00:02:42.740Everyone, it is so good. I'm supposed to say this at the end, but I want to say it at the
00:02:45.800beginning. Like, I just, I'm obsessed with it. It's fantastic. And I think,
00:02:49.160Part of why it's so good is your particular training and background. So can you say a little
00:02:55.740bit about that? Sure. So I've been reading romance basically my entire life. The way I was introduced
00:03:01.600to romance novels was not book talk, but a series of Avon published romance novels that only existed
00:03:07.920in the early 2000s called Avon True Romance that were YA romance historicals for teenagers written
00:03:15.460by the popular authors of the time so like a beverly jenkins historical romance for teens
00:03:20.820and they it worked on me did how did you get it did like someone in your family have avon like
00:03:27.620did they get avon no no one in my family read romance at all i just got it on a bookshelf at
00:03:33.500like a hastings in nevada on a road trip or something clearly it was formative to me i
00:03:37.340remember exactly where i bought it hey students i used that's where i used to like go browse like
00:03:44.820oh my gosh are they going to have like a live album by tori amos in like 1998 and if you were
00:03:51.580super super lucky in north idaho they would maybe have one but i thought it was like
00:03:56.380the peak of sophistication they also had jules poetry book um i mean that's your romance
00:04:02.000background. What's your other training in? Well, so I eventually I interned at Penguin right out
00:04:08.200of college working for a romance imprint. And then I actually ended up going over to work at Amazon
00:04:12.680on the books marketing team, where I was the only person on that team who proudly read romance and
00:04:18.420a lot of interesting opportunities came my way because I was actually reading romance novels,
00:04:22.580and I could talk about them. And so from there, that's wild. So I was, I was 23, 24. And they
00:04:29.820ended up letting me pick the best romance novels of the month while I worked there because previously
00:04:33.960they were just using a spreadsheet and averaging star ratings no yeah that's well you're like
00:04:42.060you know this is a wide open like I just can't believe that they didn't think like oh maybe we
00:04:47.520should have someone were there any other genres like did they have someone who actually read like
00:04:51.740sci-fi or fantasy oh pretty much everything else someone was reading but romance was the one that
00:04:56.720no one was interested in, even though even at the time, romance was like, a huge part of where they
00:05:02.420were making money in the books category. Right, right. So what interests you so much about book
00:05:07.440talk that like you would dedicate an entire newsletter to it? So I think part of it is just
00:05:14.140it's like a shadow version of the publishing industry at this point, right? I started looking
00:05:18.880at the New York Times bestseller list. And I'm obviously very conversant with popular authors
00:05:23.620and books. And there were suddenly all of these authors I'd never heard of hitting the New York
00:05:27.640Times bestseller list. And it was because they were independently published romance authors or
00:05:33.200other authors who were going viral on BookTok. And it was like sort of reaching out of that bubble
00:05:37.960into the broader world. And so I wanted to learn more about where these people were coming from,
00:05:42.480what they're writing about. I think romance trends are an interesting indicator of where we are,
00:05:47.920like the national sentiment and what people are trying to escape from or what their fantasies are.
00:05:52.780And I think that that's like very clear on book talk, because the kind of reading that a lot of people are doing on book talk is escapist, it's fantasy. And so it's all of these books that like maybe are a little bit outside of what people think of when they're thinking about what readers are reading.
00:06:08.700but they're actually the thing that most people are reading on a pure numbers scale.
00:06:14.340Absolutely. So I think that there's like some part where people are like, oh, book talk,
00:06:18.120is that just like people talking about Sally Rooney's intermezzo when it comes out, right?
00:06:23.000Like, no, that is not. I mean, there are some people.
00:06:26.660There's lots of people talking about Sally Rooney, but people are talking about everything.
00:06:31.260right uh and the other thing oh i wanted to shout out your excellent uh recent piece on
00:06:38.720hockey romances as an example of what you can like if you look at a trend that's happening
00:06:44.360in book talk but also just like in romance generally and why it is working the way that
00:06:49.720it is and and how it connects to larger societal and ideological trends like it's just it's really
00:06:54.020good so we will link to that in the show notes because you have this background in publishing
00:06:58.900I think you're the perfect person to answer this. Before BookTok, how did a book take off in
00:07:04.240popularity? That is an excellent question, partially because the publishing industry
00:07:10.220is notorious for not having a lot of data about book sales or how these things happen. And so
00:07:16.300it's like a lot of vibes-based marketing. And BookTok is really just the most recent version
00:07:22.260of that. They know that BookTok is working, so they're funneling all of their energy into BookTok.
00:07:26.340do they know how book talk is working like how to make something go viral in book talk absolutely
00:07:29.980not and before it was bookstagram before it was booktube that's just you know similar versions of1.00
00:07:36.100the same thing before that it was blogs there are still some popular blogs like smart bitches trashy0.82
00:07:41.400books yes yeah yeah incredible and they're still around uh and you know before some of it's the0.83
00:07:46.940amazon algorithm has gotten better and better there used to be far fewer self-published titles
00:07:53.120so it was also easier to surface those titles and algorithms and now there's just so much that
00:07:58.900tools like book talk are a necessity for book discoverability because there's just so much
00:08:03.980what about what was the role of things like book of the month club and even like oprah's book club
00:08:10.160which i think like oprah's book club is so fascinating to me in its capacity to bridge
00:08:17.000this gap between like there were some of hers which we would consider like literary books quote
00:08:21.760unquote right and then there were other things that gained a modicum of prestige like a middle
00:08:26.980brow prestige by being selected by oprah how did those work differently because those seem to me
00:08:32.360much more of the work of like big influencers right yeah but i think it's sort of just like
00:08:39.180a broader version of what's happening now on book talk and a lot of the big book talk
00:08:44.040influencers are just micro celebrities running their own book clubs and they even operate book
00:08:49.120clubs on a platform called fable where they pick a book every month that all of their fable is very
00:08:54.040interesting they so they pick a book every month that all of their followers on that platform read
00:08:58.760there are probably hundreds of book talk book clubs on this platform where they host the discussion
00:09:04.380and recently the most interesting thing i found is that several of the biggest romance book clubs
00:09:09.960on fable this month were reading a marketing zine published by hinge about six different couples
00:09:17.120that met in real life on Hinge and their stories were written by people like Roxane Gay.
