518.
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