The online phenomena known widely as “BookTok” sprung up in the early pandemic months. It was started by readers who both had a new abundance of time on their hands, as well as a craving for community in a time of isolation. Once a rich and vibrant community, BookTok has fallen to an over-commercialized cash-grab in recent months, and its current rhetoric is damaging to both young readers and the general literary sphere. 

In light of the lockdown, BookTok skyrocketed in popularity as leisurely reading became popular once more. Publishers, writers and retailers began to pick up and weaponize this new corner of the internet. Before commercial influence, BookTok began as a place where avid readers discussed topics like authorship, rhetoric, style and character development of mostly classic, literary and contemporary fiction. 

However, the commercialization of the “BookTok” name fundamentally altered the types of readers being targeted and the types of books being promoted. While romance had always had a strong presence in BookTok (who doesn’t love a romance subplot?) it suddenly became the face of mainstream literature and the hallmark of good writing.

I don’t say this to disavow the romance genre — I enjoy reading it and it can be done incredibly well. It has great merit rivaling many other fiction genres, but for it to have earned that merit, like all writing, it must be thoughtful and well written.  This is where the fundamental problem lies. In light of its commercialization, BookTok and its users began to glorify copy-paste, poorly written, trope-centered fiction.

This glorification has culminated in the recent discourse on BookTok that disavows and disregards any literature that is not “easily digestible,” which has come to mean anything that isn’t smutty romance. Readers are no longer interested in fantasy, young adult fiction, classics, literary fiction, sci-fi — any of the genres that, along with romance, construct the literary canon.

As romance fiction started to gain a bigger presence within BookTok and more people began reading, its content moved away from literary analysis and fandom-like accounts to a largely recommendation/review based style of interaction. In recommending to others, people were looking for ways to market their favorite reads. What did that come down to? Tropes. Enemies-to-lovers, fake dating, workplace romance, friends-to-lovers, you name it. Everything was tagged with a trope. That’s when commercialization struck.

For what I believe to be an aim to make money out of the pandemic, companies looked for ways to take advantage of this corner of the internet. From author to publisher to retailer, everyone was looking to market their product easily. How to do that? Learn from the readers online. 

Name a trope. Tag it with #BookTok. Soon the market was flooded with endless versions of the same type of novel. It gets attention, BookTok promotes it, more people buy it — the cycle goes on and on. However, the effects of BookTok marketing ran deeper than just the transformation of the literary market.

This popularization of trope-style romance also pushes the harmful narrative that good romance writing and well-written character dynamics cannot exist without heavy sexual content. The presence of heavy smut as a marker of good writing, as well as the harmful dynamics that often exist between characters in those scenes, have become overly glorified and even romanticized. Not only that, but they’ve become campaigned for by writers, publishers and retailers hoping to turn a massive profit from these romantic fantasies. As I’ve witnessed, it’s begun a sick cycle of romanticizing the sexualization and abuse described as love.

This is particularly harmful when recognizing that many of BookTok’s members are young readers, whose Young Adult space has been pushed out. I find reading to be vulnerable and impressionable, and I believe we should be campaigning for young readers to use literature to think deeply and creatively about all types of writing. When we push forth only one type of writing as the holy grail of literature — harmful, stereotypical writing at that — we lose the meaning of what literature is meant to be. Me? I blame BookTok.

The bottom line is this: read whatever the hell you want, but be careful what you glorify, and make an effort to diversify your own reading journey.