00:09:22.760Oh, so like basically Hinge paid like authors like Roxane Gay to write essentially like
00:09:30.840marketing content for them, but it's like good marketing content because it's by established
00:11:07.280And there's so much passion with all of these readers, so that's a really good venue for them.
00:11:11.200And I would say the other interesting thing about celebrity book clubs that there's there's still a ton of them, right? We have Reese Witherspoon, we have Jenna Bush Hager, read with Jenna. And those in recent years have really been able to move the needle, but increasingly less. And part of it's because they don't resonate with these younger readers, but readers already have trusted sources. They're getting book recommendations from and it's not Reese Witherspoon, right? It's like someone with 100,000 followers on TikTok.
00:11:35.360It'd be like they would want Reese Witherspoon's daughter, Ava, to be giving recommendations, not Reese Witherspoon herself.
00:11:42.300Well, and there's all kinds of random celebrities with book clubs now, right?
00:11:45.180Like Dakota Johnson has a literary fiction book club, which I find quite strange.
00:12:26.040But on the other hand, the very online, fragmented, performance-oriented experience of being
00:12:31.960on TikTok seems to train your brain out of the very kind of focused attention you need for reading
00:12:37.580in the first place. How do these two tendencies stack up in the end? Love this question. It's like
00:12:43.780the question at the heart of so much of this. So attention span that works for TikTok is not the
00:12:49.300attention span that works for immersive reading. What do you make of that tension? I think that's
00:12:54.960really interesting, especially the part about performance, because to me, part of what's
00:12:59.760fascinating about book talk is some of the shift away from the shame about reading popular fiction
00:13:04.380and romance in particular. So in that way, it's not how I've always thought about performative
00:13:09.280reading, which is like where you have a copy of Infinite Jest on your bookshelf to show how
00:13:12.840smart you are. It's like totally different than that. And I was someone who hid all of my mass
00:13:17.980market paperbacks under my bed in my dorm room as an English major at a liberal arts college.
00:13:22.220So I think that's a really interesting shift in the past 10 years where like,
00:13:25.840these are very conventionally attractive and popular looking women being very proud of the
00:13:30.940kinds of books they're reading and how much they're reading and there's no shame there
00:13:34.720so i think it's a very different kind of performance than what you might think of
00:13:39.100in the past as performative reading and more of the performance is like the book fluencing of it
00:13:45.080right where it's the aesthetic the bookshelves behind them that are custom built and filled
00:13:51.280with special edition copies of their favorite books that they've gotten and are now unavailable
00:13:55.800to purchase. The edges are sprayed with designs, the covers are bejeweled in some cases. So the
00:14:02.740books have become these visual objects in a way that I think is new. But otherwise, the a lot of
00:14:09.300the women who are making these videos look like someone who might be in a rush talk video, even if1.00
00:14:14.080they're like a little more dressed down, they're wearing a big sweatshirt or something. Yeah. And I1.00
00:14:18.740think some of the performance is that a lot of them are all talking about the same narrow set of
00:14:24.100books. So the performance is like, you have to have an opinion about ACOTAR, you have to have
00:14:30.480an opinion about Haunting Adeline, which is this like very dark stalker romance with a very long
00:14:35.740list of trigger warnings at the beginning. So I think that that's where the performance is that
00:14:40.540you have to show you're participating in this same conversation.
00:14:44.520I'm fascinated by the ways that like there is this expectation that you have like almost like
00:14:48.600a canon in many different areas of book talk where you have like of course you've read these 20 books
00:14:55.160these 30 books and what it allows though instead of just being like oh everyone's reading the same
00:15:00.54020 30 books it allows um it's like a lingua franca like it's a way to talk about like this is how this
00:15:07.460was different from this book this is how I felt about this book because it's also how I felt about
00:15:11.540this book you have common points like it's almost um a form of monoculture within the genre that
00:15:19.040allows you to then break off and recommend other things as well so i don't think it's like a
00:15:24.500horrible thing it's like people who are like if you loved this blockbuster then you should check
00:15:29.540out this indie film almost yes i saw a good tiktok recently and there were several like this that was
00:15:34.680if you loved glenn powell in a tight wet white t-shirt wearing a cowboy hat and twisters you'll
00:15:39.740love these books what okay okay I'm gonna have you send me that one because that I do like that
00:15:44.900so I would like it so do I one thing that I've noticed observing book talk and just like the
00:15:54.400the larger romanticity genre as like an umbrella term is how much it has embraced abundance like
00:16:03.820so much of it is about like I have read this many books and these books are so freaking big
00:16:08.960And to get to the heart of this question, I do think it's possible and actually probably a very good practice to be able to switch from those two modalities, right?
00:16:19.700To have a TikTok brain, for lack of a better term, and then to also have an immersive brain.
00:16:25.880And that second modality of immersiveness, of like not checking your phone, of just going very deep into a text is something that these books actually, I think, teach readers, right?
00:16:38.520So maybe you haven't had a ton of experiences going to see a three hour movie in the movie theater, right?
00:16:45.100Especially if you're younger, like that has not been part of your learning experience or going to like a two hour church service, right?
00:16:53.760Or even being assigned a full book in a class in high school, like everyone was talking about.
00:16:59.020Right. Yeah. There's this viral essay right now from The Atlantic that's about like, my students can't read books from a college professor.
00:17:05.820and I think that what these books do in terms of like the way that their narrative
00:17:11.200propulsion works is they teach you to immerse yourself and the pleasures of it right like if
00:17:18.660you haven't had that experience then you don't know like okay if I put my phone in the other
00:17:23.360room this is going to be awesome well in a popular type of video on book talk is someone sharing the
00:17:28.380book that made them love reading again yeah and so I think a lot of these books are the kind of
00:17:33.280books that are teaching people to have that sort of focused attention because they are so
00:17:36.880propulsive and it sucks you back into something that maybe you haven't done since you were a
00:17:40.680teenager. Totally. And I think that's part of why this was all accelerated by the pandemic.
