“BookTok,” a play on words combining TikTok (the community’s host app) with the word “book,” has come to colloquially refer to a subcommunity on TikTok in which creators post about what they read and offer recommendations to other users. The central genres of these TikTok recommendations seem to be young adult fiction, with an unabashed focus on fantasy and romance YA novels, which have often been regarded as lowbrow due to a general literary stigma surrounding them.
High-profile BookTok titles include A Court of Rose and Thorns by Sarah J. Maas and past viral novels such as The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Many books have become bestsellers through the generative power of TikTok’s ripple-effect-style spread of information. The formula is simple: one person reads a book and posts a review or recommendation, causing others to read it and do the same. Soon, the book is trending, with posts constantly springing up reacting to content in the novel and encouraging others to read it as well.
The influence of BookTok on young adult reading patterns is unmistakable. Indigo, Canada’s largest bookstore company, boasts a “Trending on BookTok” website section. Barnes and Noble, Indigo’s US counterpart, has a “BookTok Favorites” section online and in stores. Even an Amazon search for “BookTok books” will generate a list of recognizable YA fantasy and romance titles. The largest North American book retailers have recognized and organized around the unquestionable market force of BookTok.
According to BookNet Canada, a 2023 Canadian Book Consumer Report found that 62 per cent of books purchased by Canadian book buyers were fiction, with the top genres being fantasy, suspense or thriller, and romance – categories which align with the top genres of BookTok recommendations. It is evident that the TikTok culture surrounding reading that developed in the past few years has had direct real-world manifestations.
BookTok itself has become a distinct and identifiable social media subgroup, a community of like-minded individuals who have either recently come to love or have always loved reading. BookTok is candles, fairy lights, glasses, and bookshelves: a certain, broader aesthetic that social media users can tap into at any point (literally).
Yet, in today’s internet landscape of increasingly niche aesthetic subgroups, there are pockets underneath the umbrella of BookTok in which certain books act as subcultural identity signifiers. Where BookTok on the whole sings the praises of romance and fantasy novels like The Cruel Prince by Holly Black and Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, a certain subgroup proclaims books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh and Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik, signalling membership to a more specific group.
BookTok culture online is complicated and differentiated, but there is an unmistakable subsect of Orion Carlotto-following, Reformation-wearing, Sally Rooney-reading, pink cursive font-using self proclaimed “cool girls.” In carefully styled book recommendation videos (“books about female rage,” “books about Hollywood in the ‘60s,” “books about motherhood”), they signal to their audiences exactly which online aesthetic they align with. The words “intellectual,” “fashion-oriented,” and “third-wave feminist” are not explicitly stated but implied, intuited by the keen eye of the viewer who subconsciously understands how to decode social media messaging.
This paragraph could be replicated with countless other specific sects – the key is that books have come to function as tokens online, identity signifiers which gesture towards different aesthetic groups in the same way certain clothes or haircuts do. To equate ownership of a certain item to participation in a broader aesthetic social category is a consumerist conception of identity that is pushed by the internet. On a visual platform like TikTok, the actual quality or content of a novel is inconsequential – it is quite literally the phenomenon of judging a book by its cover, prioritizing style over substance. A video displaying a collection of books with a certain style of cover art allows a reader to intuit not only the content of the suggested novels, but the aesthetic orientation of the creator.
As internet culture develops and becomes more specific, distinct, and intricately organized, it is important to recognize the way everyday objects can be co-opted to serve as signifiers towards pre-packaged aesthetic groups, not by the fault of any individual, but through the invisible guiding hand of the internet that pushes for commodification and categorization. There is nothing wrong with reading what the internet recommends or having genre preferences, but we should seek to read a differentiated, nuanced range of stories rather than according to a certain aesthetic – always reaching for diversification and depth rather than neat aesthetic cohesion, resisting the urge to judge a book (or a person) by its cover. Online culture has real-world consequences, as evidenced in current book sales mirroring TikTok trends. The categorizing, flattening gaze of the internet can quickly become transposed to the world of literature with detrimental and limiting consequences.