Booktok: A Beginner's Guide

Asha Denhoy

If you have been in a bookstore in the past few years, you have probably walked past a table with a sign that says ‘BookTok.’ The books on this table probably consist of a mix of romance books with cute cartoon covers and fantasy novels with complex symbols and dragons. BookTok, the reading subgenre of Tiktok, has changed the publishing industry. More and more, books are marketed by their ‘tropes’, and in my opinion, the quality of novels has drastically decreased.

In 2020, during the pandemic, I, like millions of others, was looking for something to read that would help distract me from the things that were going on in the world. I stumbled upon a video of a creator listing out recent books that they had read. After going down a rabbit hole, I saw more and more creators recommending the same books. Many suggested books by popular fantasy author Sarah J Mass, or some popular romance novels like It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover. These were the original ‘BookTok books.’ These were novels that huge amounts of people were reading, and posting their reactions online. They would talk about the romance, or fantasy elements, and usually also the attractiveness of the main love interest. Something a majority of these books shared, a female centered story. Many of the novels were written by women, with women at the center, and the BookTok community was made up of majority women. Women were leading the charge of recommending books with romantic plots, and fantasy men who raised their standards. This caught the eyes of many publishing agencies.

Source: Wikipedia

In 2023, Rebecca Yarros published her adult fantasy novel Fourth Wing about a girl who becomes a dragon rider (there is a lot of other plot but you get the point). This book took over TikTok. Every other video I came across was someone ranting about how great this book was. I read it, and also enjoyed it, and then I started seeing trends. Publishing companies started to market their novels as ‘for readers who enjoyed Fourth Wing.’ The popularity of this series caught the eyes of these publishers. Authors started writing trope heavy books that, in my opinion, lacked any plot. These books got published quickly, often with editorial mistakes, because authors and their teams knew that they would sell.

Source: Red Tower Books

While some books that have gone viral on TikTok are not great, it has also allowed for a rise in reading classics. People were rediscovering novels that are considered classics, but were not widely read. Books like Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein even got recent adaptations, and in terms of the Emerald Fennell film - many book girlies, as they have coined themselves, went to the theatres to see what was marketed as ‘the greatest love story of all time.’ This article is not a review of the film, so I will keep my opinions to myself, but people were seeing the movie and then reading the book, and noticing the staunch differences between them. While some are misunderstanding the point of the books, others are discovering genres that they may have never read before.

The rise of BookTok has also led to a rise in the number of readers, and while some of the books might not be the  most intellectual, it has opened the eyes of millions of people to reading and novels, and for this, we have to be grateful. More people are reading books, and therefore opening their minds to experiences and stories that they have never seen before, and it is quite a great sight to see.