00:17:44.960Oh, totally. The other interesting thing, thinking about reading deeply, is that the book talkers in
00:17:49.220particular and on Bookstagram, they love to annotate these books. And they're books that
00:17:53.300I wouldn't have necessarily thought to annotate when I was reading them, but they'll put page
00:17:56.860flags on every page. They have a color key about which color page flags align to like banter or
00:18:02.760sex scenes or all kinds of different personal ways of annotating these books and then they show
00:18:07.160those annotations and so it's like a performance of close reading yeah but they're still close
00:18:12.660reading yeah yeah and like just because like i don't know infinite just has like footnotes and
00:18:20.040uh references that might be more like hi bourgeois like they that doesn't mean that it's a different
00:18:26.740sort of close reading like it's still close reading it's an incredible skill uh i i love
00:18:31.500that you brought up the way that people have performed or use these books as a way to get
00:18:38.360back into reading. This was certainly the case for me during various reading droughts during
00:18:43.440the pandemic. I also think it's true for a lot of women as they get into their late 30s and 40s
00:18:47.980that like whatever part of their life is making their life feel like very exhausting, giving them0.59
00:18:53.560burnout. Like for me, the first sign that I'm burnt out is that I don't want to read at night.
00:18:58.000But having something that retrains you in that attention is just so fantastic.
00:19:03.540Our next question is about which books take off on BookTok.
00:19:08.840I know the quality of a book is subjective, but I've been finding that the books I'm seeing over and over again on BookTok just aren't that good.
00:19:15.420It's almost turning into a red flag for me.
00:19:17.660If it's showing up a lot on BookTok, I probably won't like the book.
00:19:20.920So I'm curious, how is it that these books end up being circulated as much as they are?
00:19:25.240Is it marketing campaigns, like paying booktalkers to promote a new release?
00:19:29.520Or is this content actually genuine as tastes are evolving?
00:19:35.580What kinds of books become popular on booktalk?
00:19:39.220So I think that it's more complicated than people think when they think about booktalk.
00:19:45.440Because at the surface level, the obvious big hits from booktalk are romance, it's
00:19:50.280romanticy. It's a lot of like thrillers and suspense books like popular fiction. But there
00:19:56.880are fandoms and conversations about all kinds of books happening on BookTok. And so one sort of
00:20:02.680viral BookTok person that you might not expect is Rachel Cusk, the experimental writer of
00:20:07.580autofiction has a huge thriving community of young female fans on BookTok. There's a video about
00:20:13.280which order to read her books in and it has over 27 000 views so just because we think about book
00:20:20.580talk as being about certain kinds of books doesn't mean that there aren't like incredibly passionate
00:20:25.080fandoms for very specific kinds of writing another book that isn't what you would typically expect to
00:20:31.100blow up on book talk but that is sort of a big book talk hit is bunny by mona awad which is like
00:20:35.400an extremely weird literary fiction novel so i would say we're all prisoners of the algorithm
00:20:41.440them and when you start looking at book talk maybe it will only be serving you a lot of like
00:20:45.880dark romance mafia romance romanticy but if you start searching for a book you've loved I think
00:20:51.960you might find someone talking about it yeah I think there's also this tendency it's like an
00:20:57.800infantilization almost um if like you like books that are on book talk then like you could never
00:21:04.600have expansive taste whereas like I think if we think back to when we were younger there were a0.60
00:21:10.940lot of like entry level books for me like I read the shit out of John Grisham when he first came
00:21:17.500when his books first came out and they taught me to then also be like oh like I'm gonna take this
00:21:24.820off my mom's shelf or I'm gonna take this off my mom's shelf and a lot of them were like challenging
00:21:29.460weird interesting books right and so how does like books like I love that like experimental fiction
00:21:36.140you can be like oh this is totally different than the genre that I read all the time but also I
00:21:40.800love books so I can love this just the same yeah and sometimes it's the same book talkers who are
00:21:46.300talking about romanticity and Rachel Cusk right like they just have broad taste and believe it or
00:21:53.300not where do how many dudes are there in this world okay I keep trying to find more there's
00:22:01.260not very many the place that you mostly find dudes is there are couples often married couples
00:22:05.800reading books together who have joint accounts and they'll trade books so like she'll read his
00:22:10.040horror novel and he'll read her romanticity and they like react to them right and it's sort of
00:22:14.780transgressive that he's reading romanticity or it's exciting to see a man reading this but i do
00:22:19.820think as it gets more and more popular it's possible we'll see a few more men if for no
00:22:24.240other reason than because it's very lucrative yeah it drives book sales but it is very female0.76
00:22:29.960dominated space that that's a good way to talk about the second part of this question which is0.96
00:22:34.280like where if a book appears everywhere on book talk suddenly like is it because like there's a
00:22:42.360marketing campaign like are these genuine recommendations how or organic quote-unquote
00:22:47.240is this what what's your thinking uh it's interesting because there are definitely
00:22:52.920you know book publishers obviously understand the power of book talk and even if they don't
00:22:57.060understand how something goes viral they're always going to try to make something go viral
00:23:00.500And then with these self published authors, there's a rise in the number of independent PR firms that are all you can hire to help your book, and connect you with these influencers. And so what has gotten really popular in the past few years, as more people are trying to reach out to influencers and get them to cover their books is like, gift boxes that are sent out with new releases with related items to all of these influencers. So like stickers and shirts, in some cases, a vibrator, which was very controversial.
