I Don’t Want to See Another ‘As Seen on TikTok’ Tag Ever Again
TikTok’s influence on literature and the marketing of books
Délia Campos-Ferreira
It's the first snow day of 2021—I'm sitting in my bedroom at my off-campus house in Jersey, scrolling through TikTok while I wait for the first class of my junior spring semester to begin. This latest bout of scrolling led me to a TikTok recommending a book specifically for LGBTQ+ readers—it was a love story between two lesbians set in the 1950s in San Francisco. The book piqued my interest as someone passively looking for recommendations, so I purchased it. However, shortly after that, my entire FYP (For You Page) was filled with different book trends, from people explaining the plot of a book as their actual life to recommending books to read based on 'eras' and aesthetics. Despite buying that one book, Malinda Lo's Last Night at The Telegraph Club, I didn't take any more suggestions from the app. It wasn't that the book was terrible—I enjoyed it, but other books recommended weren’t appealing. Plus, I was in my reading slump, and a combination of college/the pandemic made it nearly impossible to find interest in anything.
Later that summer, while working at my college's bookstore, I discovered something I hadn't seen last year—"As Seen on TikTok" and "BookTok" signs and stickers. After my brief encounter with popular BookTok books, I knew they weren't all they were hyped up to be, but there was probably a reason I kept seeing all these signs and tables filled with them. It was like a "Seen on TV or Netflix" but for books recommended by people who were essentially strangers. At the time, I decided not to dig deeper and blamed my discomfort on my hater-ish tendencies.
In December of the following year, I started working at another bookstore and realized those stickers and signs weren't just a quick fad for college kids to read more. For a moment, I thought I was exaggerating, maybe it was because of the holiday season, and people needed better access to these bestsellers. Or, it was the layout of my current workplace that felt overwhelming. But as I looked around, I realized that tables piled high with identical-looking generic covers with staler romance than my own. Naturally, it didn't help that when I glanced at our windows, cardboard cutouts adorned them advertising Colleen Hoover's It Starts With Us and It Ends With Us—TikTok's presence was inescapable.
The problem isn't just the bombardment of signs and stickers but what it means for how we consume literature today. It's not uncommon for book advertisements on TikTok to be misleading and for the book content to be nothing more than Wattpad-level fiction. I will be the first to say there is nothing wrong with reading for enjoyment. No one expects you to pull out Crime and Punishment while you're at the beach this summer—unless, of course, it's required reading for your high school AP Lit class. However, when Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other large companies selling books promote writing with little to no substance, and TikTokers are doing the same, how are people learning anything?
And it's not just that they aren't learning anything, but that audiences are actively lied to through TikTok and other social media platforms videos that look like another BookToker recommending a book when it's an ad (sometimes made by the author). The problem with this is that, like any product, sometimes the advertising is better than the actual product, which some TikTok users need help finding the hard way. I understand that the authors don't do it maliciously and are just trying to be successful authors—something I would respect if these books weren't just a collection of tropes stuffed into 200-300 pages of nonsense.
There needs to be a discussion about book recommendations, the demographics, and how bookshops and social media play a role. Bookstores tend to promote YA (Young Adult) books and Fiction (primarily for adults), but a genre lies in between, New Adult. The characters in these novels tend to be between the ages of 18-25, which allows for more mature topics to be included, such as depictions of sex, suicide, and drug abuse, and highlighting the loss of innocence. This genre allows books like Colleen Hoover's novels to be classified as "Young" Adult. However, the New Adult genre has yet to expand enough to have its own space in bookstores, blurring the lines between the two genres. Paired with BookTokers making videos and not specifying what audience the book they're recommending is for, the distinction becomes even less clear.
Trying to market literature by telling people what books have problematic themes and shouldn't be read doesn't help readers either because, once again, how are they learning? Recognizing authors with a problematic past (or present) and having open conversations is of more importance. Especially when those authors get book-to-film adaptation deals and more attention from retail stores. Colleen Hoover has an entire table dedicated to her in most Barnes & Noble stores and top bestseller lists on Amazon. Hoover also has a film adaptation with stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni coming up for her novel It Ends With Us. All of this despite the fact that her son verbally assaulted a 16-year-old girl, and all her readers received was her stating that she spoke with the girl and her son about his behavior. In 2022, Delia Owens' Where the Crawdad Sings was adapted into a film with a soundtrack by Taylor Swift. Once again, all of this, even though she and her husband are wanted for questioning for their role in a murder case. Meanwhile, authors like Delia and Colleen continue to take up space, and non-white authors struggle in the publishing industry, barely making it into the New York Times bestsellers list.
In New York Times bestseller lists full of James Pattersons, Colleen Hoovers, and Nora Roberts, how are up-and-coming authors supposed to market themselves? An author might have the same luck as Colleen Hoover, originally a self-published author. Her first two novels, Slammed and Hopeless, were released in 2012, and later her most famous novel, It Ends with Us, ended up on the bestsellers list for USA Today. While TikTok certainly had a big hand in making this happen, Hoover has always been good at promoting her work as a self-published author. When first starting out, she gave free copies of her YA novel, Slammed to book bloggers, and eventually, her popularity grew with BookTube and Bookstagram. That will not happen to every author, especially if that author is marginalized in any way, because the TikTok algorithm is not kind to non-white creators.
Last summer, Barnes and Noble announced a new “nationwide strategy” that deeply hurts smaller authors who are not as high on the top bestsellers lists. Kelly Yang, author of the Front Desk series, tweeted:
“#BarnesAndNoble has suddenly decided NOT to carry KEY PLAYER, the 4th FRONT DESK book, coming out in 2 weeks! Here are the new details of their new “nationwide strategy”—only giving shelf space for Top 1-2 books per publisher! I am not Top enough, apparently! #FrontDeskSeries.”
Between TikTok pushing these authors and large companies changing policies, the same people will remain at the forefront. In an article from PublishersLunch, when defending this decision, B&N CEO James Daunt says that they have been steadily working to improve its backlist stock and to make this individual to each store. But if social media apps influence how people buy books and the genres that are doing well, and companies are going solely by individual stores and what they like, how does this help smaller authors?
Despite all of this, TikTok has given writers some liberty on how they promote their content. From the writing process to character mood board creations, authors can spend less money on marketing strategies. In addition, fans of the author get to interact directly with the creator and not necessarily have to wait for a tour stop in their city to ask them a question about the book—this is perhaps one of the few positive aspects of TikTok and BookTok. However, as BookTok's popularity rises, retail stores selling books will continue to look to the app to know what to sell and cater to white women, who make up most of the market, leaving the rest of us in the lurch.
