Romance BookTok
Show Notes
The Reformed Rakes tackle BookTok. Often touted as the savior of Barnes & Noble (questionable), and a driver of romance book sales (unclear). We review several articles making those claims, including from NPR and The Guardian, and make our Citation Needed loud and clear. These articles often reference authors who say romance readers feel less shame about sex and that happily ever after has “come back in fashion.” What stats these articles do offer mostly comes from NPD BookScan: a subscription service accessible only to publishers.
References
Chels’ Substack: BookTok, Explained
The Guardian View on BookTok: A Welcome Disrupter of the Status Quo
The London Review of Books: BookTok
Femchaos Podcast: TikTokBookTalk with Leigh Stein
Public Books: Where is all the Book Data?
Nielsen BookData: The bestselling power of TikTok
The New York Times: How TikTok Reads Your Mind
Electric Literature: Can We Still Judge a Romance Novel by its Cover?
Publishers Weekly: Barnes & Noble Pushes Ahead in 2023
The New York Times: Can Britain’s Top Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble?
Transcript
Chels: Welcome To Reformed Rakes, a romance podcast steeped in dissipation. My name is Chels, I’m the writer of The Loose Cravat, a romance newsletter on Substack, a book collector, and a BookToker under the name chels_ebooks.
Emma: I’m Emma, I am a law librarian writing about justice and historical romance at Restorative Romance on Substack. I’m also on tiktok under the name emmkick.
Beth: My name is Beth and I’m on BookTok under the name bethhaymondreads.
Chels: So today we're talking about BookTok. “BookTok” is a word that has a sort of mythological power when it comes to journalistic trend pieces. If Tiktok itself is the “dancing app for teens,” then BookTok is the corner where we shimmy to multi-genre author Colleen Hoover, the place where youth and a written artistic medium intersect to form publishing’s most desirable marketing group.
Trend pieces attempt to attach meaning to a changing landscape, and they’ve all sort of clung to BookTok as the reason for a seismic shift in reading habits, book purchasing, and publishing trends post-2020. Barry Pierce in British GQ says that “there is an uncanny falseness behind it all, a showy nothingness that only approximates bibliophilia.” In the London Review of Books, Malin Hay writes that on BookTok, “there is a worry that we’re all being taken for a ride. What makes CoHo better than all the writers of commercial fiction who don’t make it?”
There are also those that sing BookTok’s praises, particularly where it comes to romance sales: Deanna Swartz and Meaghann Collin Sullivan write in NPR that “Gen Z is driving sales of romance books to the top of bestseller lists,” citing the uber-success of Hoover and Emily Henry as examples of youthful purchasing power. The Guardian, also touting Hoover as a success story, calls BookTok a “welcome disrupter to the Status quo.”
If you can’t tell from our introductions, Emma, Beth, and I all met on BookTok, the corner of TikTok dedicated to books and reviews. We all have the overlapping interest in historical romance and a similar sort of understated review style, and commenting effusively onto each other's videos turned into a group chat that turned into this podcast.
Why did you join BookTok?
Beth: Nobody in my offline life wanted to talk about books the way I wanted to. I did a few videos, and then started posting more regularly, even though I primarily read romance books. Say, if one of my siblings asks what I read lately. I will pull the latest non fiction book out. Not that they think badly of romance as a genre, it’s only that it would be me talking at them. Plus, I do like how tiktok is set up as a platform. Mostly.
Emma: When I first posted a video about what I was reading, I was still mostly seeing jokes and dancing and Swifttok. I scrolled back and the first video I posted about reading romance was about my spreadsheet that I used to keep track of my reading in June 2021. I went from reading almost no novels to a novel every other day when I started historical romance, so I was really voracious, but for this one specific thing. So I do think I was making videos about what I was reading before I knew what “booktok” was. I didn’t use the hashtag “booktok” until a few months later!
Chels: I made a few videos on TikTok kind of trying to figure it out. But I didn't really start making BookTok videos until they raised the time limit to three minutes. It used to be that all of your videos had to be under one minute, which is not something I could ever successfully do.
I made a video showing off two Patricia Gaffney book covers that got more attention than I was used to, and I sort of realized that this was a place where I could talk about my hobby, and it just kind of took off from there.