00:23:30.500people are doing everything they can to get their books in front of these influencers and definitely
00:23:35.440some of them are paid but the book talk community is pretty savvy and they're often good at sniffing
00:23:41.280out when things are paid reviews and that has caused scandals occasionally yeah in the past
00:23:47.020and i think the interesting thing about book talk that sort of counters the idea that a lot of these
00:23:51.900titles are seeded or inorganic is that a lot of the books that go viral on tiktok are separated
00:23:57.660from their release date. So a good example of this is Priest by Sierra Simone, which is this
00:24:03.940incredible, spicy, erotic romance about a priest who falls in love with one of his parishioners
00:24:08.980and has to decide, is he going to be with her or keep his vows? They have sex on the altar of the0.89
00:24:14.520church, recommend. It came out in 2015. And it caused like sort of a minor stir in the romance0.84
00:24:21.500community but didn't break out of that space but in 2022 someone who was a big book talker just
00:24:28.000found it organically on book talk and it went you know super mega viral seven years after it first
00:24:34.000came out and it kind of reinvigorated her entire career in some ways right and that's pretty common
00:24:39.000on book talk like it's not when you're looking at videos it's not all new releases a lot of it is
00:24:44.320things that have come out this year last year several years ago or you'll read one book by an
00:24:49.460author and then binge everything they've ever written yeah book talk readers are very big on
00:24:53.900seasonal reading so right now the books that are viral are like really really really fall themed
00:24:59.220the one that I'm seeing everywhere is the pumpkin spice cafe uh like great that didn't it's not new
00:25:05.380it came out last year I think she has another book called the cinnamon bun bookshop that has
00:25:09.580just come out so she understands exactly what she's doing are these like is that like cozy
00:25:14.800romance yes exactly her name is laurie gilmore i think which has to be a pseudonym because it
00:25:20.560is so close to lorelei gilmore that it can't be an accident um is there anything like super
00:25:28.900historical like has it like has rebecca gone viral on book talk like or even something from
00:25:34.020like before 2000 can you think of anything oh that's a really good question we can if you think
00:25:40.240of something later we can put it in the show notes but i would love that there must be but
00:25:44.120it is I would say things from the past 10 years in some ways I tell people that it feels like
00:25:49.000we're living 2015 all over again which is sort of the last boom of independently published romances
00:25:55.120breaking out of their bubble and a lot of the popular authors on book talk now are authors that
00:25:59.800sort of came out in 2015 and their books are being rediscovered I have one maybe one last
00:26:05.460interesting thing here just on the topic of case evolving in connection with book talk
00:26:12.220One thing that I'm seeing, I don't have anything other than actual sort of anecdotal data for.
00:26:17.820A lot of the books that people are reading and talking about on BookTok are in Kindle Unlimited,
00:26:23.900which has come up on the podcast before.
00:26:25.940It's the sort of Amazon streaming service for books.
00:26:29.820You can read anything enrolled in the program.
00:26:31.940But authors whose books are in the program get paid based on the number of pages of their books read each month.
00:26:38.100and what I'm seeing is that genre fiction books are getting longer so books that I wouldn't have
00:26:45.380typically expected to be longer than 300 pages like rom-coms I read a 480 page sports romance
00:26:52.280recently that's too long too long it's too long and you feel how long it is and like obviously
00:26:58.180the romanticy books are long too but I think we're sort of seeing this return to a Dickensian
00:27:03.060payment model where the writers are being paid by the word. And it's influencing what they're
00:27:08.580producing. And when I ask younger readers about it, they love it. They want the books to be as
00:27:12.940long as possible. So I do think that's one way where tastes are genuinely shifting because of
00:27:17.940what is popular on BookTok and the way that people are reading now. Yeah, it's almost like
00:27:22.300it's like, I think about this a lot, like that TV series, that eight part TV series should have
00:27:27.880been a movie but if if you are used to thinking about your the narratives that you consume as
00:27:33.820these like super long drawn out like not even just one book but like many different books like who
00:27:39.460cares if it's one book right it's like the length doesn't matter in terms of you just want to be in
00:27:45.700this story for longer but like rom-com should be 90 minutes to max two hours and a rom-com book
00:27:52.860should be 300 pages. That is my. Exactly. It's also sort of the fan fictionification. Yes. Of
00:27:58.800these books, because popular fanfics can be, you know, 600, 700,000 words long. And these readers
00:28:04.340are reading fanfiction and these independently published romances. And to them, there's not as
00:28:08.660much difference than maybe another reader would expect. So their expectations in the way they read
00:28:13.540are different. The other thing I want to address quickly is this idea like, and we always come up
00:28:18.960against this when we talk about I think romance fantasy anything that's considered genre fiction
00:28:23.600right is like this these books aren't as good and do you like as a romance reader like someone who
00:28:32.500has taste within romance and is not trying to compare romance as a genre to like literary
00:28:38.940romance like do you think that the books that get featured on book talk are quote-unquote worse
00:28:44.580like what is no no I think that sometimes it's harder to find things that you really love just
00:28:50.760because there's so much and tastes are increasingly individual because there's so much you can find
00:28:56.160like niche content for anything you really love and drill down and search that way when I worked
00:29:01.500at Amazon actually one of the projects I worked on was expanding the bisac codes for romance so
00:29:07.280that you could categorize books by tropes instead of just sub genre so you could like sort and look
00:29:12.920for secret baby books. And I think this is sort of the maximalist outgrowth of that kind of reading
00:29:19.760and searching. So it might take a little longer to find a book that you really love, but they're
00:29:24.120definitely out there. And I definitely don't think the quality of the book talk books is worse. Like
00:29:29.300one of the things that's really popular right now is gothic romance. Yeah, and it's very gross and
00:29:34.480horary. That's not for me. But I think these books are really interesting and well written. And
00:29:38.520they're doing something totally fresh that I haven't really read in the genre before. So
00:29:42.460you know i'm happy that people have that available to them now are they gothic as in like
00:29:47.500like a little bit of vampire are they more gothic in terms of like
00:29:52.440uh i would say like really just really creepy very almost body horror lots of gore i read one
00:30:03.040called nocticadia about like flesh-eating worms that live in your body and a mysterious college
00:30:09.380on an island, you know, surrounded in fog, where they're the only people who know about this worm
00:30:14.940eating disease and only people studying it. This seems very related to like climate change and
00:30:21.280like horror of the world to me. Yeah. Yeah. I also think the presidential election is going to have
00:30:28.600a big impact on what is trending on BookTok in the next six months. So we've mostly been talking
00:30:35.840about readers on BookTok, so our next question is about the role that BookTok plays for authors.
