Is Booktok Worth the Hype?

 by Isabella Frobisher

With #booktok having over 107 billion views on TikTok and still consistently growing at a consistent rate; how has it got so much hype and does it deserve it? 

First off, you may be wondering what is #booktok. Well, it is a social media platform for book lovers to promote their love of books with short videos ranging from 15 seconds up to 5 minutes. Video content can be diverse but the key themes of the main videos that are the most successful in popularity are things such as book recommendations or how many books someone can read in 24 hours. With how TikTok is designed with its algorithm, books can seem to appear on your ‘for you’ page regularly as videos of similar content are more likely to come up based on previous user interactions. Therefore, a certain book can just consistently be on your ‘for you’ page, prompting it even more to yourself and subsequently other users. This causes a ‘trending’ effect for certain books and boosts the huge hype that #booktok has already created. 

So that's how #booktok has gained the hype but is the content worth it? Within the ‘core’ of booktok there are three main authors that are essentially ‘the mothers’ of this whole universe. These are Taylor Jenkins Reid, Sarah J. Maas and Colleen Hoover, who are well-known renowned authors in their own right. Taylor Jenkins Reid predominantly writes about historical fiction based in the late 20th century; all of her books are standalone but all happen within the same fictional universe she has created of frictional celebrities. She has gained huge popularity and one of her books, Daisy Jones and the Six has now become a series adaptation by Amazon Prime with Reece Weatherspoon being one of the executive producers and will be released March 3rd this year. Sam Cflaalin will be playing the male leading role of Billy Dunne. Sarah J. Maas has also had notable success with not only one but two book series, A Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses. Both of them have a huge fan following and are in the genre of fantasy romance. In the Throne of Glass series, Sarah J. Maas started when she was 16 and with now 9 books in the series you can see how she has improved as a writer and effectively the reader can ‘grow up’ with her through the books. Now moving onto Colleen Hoveer, who had at the beginning of her writing career had to self-publish many of her books and has now sold over 20 million of them. She writes mostly about romance and the most popular book of #booktok is by her; It Ends With Us, which has had 84 weeks on the News York Times Bestseller list. Colleen Hoover has also edged away from just a classic romance book to that of a thriller, Verity which has also received major hype because of its plot twist, showing that her writing skills don't only lie within a specific genre and one can try one of her books even if romance isn't for them.

But with all of that said the writing of these books themselves aren't that of the greatest quality and are nowhere near that of a classic book’s standard such as The Great Gatsby. However, they are all still a definite fun read and can capture and engage the reader in their different world - and isn't that the sole purpose of a book?