But of course BookTok brings up a lot of big feelings both on social media and in the offline world. Why do you think BookTok is so polarizing?
Beth: I think everyone is rushing to decipher what they’re seeing on TikTok with little evidence to back up what they say. So then these interpretations are at odds with each other because everyone interprets trends or outside data differently. Tiktok keeps its algorithm a secret, like most companies. Although we do have an article from the New York Times published in December 2021. It confirms what you’d think where watch time / time on site is paramount, while being scant on anything specific. It’s in their best interest to keep that information close to the vest.
Emma: Not unlike romance, I think BookTok creates a place where the in-group feels immediately aggrieved and defensive because it is dismissed by the hegemonic out-group so frequently with the exact same shallow criticisms over and over again. But then this means the defenses are the same over and over again and we never really get anywhere. And this just furthers the polarization.
Chels: The thing you’ll hear in every BookTok trend piece is new book sales. This is also something we see as a valuation for romance as a genre, that it’s a billion dollar industry and thus worthy of our notice. But what if neither of those things are true, or at least something we can prove?
Andrea Martucci from the Shelf Love podcast has pointed out both on her Substack and on Twitter that both the “billion dollar” and “best-selling genre” claims are based on old, unverifiable data. Similarly, claims about BookTok’s purchasing power are dubious. Before we get into that, let’s talk about marketing on BookTok, and what publishers are doing to drive book sales.
So Leigh Stein, who is the author of Self Care, a novel that satirizes girlboss feminism and the wellness industry, decided to defend BookTok in her LitHub article, “BookTok is Good, Actually,” but something that I found very frustrating was how that defense hinged on BookTok’s purchasing power. Stein comes to the conclusion that authors need to have their pulse on TikTok if they want to be successful, and that sad, literary snobs who avoid TikTok are clinging to their intellectual bonafides to their detriment. It was a polarizing piece that got a lot of, what I believe is deserving backlash, but this made me think about how marketing actually works on BookTok.
Stein has fashioned herself as a sort of BookTok whisperer. She has a class on BookTok for Writers, and frequently tweets anecdotes about BookTok that kind of feel like an archeological study. I haven’t paid for Stein’s courses, so there could be more to it, but when she discussed the backlash to her piece on the FemChaos podcast, she said part of her TikTok strategy was to send physical copies of her books to BookTokers. This is essentially how publishers always market books upon release, but Stein, who is published by Penguin Random House, sent these books two years after Self Care was published, of her own accord.
Let’s get into ARCs! Let's talk about ARCs. So ARCs are Advanced Reader Copies, which are distributed in advance of a book release to reviewers in hopes that they’ll make content. This is the go-to method on BookTok, because it makes frontlist titles’ success feel word–of-mouth, while in reality the more wealthy publishers have a wider distribution.
BookTok is uniquely suited to the ARC process because of how ephemeral TikTok videos are. The app is specifically designed to make you feel as though you need to constantly post. TikTok also pushes your videos to the FYP, or “For You Page,” which is a place where people who don’t currently follow you can see your videos. The more engagement you get, the more likely you are to end on the FYP. When you make videos about a book that a lot of people are already talking about (possibly because they all received the same ARC), that video is much more likely to end up on the FYP.
So how do you think ARCs and book boxes affect what is perceived as a BookTok book?
Emma: The first thing I think about when it comes to ARCs is sort of this internal community pressure to make content with ARCs. There are a lot of videos about sort of rules of how we treat ARCs, viewing ARCs as a privilege or a gift, or even a transaction for which something is owed is something that I see a lot of videos about creating these sort of rules of behavior around these books that are really speculative marketing on the part of the authors.
Beth: Right. A flood of ARCs from publishers can drive the conversation that week on BookTok. If you have several videos pop up about the same book repeatedly as a creator, you feel pressured to join the conversation. I feel that pressure sometimes because I do want to add to the conversation, or know what's going on, so I can imagine other people might feel the same.
It feels like when publishers flood us with ARCs, they're trying to mimic the organic thing that happens on BookTok where someone recommends a series or a book they love, and it catches on to everyone else, and that is fun. Like, when your whole group all reads the same thing together, and you talk about it. I think though it's good to question, who's influencing the conversation?