00:30:40.820This is from Andrea. Social media was at one time presented as the great democratizer of fame.
00:30:47.620Once upon a time, the industry, insert any creative industry here, acting, singing, writing,
00:30:53.860was very gatekeepy, and it was hard to get one's work in front of the quote-unquote
00:30:58.640right people for it to even have a shot at the general public ever seeing it. You had to have
00:31:04.900in or know someone, etc. The advent of social media flipped that idea on its head by allowing
00:31:11.980people to put themselves and their work in the public eye without the help of anyone from
00:31:17.820traditional industry pipelines, which seemed really good on its face. However, at this point,
00:31:24.720the whole process of getting a book deal has been flipped on its head, and now it seems like no one
00:31:30.840will even consider publishing a book if the author doesn't come to the table with an already built-in
00:31:36.960audience via social media or substack. You have to prove you have x number of followers who will buy
00:31:43.860the book before anyone will consider publishing it, which puts a whole different kind of pressure
00:31:49.160on authors to not just be writers but cults of personality and create entirely other types of
00:31:56.080content sometimes just to gain this audience that is now necessary to get their foot in the
00:32:01.980publishing door. It also means that book doesn't have to necessarily be well written or quote
00:32:08.880unquote good to get published. Its author just has to be popular on book talk. So my question is,
00:32:16.720with all of that in mind, is book talk good or bad for authors? Are they better off now than they
00:32:24.640were 20 or 30 years ago, when the path to getting published was very different.
00:32:30.100So the first thing I would say is that I think a lot of this is true in terms of like,
00:32:34.580how difficult it is to get a book deal if you don't have a large social media presence. But at
00:32:41.300the same time, I interview a lot of authors who like, I know from when I'm linking to their social
00:32:46.880media presence that they either have very little or they have started a newsletter or started an
00:32:51.440Instagram, in order to promote their book. So they got the deal without it. And these are not
00:32:56.880massive deals by any stretch of the imagination. But like, it isn't as clean of a delineation as
00:33:02.760like, if you don't have a huge social following, you cannot get a book deal.
00:33:07.380Yeah, but it's still very possible to write and sell a book to a traditional publisher without
00:33:11.620an existing platform. Agents are still looking in their slush piles that are plenty of debut
00:33:16.180authors that aren't building their career off of TikTok. I do think if you want to be an author,
00:33:20.260You do have to think about social media more because once you get that book deal, you're going to be responsible for promoting that book on some platform or channel.
00:33:28.080And that's just the reality of the business at this point in time.
00:33:31.740But like you don't have to have one to start with.
00:33:34.480Yeah. And I would say also that a lot of the authors that I'm friends with, the way that they have sold the most books is not through the actions of traditional publicity.
00:33:44.460And, you know, they're like, yes, getting placement in People magazine still like can
00:33:50.820move books, going on a morning show can move books, doing podcasts, especially can move
00:34:14.460it's definitely true that building a social media platform or having success as an indie published
00:34:19.220author can be a way into the traditional publishing pipeline now. Like there's really
00:34:23.640a race among all the big five if something starts going viral to sign that author for their next
00:34:28.740books. And more, more authors are getting book deals through those channels than before. But
00:34:32.620it's been sort of more or less true for the past 10 years as self publishing has become more of a
00:34:37.860thing. The publishers have always been trying to buy the big sensational self published books and
00:34:43.920move them into the traditional publishing pipeline. And now many authors are opting out of traditional
00:34:49.520publishing entirely because there's another option for them or they're choosing to go hybrid, which
00:34:54.320means they have both traditionally published and self-published titles. And so when I talk to young
00:34:59.460writers, what's interesting to me is that often their first goal is not to get an agent or a book
00:35:03.800deal, but to build a platform and self-publish. That to them is the most natural path. They're
00:35:08.560digital natives. They are already comfortable on these social media platforms. And they see that
00:35:13.260as the path that allows them the most creative control over their career, which I think is
00:35:17.700interesting. So it's very different than how I would have thought about getting a book deal even
00:35:21.84010 years ago. But in some ways, I think that's great. Like this can be particularly true for
00:35:26.180creators of color and LGBTQ plus writers who've been historically kept on the fringes of traditional
00:35:30.840publishing. And now they have an ability to launch their career and have all of these levers they can
00:35:36.260pull without those gatekeepers. For as much as we talk about how algorithms I think are like
00:35:41.560racist in all of these different ways, like, you know, who's more racist is the oftentimes the
00:35:45.840book publishing industry, right? Like who has this understanding of like, who will buy which books
00:35:51.080and who will buy a book by this reader or with this name or all of that sort of thing. Like
00:35:55.220there's such antiquated understandings. There's still tremendous barriers to getting your book
00:35:59.420seen in this increasingly crowded landscape. And the TikTok algorithm does diversity no favors.
