Tropes, Trends, and TBRs: How BookTok is Shaping a New Era of Literature

Before the rise of BookTok and social media, publishing a book was difficult. New authors had to first find an agent to help the book reach editors at publishing houses. After the book had gone through the editing process and the rights were sold to the publishing company, the book could be finally be published. Though self-publication (the process of writing, designing, marketing, and publishing a book by oneself without a publishing house) did exist, marketing conventions before social media didn’t typically allow for self-published books to take off in popularity. Liz Noland, a school library media coordinator who previously worked in book publicity at Penguin Young Readers Group and Macmillan Publishers from 2005-2009, described what self-publishing was like before social media and BookTok. 

“In those days, it was incredibly rare for a self-published book to break out and become a bestseller,” Noland said.  “It was typically a word-of-mouth situation, and then the rights would inevitably be snapped up by a traditional publisher that could help expand sales channels.”

However, as social media expanded and BookTok was created, self-published books were able to break through and become bestsellers. In this new age of publishing, Colleen Hoover has become what many consider the archetype of the self-published author gone viral because of BookTok. When Hoover first wrote and self-published her debut book Slammed in 2012, it didn’t immediately top the bestseller list. It took years for her to gain fans and enough revenue to become a full-time writer, but even then, she hadn’t reached the levels of fame many associate her with today. It wasn’t until videos of fans reacting to her book It Ends With Us went viral in 2020 and 2021 that her novels reached stratospheric success. Hoover’s books, the majority of which were backlist titles, quickly came to occupy as many as six spots on the New York Times bestseller list. This popularity has continued the last few years, despite critics who claim her books are problematic.

Hoover’s rise to fame isn’t the only one of its kind; many modern authors owe their success to BookTok. BookTok has proven to be a powerful force in the publishing industry, allowing self-published and new authors to reach wide audiences in an industry that traditionally gatekeeps; BookTok has helped those authors fight back against a community to democratize it. However, BookTok’s hold in the publishing community can be a double-edged sword. 

When a book is published through a publishing house, it undergoes the important process of editing. Editing not only catches spelling errors and sentence structure mistakes but also takes into account the plot and structure of the book to help the author create a more well-rounded story. Self-published books miss the vital process of editing, which detracts from the book’s value. Many books that were hastily self-published and subsequently went viral on BookTok contain spelling and grammatical errors and underdeveloped plots with confusing loopholes. Although BookTok has helped self-published authors find success, it has also incentivized new authors to self-publish books that, had they been published the traditional route, likely would still be in the rough draft stage.

The most popular genres on BookTok are undoubtedly romance, fantasy, and young adult fiction, the result of the overwhelming majority of BookTok users being young women. Until the rise of BookTok, these genres (along with the literary opinions and interests of women) were vastly undervalued in the literary community. Although some books in the romance and fantasy genres, such as “Twilight”, have seen immense success because of female readers, it was rare for romance, fantasy, or YA novels to see the success they have today. In BookTok’s beginning stages, the smaller community of new authors and dedicated readers proved to be an effective space for new voices and books to emerge; however, as BookTok has grown in popularity, it may now have the chance to homogenize the industry and lessen readers’ scopes. When Liz Noland was asked if she thought that social media has diversified the reading community, she responded that it both has and hasn’t.

“I think social media has helped publishers understand the popularity of certain genres that did not get as much publicity exposure in traditional media outlets: newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV… Genre fiction like romance, fantasy, and thriller-horror did not get as much coverage as mainstream media, even though they had dedicated readers.” Noland said. “As books in these genres have exploded in their exposure on social media, traditional publishers have realized that the market for these genres is larger than they previously thought and they are absolutely putting more resources into buying, marketing, and printing books in these genres.”

While it’s great to see that women have had such an impact on the literary community, the explosion of the popularity of genre fiction can pressure authors into writing books that fit into clean, organized boxes, therefore lessening the diversity of books. 

As a result, BookTok has seen a rise in shallower, trope-filled stories. A major critique of the BookTok community is that books popular on the app have been reduced to sensationalized, aesthetic-focused, and trope-centered stories. To draw more people into the BookTok community, creators have, knowingly or unknowingly, marketed books based on trends and “tropes.” Tropes are literary devices that convey ideas, concepts, or patterns with a referential meaning. Popular tropes on the app often relate to romance books, with the love interests being marketed as an “enemies-to-lovers” couple or a “grumpy/sunshine” duo. These tropes are used to market and write books because they catch the eye of readers with short attention spans. Tropes are constantly fluctuating in and out of popularity and can be discarded after their time limit is up; much like fast fashion, tropes trend in the BookTok community before being thrown out for something shinier and more alluring. BookTok critics argue that as books have been boiled down to these small nuances, BookTok is reducing popular literature to cookie-cutter, shallow stories. When Noland was asked about her opinion on this critique, her response was similar. 

“As a librarian and voracious reader, I’m constantly searching for that special experience of reading a book or author for the first time and discovering something different than what I’ve read before,” Noland said. “But both traditional publishers and self-published authors are inclined to follow the formula of what has already been successful on capturing social media attention.”

Tropes aside, BookTok can actually reduce readers’ scopes because of the TikTok algorithm. Simply put, the TikTok algorithm collects information about videos that users engage with and continues to recommend similar videos to increase engagement. If, on BookTok, a user engages with videos related to fantasy books, they will be proffered more such videos and won’t be exposed to other genres. This could become an issue for both readers and authors, as readers lack awareness of books outside their limited scopes and authors struggle to reach readers outside of the fans of that particular genre.