Chels: I have this article I want to talk about. It's called Where is all the Book Data? by Melanie Walsh published on PublicBooks.org. She is a data scientist and literary scholar. She went looking for book sales status to see what books people were reading during the pandemic, only to find that most of it is proprietary. She says that "What I learned was that the single most influential data in the publishing industry—which, every day, determines book contracts and authors’ lives—is basically inaccessible to anyone beyond the industry."
According to Walsh, BookScan is the underlying source for most book sale information that is given to journalists. What is shared with them is not comprehensive, granular data -- it paints a broad picture. A BookScan subscription can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $750,000, but academics and journalists, basically, anyone working outside the industry, is barred from using BookScan.
Walsh covers checkout data gathered by libraries and their importance, but we’re going to focus on the BookScan part of the equation. The prevalence and usage of BookScan means it’s “also used to determine the size of an advance, to dictate the scale of a marketing campaign or book tour, and to help sell subsidiary rights like translation rights or book club rights.”
Walsh spoke to Anne Trubek, the founder of independent press Belt Publishing. Trubek called BookScan a “conservative force” in publishing and the data “encourages publishers to keep recycling the same kinds of books that sold well in the past.”
BookScan relies on sales history of an author if it exists and sales history of “comparable, or ‘comp’ titles. Then publishers use BookScan data to determine the size of the advance, the scale of marketing or book tour, and to help determine “subsidiary rights like book club or translation rights.”
Then publishers use BookScan data to determine the size of the advance the scale of marketing or book tour and help determine, quote subsidiary rights, like the book club or translation rights
One last point, BookScan’s data is incomplete. They claim “to capture 85 percent of physical book purchases from retailers (including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and independent bookstores) and 80 percent of top ebook sales.” This doesn’t account for books sold at events, conferences, specialty retailers, and libraries.
Please check out this article. We'll link to it in the show notes, and it's worth the read.
Emma: Walsh points out that the Seattle Public Library is one of the only libraries that tracks and releases the anonymized data of checkouts and references the possibility of other libraries joining the effort. SPL’s project is a part of a larger open data project that includes many of Seattle’s municipal institutions. Libraries can be reticent (rightfully, I think) to release circulation data, even in anonymized form. It would be anonymized to some extent already--every library I have worked in, the moment you return a book, that book record leaves your record, there is no library end storage of check out history attached to a user.
But circulation can also be wielded against a library when they are not allowed to frame the data themselves. By the nature of libraries, there’s a lot of access that doesn’t show up in circulation numbers--parents who read to their kids at a library, someone who has shared a library book with their family, or just someone who uses the resources of a library in the library! I’m wary of libraries opening up their data to fill this gap created by publishing obfuscating data they already have.
Still the most interesting thing that I saw in the SPL’s data that I looked at directly was just how popular their city wide book club was (Seattle Reads). Running since 1998, the books selected for the last three years have exceeded total circulation for Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us.
Beth: Walsh's article is great for going over who owns book data, and she reiterates how we need it to be free, open, and interoperable. If they restrict access to the data, then they spin the story, making it difficult for others to interrogate its validity.
One of BookScan’s primary motives is to prove it's worth to publishers not to provide the best, most comprehensive data. These two objectives might line up at times, but take all the data from them with a huge grain of salt.
So how do we apply this information specifically to romance? I think Andrea from Shelf Love is right, and that we are kind of overinvested in proving that romance is valuable by tying it to some sort of grandiose monetary value, as though purchasing power is a sign of worth. I don’t think we need to resort to this!
So we're gonna take a look at two articles that tout romance BookTok’s purchasing power, one from the Guardian and the other from NPR.
We'll start with The love boom: why romance novels are the biggest they've been for 10 years. And this was published by the Guardian in December of 2022.
Emma: This article covers why they think romance novels are selling more in the past ten years. The tagline: “The books that might once have been hidden in bedside drawers are flying off the shelves – and young readers are the driving force. How did happily ever after come back in fashion?” Authors Lizzie Blackburn, Emily Henry and Beth O’Leary give quotes. Nielsen BookData offers their data as proof we’ve seen a year-over-year rise in romance book sales. We can’t do without a mention of Colleen Hoover’s meteoric rise and TikTok getting the credit for boosting the popularity of It Ends With Us.