00:36:05.020It's pretty racist. It serves up a lot of content from different creators that promote the same
00:36:09.580handful of books. It's hard to find anyone other than white women. And you can see this reflected1.00
00:36:14.180in the New York Times bestseller list, like the same handful of books are sticking around for
00:36:18.940longer for many weeks on end. And 2023, Colleen Hoover and Fourth Wing were the longest lasting
00:36:24.540number ones on the list. And things can sort of hit the list again, and again, and again,
00:36:29.820over several years. So in the past few weeks, there was a special edition bind up of three,
00:36:35.700I think two or three of the Bridgerton books in like hardcover that's very beautiful that hit the
00:36:40.740New York Times bestseller list which you wouldn't expect a hardcover version of Beach Read has been
00:36:45.660hitting the New York Times bestseller list and that came out in 2020 but this these special
00:36:50.380editions are sort of just selling over and over again which reduces the number of voices and
00:36:55.920authors that are becoming popular and if you look at the ripped bodice diversity report things are
00:37:01.880actually getting worse with the rise of book talk so the percentage of bipoc creators that
00:37:06.220publishers peaked in 2021 or 2022 in most cases and dropped in 2023 and some of that is because
00:37:12.820the publishers are chasing the big book talk books and that has changed how many diverse authors
00:37:19.360they're acquiring it kind of reminds me like the the ways that um money is funneled towards like
00:37:25.920these boxed editions and like stuff that's already popular like it's it's not dissimilar
00:37:30.540from like taylor swift and like reissues and buying the special cds and like all that stuff
00:37:35.980right like there's just a lot of energy that's directed towards amassing artifacts of the
00:37:43.640primary object of fandom right instead of and like this is not a critique of taylor swift like
00:37:49.160she's just being taylor swift and like reissuing stuff right but it does have this secondary
00:37:55.320function of like funneling more attention and more resources from the fans themselves towards
00:38:01.020the same narrow selection of things. Yeah. When we can talk about Taylor Swift in connection to
00:38:06.420this question, because she announced her book, and it is being self published, because the
00:38:10.520traditional publishers don't have anything to offer Taylor Swift. And so I think that's also
00:38:16.120interesting. They don't have anything to author Taylor Swift. And increasingly, maybe they don't
00:38:19.940have anything to offer other authors who have different paths to publication. And so how is
00:38:23.820that going to change the books that we're seeing get popular and how people discover books and how
00:38:27.960people publish books in the next several years yeah I mean I think I was talking with a cookbook
00:38:33.020author recently and she is exploring some ideas of like author equity because a cookbook especially
00:38:39.860you're developing the recipes like if you can fund the photography or if you do the photography
00:38:45.220yourself and then the vast majority of the profits go to you you know and like if you're doing most
00:38:51.020of the promotional work as well that seems in line with how it works yeah when I think a lot
00:38:55.600of the angst baked into this question is the fact that traditional publishing is not serving writers
00:39:01.700as a whole as it once did because there's such an expectation on authors to promote their books
00:39:07.840themselves and there's such limited resources and marketing resources at publishers that really
00:39:12.960it's up to these authors unless they're like the biggest biggest titles to move the needle
00:39:17.420themselves yeah there's an expectation that they do most of the labor of marketing their books on
00:39:21.740social media and on other channels without much support yeah on tiktok there are some authors who
00:39:27.300have their own channels and some of them do it better and worse than others because like we
00:39:32.940talked about readers are pretty savvy and so recommending your own books almost never works
00:39:37.620because it feels phony right like it needs to be organic from someone else yeah and what these
00:39:42.840successful book talkers do is they do a kind of bait and switch but if they do it well enough
00:39:47.440then like they go viral enough that it still works so the one i'm thinking of is there's an
00:39:51.780author named mads rafferty and she writes romanticy and she'll post like very traditional
00:39:57.660kind of standard book talk videos like 10 shadow daddies in romanticy that i'm loving right now
00:40:04.720and like one of them will be her book and so she's incorporating it into videos that feel more
00:40:11.820organic but she's still promoting herself right it's so interesting that like self-promotion
00:40:16.620doesn't necessarily work with book talk I think because the reason you're coming to these accounts
00:40:21.460is for their taste right whereas like I think as like a newsletter writer I don't have any qualms
00:40:29.340about promoting my book because like this is more of the sort of content that you want from me like
00:40:34.480you're not coming necessarily for my book taste you're coming for the other things that I write
00:40:38.800The other thing that I'll note is I do think there's kind of a somewhat generational divide in terms of like this allergy to self-promotion or for like building up your platform first and then becoming a writer or concentrating on building up your platform while also writing things.
00:40:56.620and i've always felt that as i was coming up through writing most acutely from people who
00:41:04.340are older than me because i think it is a very large part of especially the gen x ethos that
00:41:10.640self-promotion is something that um and and i don't fault anyone for like breathing this air
00:41:18.340like it's just it's something that you should not do like the work should speak for itself
00:41:21.640right and self-promotion is garish in some way and I always thought this actually that I would
00:41:27.120feel it from people who are older than me both in academia and then also like even just like
00:41:32.220tweeting my own work right when I first started at BuzzFeed and that feeling like you don't want
00:41:36.840to tweet it too much or like tweeting it with like I wrote a thing right like just like nonchalance
00:41:42.180about how you wrote it and I I think it's important to understand that like the younger generations
00:41:48.240do not have that self-consciousness they don't and they also have different strategies on how
00:41:54.360to promote themselves particularly related to books that I think are very interesting
00:41:58.340so a lot of what these authors do is they commission fan art of their characters by
00:42:03.340artists and that's the thing that drives book sales for them like fan art is so popular and
00:42:08.220that feels a little bit less like self-promotion if you're also promoting another artist's work
00:42:12.280in connection with your book and it like is sharing the vibe of the book or they'll do
00:42:16.500cover reveals have been a big thing in publishing for the past 10 years probably and that's one of
00:42:21.640the steps along the road to promoting your book as you do your cover reveal but now book talk
00:42:25.600authors are doing trope reveals where they do a graphic sharing what tropes are in this book like
00:42:30.320there's only one bed enemies to lovers and that's what readers are excited about and so that's
00:42:35.220another way of like building that authentic connection with people where it feels a little
00:42:39.400bit less self-promotional you have a post where you break down like kind of the different kinds
00:42:43.800of book talks that I will link to in the show notes because I think it's super useful if you're
00:42:47.860not as familiar with this world but the tropes post is especially fascinating to me and I know
00:42:53.180I've talked about this with other romance writers and like melody talks with me about it a lot like
00:42:58.740I think some people if you're not super deep in the romance world you're like wait isn't it bad
00:43:03.400to be tropey like isn't it bad to know like oh there's only gonna be one bed at some point right
00:43:08.880Like, don't you not want those reveals? But that's part of like, a sub sub genre, essentially,
00:43:15.620like you are you're zeroing in on the different things that give you pleasure as a reader,
00:43:20.040and coming back to those things. And that's not to say that there aren't other tropes that you
00:43:23.820might be introduced to. But it's like a way of knowing that you might like this book even more.
