Rate BookTok Three Stars
You would think that something as calming as reading — an activity that has maintained a reputation through centuries as being light and fun — would have transcended the simplistic ideology that has persisted within the reading community.
You would be dead wrong.
In the past few years, the rise of “BookTok” — a community of readers on the social media platform TikTok — has brought to light many of the issues surrounding the readers that are a part of it. Because it’s “motherfucking hard to write books,” a female author took to TikTok, stating that if you rate books less than three stars then you are an “asshole.”
While no one is claiming that it is easy to write a book (I haven’t written a book, but my 40 page thesis damn near killed me), the author believes that — because writing a book is a difficult task — a reader should dampen their opinions of a book and rate it a minimum of three stars in order to truly acknowledge the effort of the author, and to save the author’s feelings.
This is indicative of a larger problem seen in the BookTok community, where readers and authors have come face-to-face with each other. Now, instead of the separation of fame, fortune, or just downright not caring; the audience and creator are essentially one. People feel a connection to the person whose art they are holding in the palm of their hand — otherwise known as a “parasocial relationship.” Forbes characterizes this as a “one-sided connection in which an individual imagines a personal bond with someone in the public eye.” The audience feels a bond with an influential person that is unaware of their existence.
Although this most often occurs with influencers and other celebrities, authors are not immune to parasocial relationships with their readers. This is how we get people who say that giving any book less than three stars is cruel to the author. Because you “know” them, and in turn, they “know” you.
This is not the only issue BookTok has. Each week it feels like something new pops up, causing online discourse that is completely insular and never ending. While at times the discourse seems meaningless, most of the time, however, they are indicative of larger issues that affect not only readers, but the publishing world as a whole. One of the largest critiques BookTok has caused outside of the online sphere is just how much it has shaped the book-buying market, notably with how they are marketed.
You walk into your local bookstore, smelling the swirling mix of the grain of wood beneath your feet, and the pages of stories from long ago. You are excited to dive head first into your newest read, to travel to a world either close to your own or something completely new. But then you see it, the table marked “BookTok” and on it are covers that look exactly the same, with buzzwords like “enemies to lovers,” “good girl, bad boy,” and — God forbid — “abuse,” as seen in promotion for Colleen Hoover’s book It Ends With Us, a “novel” that essentially tells the story of someone being domestically abused in a “romantic” way. See “Colleen Hoover: It Ends Here,” on the Quaker Campus Medium page if you would like to learn more about BookTok’s problem with glorifying abuse.
The landscape of the publication industry and the tactics it uses to get readers to buy their products has changed immensely, simplifying any nuance the actual book may have to an easy-to-understand list of tropes and problematic language. Is no one looking at the back cover of the page anymore? Is the art of the summary dead?
This delves into an even wider problem within the industry — and an even WHITEr problem, I should say. The publishing industry still mostly pushes books written by white, cis-straight authors time and time again (I’m looking at you, Colleen Hoover), while investing little effort or resources into novels written by marginalized authors. BookTok is not immune. Many of the popular BookTok creators (usually white) will only push said books, consciously — or subconsciously — avoiding diversity. The New York Times Bestseller list reflects this, showing in the “Combined Print and E-Book Fiction” category that the top five spots are occupied by white authors. The publishing industry and the groups that represent the “best of the best” perpetuate an endless cycle where whiteness and heteronormativity are the standard.
This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the systemic issues present in BookTok and the wider publishing industry as a whole. Just recently, author of The New York Times bestselling novel Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford’s Translators Revolution R.F. Kuang and author of the novel Iron Widow Xiran Jay Zhao were two acclaimed authors who were excluded from the prestigious Hugo Awards due to an “unknown” reason. Speculation points to their critiques of the Chinese government being the reason as to why Kuang and Zhao were excluded; the awards were hosted in China, showcasing a greater issue of censorship seen in the publishing community, on a large scale.
The BookTok community is not going anywhere anytime soon, however. Despite the issues, it is a thriving community of readers and book lovers. Yet, audiences need to be conscientious of what they are consuming on the app and how it affects their daily lives.
And remember, it’s okay to rate a bad book less than three stars. You are not an asshole for it.
Courtesy of Santa Clara Library