Emily Henry says it’s common to see videos where someone has a positive reaction to a book’s sex scene on TikTok. She adds younger readers are “moving away from the idea that desires – especially women’s desires – are innately shameful.”
The Guardians frames the less shame about sex by adding: “This change is reflected in the figures. Instead of buying ebooks, generally thought of as easier to read in private, young people are shifting to print. Nearly two thirds of romance books bought by 13-24 year olds in the first half of the year were print formats, compared with under 40% for all other age groups.”
The article touches on a few other points about how romance novels have evolved. Then in this Turbulent Era, romance books offer a happily ever after readers crave.
Beth: Okay, so two things I wanted to touch on about this article. First, why is this article going to authors for discussion on TikTok? Now this isn't bad per se, but in an article about why romance novels are selling more. They're not the people I’d ask, unless I were to ask about their specific sales.
Sometimes I think journalists go way too broad on who they interview, and it's mostly because they're in the same industry, so everyone must have the same industry knowledge.
It's like, if I went to an orthopedic surgeon and asked for their insight into the pandemic. Technically they're a doctor, but they probably haven’t thought about pulmonology or related field since medical school. Public health is its own field. Picking people adjacent to a field, or even in the field doesn't mean you're getting the best information
There are other relevant people, booksellers, marketers, social media experts, I'd ask over an author about “what the hell is BookTok? Why did we sell more books this year?”
Then how they back up Emily Henry saying younger people are less shameful about sex with “Nearly two thirds of romance books bought by 13-24s in the first half of the year were print formats.” Which could be true, yet no other expert or study is cited to back this claim.
I could also make a theory sound plausible. Perhaps younger people find more value in book collecting, leading to the increase in print book sales. Again, I don’t have anything to back that up but neither does the less shame about sex theory. Like most things in life it’s probably a mix of things.
Chels: I think these authors who get interviewed for these pieces naturally have a positive view of TikTok, because their books are billed as BookTok books.
That's also why I think we get this then versus now framing the idea that younger readers are less susceptible to shame because, of course, progress is always linear
There’s an article in Electric Literature called Can We Still Judge a Romance Novel By it’s Cover that simultaneously argues that there’s less shame around openly reading romance novels while praising the ubiquity of vector art that is, in their words, “cute rather than steamy.” They kind of want it both ways – they want to be able to say that these cover trends are indicative of a growing comfort with romance novels, while also, basically saying that the discomfort that comes with not just clinch covers, but other cover styles that are more easily identified as genre romance - think of your shirtless ab covers, your woman in a ballgown- is somewhat justified.
This is also when we get into the point that a lot of “BookTok romance novels.” (And I’m saying this with scare quotes because a lot of the romance novels I associate with BookTok are self-published, and less likely to appear on a Barnes and Noble table, or in trend pieces like this) can easily masquerade as general fiction in bookstores, and, in fact, maybe more aptly labeled as general fiction, particularly in the case of It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover.
They’re big trade paperbacks instead of mass market, they might have vector art covers of people standing within proximity of each other and not embracing, or a big ol’ flower.
When we talk about the big TikTok boom of romance novels, it’s a lot of these same contemporary romance novels that kind of skirt the line between romance and general fiction, written by authors that either have an established fandom, are lead authors for a Big 5 Publishing house, or both. The article claims that “In the UK, sales of romance novels are at their highest since 2012, when Fifty Shades of Grey hit the charts."
One of the reasons they say that romance is big now is because of Hoover, who is not only not solely a romance novelist (she writes in a bunch of different genres,) but she's an EL James type, one in a 1 million success story. Just last year she took up four spots on the Goodreads Choice awards, six spots on the Amazon bestseller list, and, according to the New York Times, her books outsold the Bible last year.
Her biggest hit, It Ends With Us, masquerades as a romance novel, only to gut punch you with the domestic drama, and I think any romance trend piece that focuses so heavily on Hoover is frankly suspect.