00:43:30.340Yeah, there's a comfort in like having expectations for what you're going to read
00:43:33.760and knowing what you're going to get. So I do think it's interesting that there's that emphasis
00:43:37.780and now microtropes which are so specific as to be meaningless. I saw something recently where
00:43:42.660they said one of the tropes in the book was he teaches her how to play guitar. No. Yeah. Like
00:43:48.600that's not a trope. He teaches her a skill but maybe be a trope right. I feel like the trope
00:43:54.920version of that is he teaches her how to play pool and he's like standing behind her with the
00:43:59.640pool cue. That's a trope. That has happened a lot but. Okay our last question is about a specific
00:44:05.880corner of BookTok where it's all about the numbers. This comes from Shara. As a big romance
00:44:11.240reader and follower of BookTok, please help me understand the disbelief around people reading a
00:44:17.000lot. Every month, someone goes online to say people can't read more than 100 books a year
00:44:22.960and work and have a life. There's no doubt that some of the heaviest readers on my feeds
00:44:28.500are women primarily reading romance. Is it misogyny because it's women? Is it snobbery0.82
00:44:35.260because it's romance? Is it anti-intellectualism because who could ever enjoy reading? I usually
00:44:41.940read more than 300 books a year and I still have friends, family, a job, and a healthy social life
00:44:47.660because I prioritize reading in my downtime. Why aren't people who enjoy movies or TV given the
00:44:54.160same kind of grief online? The first thing to talk about here is like what is it about books
00:44:59.460that makes people keep track of numbers and report them? I feel like this is a relatively new thing
00:45:05.020but yeah it's a good reads thing right I think this all goes back to the good reads reading
00:45:10.740challenges that people do where they set a goal at the beginning of the year I'm going to read
00:45:14.820100 books they track them on good reads and then you see like as the year goes by they show you
00:45:20.020their progress how many books have they read towards their good reads challenge and as you
00:45:23.480get closer to the end of the year people start getting frantic and they're like I have to read
00:45:26.54020 books this month tell me some books that I could read really fast so I could keep on track
00:45:30.920with my Goodreads goal. And I think you see that in book talk a lot in these, like, just like long
00:45:37.020lists of books people read in a month, or like, if you need to hit your goals, even they'll share
00:45:41.580things like this, here are some fast reads. The other thing that people do a lot on social media,
00:45:46.180less on book talk, because I'm not sure it works great as a platform for this is a 24 hour read
00:45:50.420a thon, where they tape themselves reading for 24 hours straight and share how many books they
00:45:56.100finish and read and what those books were and what their experience of that was. So that's a
00:46:01.760performance of reading. We want to go back to that. And I think the most performative thing
00:46:05.880about a lot of this is sharing the numbers of books you're reading. But I don't feel like it's
00:46:11.840that new outside of the Goodreads reading challenge with romance specifically, because
00:46:15.700romance readers have always been high volume readers. What I think has changed is that some
00:46:21.580of the barriers to entry with price have been reduced because we have self-publishing, we have
00:46:27.000the Libby app, we have Kindle Unlimited. You can read a lot more books for a lot less money these
00:46:32.720days. How much is Kindle Unlimited a month? It's $11.99, I think, but you can sometimes get it on
00:46:38.880sale. Yeah. I'm just thinking about like, you know, used bookstores have trafficked in like
00:46:46.160dollar used novels for a very long time or even like lending libraries or libraries right you
00:46:52.560could get as many books as you want from libraries they might not be all the like new releases but
00:46:57.100there are thousands and thousands of books that you can read in a particular genre and i've talked
00:47:03.160about this before i actually think that like the reading challenges is all part of like optimization
00:47:09.640culture and like how can i make my reading feel productive in some way like i i just think it's
00:47:15.980shitty and also like the idea that like you should be fitting in like short novels that you can tear
00:47:20.660through just to reach a number like why why are you doing this who is this for like what i saw a
00:47:27.000tweet where someone asked if they could track the picture books they were reading to the new their
00:47:30.880newborn baby on goodreads and include them in their goodreads reading challenge which i thought
00:47:35.220was fascinating no it doesn't matter like you should just read the books read the number of
00:47:44.300books and I also think that it turns like sometimes for better sometimes for worse it turns you into
00:47:49.520like you're self-conscious about your reading list right and I think like what it did encourage
00:47:55.660me to do since I was always like talking about the books that I was reading the one year that
00:47:59.740I did this was I definitely need to get more authors of color in this list and so that like
00:48:06.060I broadened my tastes in that capacity during that year um and continue to obviously but like
00:48:12.140when you're publishing like when you're telling on yourself if you're only posting novels written
00:48:17.100by like white women or white dudes um I I can't believe that people like if we broadcast how many
00:48:24.820hours of like reality television that we watched yes like people wouldn't be like I can't believe
00:48:29.440you watch that much reality television well I think there is still some shame around watching
00:48:33.580tv right and maybe it was oh totally much more of a shameful thing in the 90s and you know maybe
00:48:41.280it's less so now with the advent of streaming everyone's like well I can't be that shamed
00:48:45.260because everyone watches so much tv or it's like such a passive activity as you're doing other
00:48:49.380things and maybe that's part of what's controversial about reading so much is that you can't split your
00:48:54.040attention when you're reading you're not doing anything else when you're reading but I do think
00:48:58.620a lot of it is misogyny. I do think a lot of it is about the kinds of things people are reading
00:49:02.500and what people consider worthy of attention. Yeah, I definitely think there's some of that
00:49:07.100happening there. But I think some of this is true about women in fandom spaces in general. Like0.55
00:49:12.340there's that sort of trope where younger fans online will say it's really sad when women in
00:49:17.520their 30s are still participating in fandom. I think there's something weird going on here about
00:49:22.420like, you're not allowed to have fun hobbies after a certain age, because you're supposed to be
00:49:27.880focused on quote unquote more important things right and also especially if you're reading a
00:49:33.240ton and you're reading in genre fiction that like somehow you should be allocating if you're going
00:49:38.460to be allocating your time to reading it should be like the classics or something i don't know
00:49:43.920i don't know like business bro self-improvement books if you're reading a lot of those is that
00:49:49.100more high-minded i i have to chime in this is my take on the question of like people who are
00:49:57.160judging the high volume of reading don't understand reading as pleasure uh yeah yeah yeah like they've
00:50:03.200never had it as work yeah they've never had like an immersive pleasurable reading experience so
00:50:08.400they don't understand why you would spend 24 hours or like my my big reading times are always
00:50:16.160on vacation like they are my favorite times to read i love just bringing a huge stack of books
00:50:20.880and i think some people would be like why in the world would you ever read on vacation
00:50:25.640it's the best thing in the world I have a very particular like vacation spot I am picturing
00:50:31.120where I like to sit in front of a fire pit by the ocean and read my book early in the morning when I
00:50:36.120go to this beach town every year and like that's what I look forward to all year so peaceful but
00:50:42.460I also think that like cinephiles collect how many movies they watch in a year like there are all
00:50:49.100sorts of cultures like subcultures within art like I went to this many shows I went to this
00:50:55.120many concerts. And I think that no one is like, Oh, my gosh, actually, I do think that that people
00:51:00.860are like, Oh, my gosh, how could you go to so many concerts, there's a denigration of people
00:51:05.280pursuing their hobbies. And I think it sucks just broadly. I also think if you think about the0.94
00:51:11.440difference between the way people talk about Goodreads versus the way people talk about
00:51:15.220Letterboxd, which is like, Letterboxd, people are tracking how many movies they're watching.
