The Commercialisation of Books & the Desire for Content

 by Dawn Sands

There is no doubt that with the Covid-19 pandemic, the popularity of social media and the rise of influencers, reading has become a much more popular pastime in recent years. From 16,000 users in 2013, the book reviewing website Goodreads has increased to 120,000 users as of 2021, 30,000 of whom arrived during the pandemic. The hashtag #BookTok had 37.2 billion views as of February 2022, and according to a survey carried out by the Literary Trust, over a third of young people stated that they had begun reading more during the pandemic.

Generally, this is a very good thing. Reading has proven to be extremely beneficial for mental health, and reading widely can encourage people to become more critical, open-minded, and informed about the experiences of others. Reading a book is a gateway into over 5,000 years of literary history and written communication, and it is an incredibly special thing to be able to do, to look at what should be mere shapes on a page and interpret them into sounds and meanings and symbols and metaphors and stories.

However, this sudden increase in popularity comes not without its downfalls. In this age of social media, people want instant gratification; many modern books are written with this in mind, with characters written to fit archetypes, arcs that fit the same basic mould and the same plot conventions seemingly repeated over and over again. The way books are marketed has also changed drastically in recent years. As book fans have congregated online, authors, agents and publishers have turned to social media in order to market their books, perpetuating the same cheap tropes and dynamics without heeding the true quality of the prose, character arcs and overall plot satisfaction. Now, a major consideration for agents and editors looking to publish a book (especially in some genres, such as young adult) is how well it fits the trends and tropes that are popular online. If someone knows how to play the algorithm properly, these books can gain immediate success and earn both authors and publishers a lot of money, before being completely forgotten about in a few years’ time when the trend moves on. It is not a way to sustain literary culture, simply a way to make money out of writing that is often mediocre. Sites like TikTok have commercialised reading and turned it into an industry. Of course, this is not the fault of the authors and publishers themselves, but the system which they have fallen into - creators have to make money, and this is, unfortunately, the way in which it is made - but it is still draining to see the same set of five or ten titles being circulated online, the same tropes applied to all of them.

This is not to say that all books famous on TikTok are badly written; it is also not to say that a book can’t include popular tropes and still be of good quality, or even that books I might deem poorly written shouldn’t be popular. If there is a large audience that enjoys and can find escape in that genre of fiction, then who am I to criticise it? If the world of commercial fiction is evolving, drawing more people to enjoy reading, then books written for this market are arguably highly beneficial, and in contending commercial fiction as a whole I am simply tampering with something that was not written for me - which is the last thing I am trying to do. To put it simply, I don’t want to seem like I’m gatekeeping literature just because the genre that is popular at the moment isn’t one I am personally invested in. However, this is less about the books themselves and more to do with the way in which they are promoted. Even when a book is written for a less commercial market, it is still frequently reduced to tropes and basic archetypes simply because that has become the way in which books are referred to. While common tropes such as enemies-to-lovers or found family may have their place in describing aspects of the plot, they are not all-encompassing, and if we are going to reduce books to single words or phrases, it seems much more comprehensive to promote books based on themes that run throughout rather than plot conventions that only extend to certain aspects of the book.

Another (tangentially related) side effect of the commercialisation of literature is the intrinsic desire for content that people seem to have when it comes to the media that they enjoy. There is often a clamouring for screen adaptations after the publication of a popular novel - this is understandable, as it is natural to want to stay with the characters you have grown to love, but it frequently happens that these sequels or film adaptations simply serve to diminish the effect of the original work. Which is more common: people saying that a screen adaptation was really good, or people complaining about it, saying that ‘the book was better’? Probably the latter. Film adaptations are often too short to capture the depth and layering of a book, and therefore often lack coherence. Meanwhile, series adaptations, which are becoming more popular, may swing too far the other way, bringing in subplots and themes that weren’t in the original book and therefore skewing the balance of elements meticulously curated by the author. If a screen adaptation is going to alter the content of a book that much, then, can it really be said to be part of the same canon? Fanfiction is a common medium that people go to if they want to consume more content relating to their favourite books; though this has a reputation for being of bad quality, people who write it are genuine fans of the original work, unlike film producers, for whom creating screen adaptations is often merely a source of income. Authors have less influence in the creation of their screen adaptation than is generally assumed - though they may be allowed to check over the screenplay, they tend not to get a say in whether they even want an adaptation to be made in the first place, as the rights to their work belongs to the publishing house, not to them. The publishing house will be inclined to sell the rights for a film adaptation whether it is the author’s wish or not, as it brings in more profit (money is, unfortunately, a common theme), and the authors of the original work are rarely able to influence their editor’s decision. So, what makes a screen adaptation any more part of the official canon than the fanfiction you might write, if the author gets no bearing in what is put into the adaptation anyway? What is it that makes the official canon valid, and your interpretation not, other than that with official screen adaptations, a representative of the author gets to make money?

If part of a book is left ambiguous, there is likely to be a reason for that; it is generally not a case of sloppy writing or an author simply trying to be difficult. Personally, I am a big fan of books with an open ending, but I so frequently see people asking the author to lend their insights over what the ‘correct answer’ is, or what ‘really happened’ after the end of a book. The events of a fiction book, however - this may come as a shock, I know - are not real. If it is not written on the page, there is no saying what ‘really happened’, as you are looking to events outside of what is canon. The author may have their own ideas and interpretations based on the text they have written, but if it isn’t included in what they wrote, their opinion may bear no more weight than your own theories. (You can find the extended version of this rant in an old article about the concept of ‘death of the author’ - not all of which I even agree with any more, because apparently I can change my mind many times over the course of three months, but my point on this still stands.) If there is something in a book which is left open-ended or ambiguous, that has most likely happened for a reason, and at that point it becomes down to you, not the author or an arbitrary screen adaptation made by someone with no personal connection to the original work, to draw conclusions from it.

Therefore, in summary, though the increase in popularity of books is something that should be celebrated, the heavily commercialised industry that it has become is an unfortunate side effect. While people are once more finding release in books through the gateway that social media provides, this has resulted in publishers using opportunities like #BookTok to promote books based merely on trends and current marketability, rather than what it is that genuinely makes a book good. The desire for instant fulfilment out of a piece of media has led to people chasing after more variations of what they are used to, rather than widening their circle and reaching out to areas they may not be familiar with. Tropes have become the default for describing books, rather than the bare minimum, and I hope that in the future, maybe once the novelty wears off, we will begin to see books being promoted based on their themes and deeper nuances, rather than the arguably superficial ways through which they are marketed at the moment.

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