Emma: Whenever I read an article ascribing value to BookTok in terms of purchasing power, it feels really alien from my experience on BookTok. If anything as a user, the purchasing aspect of the app is one of my least favorite parts of the experience. I feel this way about fast fashion hauls and new book hauls. I understand the impulse to justify a community's value in terms of capital. But this flattens different aspects of BookTok and romance novels that are worth consideration.
Like many romance novel readers, romance has been a huge part of helping me deconstruct purity culture. But when we link that directly to scattered arguments about cover art that is somehow simultaneously supposed to be representative of not feeling shame when we read clinches in public, and at least partly a manifestation of shame about sex with the proliferation of vector cover art, the whole conversation comes back to “what is selling at Barnes and Noble?”
So, the Guardian posits people are less ashamed about sex and romance book sales are up according to Nielsen BookData. We touched on younger readers, Gen Z, and we have another article by NPR that goes over this as well. It came out in August 2022 and it’s called: “Gen Z is driving sales of romance books to the top of bestseller lists”
Beth: Again, we open on calling Hoover and Emily Henry, where they extoll Gen. Z's openness to reading romance. Then we get this quote from the article:
“A decade ago, the main demographic for romance was women ages 35 to 54. But in the past several years, that has widened to include women 18 to 54, according to Colleen Hoover's publicist Ariele Fredman.”
[LAUGHTER]
I’m sorry, I’m not going to change that.
Chels: We should laugh at that!
As an aside; we looked into the source of this statistic, and it appears to be from Wordsrated, the data analytics company. The part about romance readership widening to include readers as young as 18 would seem impressive if it were not for the fact that this song and dance has been done before for millennials. According to Nielsen’s Book Buying Report in 2015, “Romance book buyers are getting younger—with an average age of 42, down from 44 in 2013. This makes the genre’s average age similar to the age for fiction overall. In addition, 44% of these readers are aged 18-44, which includes the coveted Millennial demographic.”
Chels: We’re coveted!
Beth: We were! Not anymore.
Chels: Oh no.
Beth: So back to the article they interview a few Gen Zers on how they feel about Romance (Positively.) Leah Koch, co-owner of the Ripped Bodice, a romance bookstore, touches on contemporary romance’s trend towards vector art pulling in a younger audience.
Then we dive into how booktok drives romance book sales among Gen Z. “Sales for authors whose books have gone viral on TikTok had reached 12.5 million in 2022, as of July, according to NPD BookScan” and then “nearly 41 percent of TikTok's global users were between the ages of 18 and 24 — with more than half of those being women, according to Statista.”
Koch “100 percent” attributes the rising number of younger customers to TikTok.
Next we have: the majority of BookTok books are by white authors. Ali Hazelwood says, "There's definitely a pattern and a marked disadvantage that authors of color have to face in publishing." Henry shares this sentiment and wonders why certain authors haven’t blown up on TikTok in the same way.
The article adds, it's bigger than BookTok. We end on quotes from both Hazelwood and Henry, who say Gen Z embraces sexuality, and they're not embarrassed about reading romance novels.
So [aggrieved sigh] this article reinforces the idea to me that marketing is often a self-fulfilling prophecy, not always but often. Marketers will look at their metrics, see what's most successful, and then dump more resources there.
Which does make sense based on the information you have. But then you're creating the audience for your product that way when I did digital marketing, if I saw that ages 25 to 34 converted to customers at a higher rate, then I would pay more to advertise to that demographic. Then that same group gets more advertising for that product and subsequently buys at higher rates because they're receiving.
For publishers who get data from BookScan where there’s a slight bump in who’s buying their product, they’re going to make that their primary audience. Like we covered with the Where’s All the Book Data article, publishers operate on incomplete data that excludes the purchasing / reading behaviors of other people.
Emma: These statistics are aggregated together over and over, and we're expected to go--look for a correlation! But in the context of Hoover and young people, it is interesting that this “viral” sensation still hasn’t touched the Millennial touchstone of the Fifty Shades trilogy in terms of the numbers cited for sales. It seems like the goal posts are moving a little bit for what makes these cultural defining moments and that is an aspect of all of this that is missed when we point to BookTok picking up Hoover and “launching” her to virality.