00:51:20.500It's a lot of men, and they're watching a lot of movies, but it's like valorized how many movies and rare movies they're watching on Letterboxd and tracking over there, whereas on Goodreads, maybe it's not taken as seriously.
00:51:41.660One thing that surprised me when I started watching more BookTok, first of all, what really annoys me is that a lot of people have BookTok opinions, but they've never seen a BookTok video.
00:51:50.500it's easy for book talk to be like sort of the scapegoat stand-in for all of the changes that
00:51:56.500are happening in publishing so rapidly right now without people actually knowing anything about
00:52:00.920what is happening on book talk and that's I originally was going to call my newsletter
00:52:04.660I watch book talk so you don't have to because I felt like that was the space I needed to occupy
00:52:10.120for people where I think people need to know what trends are happening how people are reading if
00:52:14.700they're involved in the publishing industry at all or even if they're just interested readers
00:52:18.540but people are so scared of venturing into this space but particularly on book talk when i'm
00:52:24.740watching the videos they're so long they're so much longer than i thought they would be and so
00:52:31.880sometimes they're like three four five minutes long monologuing to camera and i have to watch
00:52:36.860them on two times speed thank god tiktok has that nice function where you can just press the screen
00:52:41.300in the right spot and they speed up but they're very long uh and i guess that it's interesting
00:52:47.040to go back to that attention question, because I think book talk videos would be pretty boring
00:52:51.520if you weren't interested in reading the books they're talking about, or if you hadn't already
00:52:54.840read that book. That's such a good point. And I also think that some of the denigration of book
00:52:59.860talk is from people who just have never spent any time on TikTok just broadly, right? Yeah.
00:53:05.700And so they don't understand how clever it can be, how varied it is, like all the different
00:53:11.020genres of different talks, like the ways you can film, how funny the comment sections can be,
00:53:17.040like yeah they just they think that it's just maybe like reels that and oftentimes reels are
00:53:22.960talks that have made it over an instagram but it's only a certain type of reel right um yeah so i
00:53:28.520think that's a great point the other thing i want to know is how you find out about the books that
00:53:33.340you want to read it's not just tiktok for the most part especially i'm reading probably like
00:53:40.360six months ahead of what books are actually released so it's like net galley and people i
00:53:45.500know, and people whose recommendations I trust and have trusted for a long time. Like any good
00:53:50.640romance reader, the vast majority of my friends are librarians. So that's very helpful for me
00:53:56.280to find out about the books that I want to read. And I had, you know, I just have favorite authors
00:54:00.780in a romance. I think that's helpful, right? Like your favorite romance author's favorite romance
00:54:05.380author is Kat Sebastian. I'm obsessed with Kat Sebastian. And she has a really great newsletter
00:54:10.720where she shares recommendations. And I think that's broadly true of a lot of romance authors
00:54:15.260I love. The romance community in general is very supportive. The first time I ever heard the phrase
00:54:20.360a rising tide floats all boats was at a Romance Writers of America convention. So there's a real
00:54:25.860culture of both recommending other people's books and talking about other people's books in a way
00:54:31.520where you're really enthusiastic about them and want other people to read them. And I think to
00:54:35.420some extent book talk is an outgrowth of that, right? Like it's just people are so enthusiastic
00:54:39.240about talking about other books. But I do find things on book talk that I've truly never heard
00:54:43.520of and would never find without the aid of book talk and then from there you kind of hope to train
00:54:49.340your amazon algorithm a little bit to serve you more books like that and you know go down the
00:54:53.640rabbit hole of that author's social media and things like that so it is i mean it takes work
00:54:57.340to find new books yeah is there a bookstagram account that you would encourage anyone to like
00:55:04.820actually follow like not just hope that they show up in your algorithm but press that follow button
00:55:09.100so that they always show up in your algorithm i don't have any like particular favorites yet
00:55:13.700partially because book talk doesn't serve you the same people over and over again you really have to
00:55:17.420like fight the algorithm to get the same people even if you follow them but there is someone i
00:55:21.940really like on instagram ah i just think she has a lot of it is just i like agree with her taste
00:55:28.220i love that um her her username is a paperback life and she has both like nice aesthetic content
00:55:37.580And I just like generally like the books that she's talking about.
00:55:40.820They're nothing out of the mainstream.
00:55:42.480It's usually just like, you know, traditionally published rom-coms and sort of more dramatic
00:57:58.720It kind of reminds me of some of Nicholas Sparks's work in terms of like a gentle protagonist in a small town, often on the coast of North Carolina.