Chels: Something, you'll notice, is that BookTok trend pieces almost always, and with the caveat: we are aware that we're talking about white authors, then the natural follow up: how do we get BookTok to promote authors of color better? How do you get BookTok, which is not a cohesive community, so much as a fragmented group of hobbyists with different ideologies to accomplish something that requires structural change.
The demographic make-up of publishing is very similar to that of authors interviewed in this piece, which is overwhelmingly white women. Tracy Sharad, who is Currently the VP and executive editor of Little, Brown told the New York Times in 2020 that there is a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing, and the number of books that are published by authors of color.
Along with the Twitter hashtag #PublishingPaidMe from a few years back that illuminated a staggering pay gap between authors of color and white authors, it makes sense that the amount of marketing money, support, and everything else that it takes to make a bestseller, or a “BookTok book” would be disproportionately allocated to white authors as well.
In Public Books, Walsh notes that it is likely that books end up with much more racially homogeneous, that is, white, as a result of BookScan data, too.
So Walsh points to Comping White by Laura Mcgrath in the LA Review of Books, where she found the quote: 96% of the most frequently used comps were written by white authors. Walsh explains that a big component of a comp title is promising sales history, so publishers, agents, and editors get stuck in this loop of referencing what has sold well in the past, which staggers innovation and reinforces what Walsh calls “conservative white hegemony in the industry.”
This is where I can trace back my frustration with poorly cited trend pieces about BookTok, because a lot of the things that BookTok does or doesn't do, are traced back to systemic publishing issues. Even though this NPR piece allots that the problem is bigger than BookTok, it still uses BookTok as the framing device, which serves nobody because you can't hold BookTok accountable, but you can do that with publishing houses.
We spoke earlier about how BookScan data is inaccessible to anyone not in publishing. But we do get some data that's spoon fed to us. Let's talk about the contents of some of these BookTok flyers that I have right here. One is from Nielsen, who owns BookScan in the UK and the other is from NPD, who owns it in the United States.
Beth: So the Nielsen book data one has three graphs on it and I hate all of them. The first one is the percentage of book buyers within each age band. First off, how do you define a book buyer? And without defining it the data is not helpful, and it's paired with TikTok users by age, like these are just two things on a graph together. And we’re supposed to be like “ahh yes, these people are buying books off of TikTok…”
Chels: But, Beth, there's a graph!
Beth: Those graphs are not easy to read, either, so the whole post is general information that someone decided to pitch as the book selling power of TikTok.
If they really wanted to do that, the entire article would be about people's purchasing habits on TikTok, as opposed to general habits broken down by age.
Emma: The assumption that people who are engaging with BookTok directly, whether producing videos, or just watching, or directly translates to a finite countable number of sales, confuses me so much, and I always wonder who has a vested interest in encouraging correlation to be found between these two things.
Chels: So I’m looking at NPD’s BookTok Flyer, and it is incredibly vague and very annoying. There's a graph that says BookTok author sales by units, and the unit is 1 million in sales. It starts at 8 units in 2017, and then moves to 20 units in 2020. It's unclear which authors are the BookTok authors that encapsulate this data on this portion of the flyer.
Below that, there’s another graph with bestselling authors, love graphs, this includes Emily Henry, Madeline Miller, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Leigh Bardugo, and Colleen Hoover, showing how many units they sold each. Henry is the lowest at .7, and Hoover is the highest at 1.9. It’s unclear how they know these sales are from BookTok, because the jump in sales happened in 2020, which is not only when BookTok took off, but it’s also when the pandemic started.
So in 2020, the New York Times noted that the pandemic drastically shifted our reading habits, and that newer authors were struggling. Readers were buying a lot of books, but they were buying books written by celebrities and previous bestsellers. So let's look back at this NPD flyer. Look at the BookTok authors. Miller, Reed, Bardugo, and Hoover were all extremely successful in 2010. All had bestsellers, some of them multiple.
So basically a lot of BookTok trends that are attributed to BookTok were already underway early pandemic. You can't really say that this is BookTok. I mean, you can.
Beth: Which they do!
Emma: They do!
Chels: Moving on from these horrible flyers. What do you think about BookTok’s relationship with Barnes and Noble?
Emma: B&N is propped up as this moral good alternative to Amazon. #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and little pieces of plastic from Amazon is its own thing on TikTok and sometimes that's really reviled in communities that are looking for less consumerism, but also allows Barnes and Noble to be characterized as this other better, possibly more intellectual thing? And Barnes and Nobles hauls make for more dynamic book hauls than Amazon hauls because you can show the shopping experience. You can show picking out the books, you can show, getting a little coffee at the integrated Starbucks that lends itself to day in my life vlogs.
But I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with any type of “new product” haul. I understand Barnes and Nobles is often the only physical place people might be able to have an in-person bookstore experience. But I think Barnes and Noble is able to evade a lot of criticism about how they pay employees (including social media teams! Barnes and Noble store teams are a huge part of booktok.) What they are doing to book spaces, and just general corporate existence and shadiness because they get to exist as “at least we’re not Amazon!”
Beth: Right? If you're not as bad as the worst guy, then you can fly under the radar a bit. And a lot of these news items read as straight PR for Barnes and Noble. There is an article by Publishers Weekly that came out on February 10th that sounds like a call I'd make to a client saying, like, “okay, here's all the things we're going to do for this upcoming year to boost sales.”
And of course the obligatory line about BookTok, and how it boosts sales. We get a quote from their CEO James Daunt, who says Barnes and Noble has been able to take advantage of the increase in reading that occurred during the pandemic, as well as the continuing lift to sales provided by BookTok.
Bloomberg has an article titled: BookTok With 43 Billion Views Has Sent Barnes & Noble Sales Soaring. It seems like everyone is taking it as a given that BookTok boosted sales for Barnes and Noble
Chels: So three notable things happened to the chain in 2019 to 2020 around the same time as the rise in book talk. First one is that Barnes and Noble was purchased by the hedge fund Elliot Management, who put Waterstones CEO James Daunt in charge. The second is that and the third is a global pandemic. Barnes & Noble touts BookTok as the reason for their recent success in certain circles, but in others, the credit all goes to Daunt, their new CEO.
Daunt’s made a name for himself by helping Waterstones mimic the independent bookstore aesthetic. In the New York Times article, “Can Britain's Top Bookseller Save Barnes and Noble?” Tom Weldon, the chief executive of Penguin Random House books in the UK said “He's essentially created a series of independent bookstores with the buying power of a chain.”
So since the Daunt takeover, Barnes & Noble has reported a substantial increase in sales. If it’s from BookTok, Daunt’s ingenuity (which is basically: independent bookstores, but corporate!), or the global pandemic that shifted how we consume media, it’s difficult to say, although that doesn’t stop people from trying.
So what we learn over and over and over again is that BookTok is not really this industry game changer like we're told, at least not in a way that is provable, which I think is the only way where it would count.
What would you say is the true value of BookTok?
Emma: For genre fiction in particular, there are these networks of information that make up the genre. Genre fiction is always in dialogue with itself, and has almost this genealogy to it. And as a new reader, to something like romance that can seem really intimidating or obfuscated. BookTok helped me see those connections faster without feeling like I had to read absolutely every romance novel before I could speak on my experience of the genre, because it was so easy to find people who had read a lot more than I had.
Chels: I think there's something to be said about how there's a low barrier to entry. TikTok puts your videos in front of people who don’t follow you, so you don’t need to be super polished or already successful on another platform, although that won’t necessarily hurt. I actually played around with starting a Substack before I was on BookTok, but I think after a year and a half of trying to really dig into my thoughts on publishing, the history of romance, and my favorite books on BookTok and developing that skill for editing, really made me a much more focused and interesting writer. So yeah, BookTok is cool.
Beth: Yes, and I’ll just end with that. BookTok is the friends we made along the way. If you can't tell from this podcast, Anyways,
Chels: Aww, you guys.
Thank you so much for listening to Reformed Rakes. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find bonus content on our Patreon patreon.com/reformedrakes. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram for show updates. The username for both is @ReformedRakes. Thank you again, and we will see you guys next time.
