Readers Can’t Get Enough of BookTok. Publishers Are Cashing In.

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Journal – "Readers Can’t Get Enough of BookTok. Publishers Are Cashing In"

Episode Information:

• Title: Readers Can’t Get Enough of BookTok. Publishers Are Cashing In.
• Hosts: Ryan Knutson and Jessica Mendoza
• Release Date: May 26, 2025
• Description: Exploring how BookTok, the TikTok community centered around books, is revolutionizing the publishing industry, driving sales, and reshaping how publishers discover and market new talent.

---

Introduction to BookTok and Its Impact

The episode delves into the phenomenon of BookTok, a vibrant corner of TikTok dedicated to book recommendations, reviews, and literary discussions. Hosts Ryan Knutson and Jessica Mendoza explore how this digital community has become a powerful force in the publishing world, particularly influencing the romance and fantasy genres.

Jessica Mendoza introduces the topic by highlighting how BookTok has been transforming publishing, attracting new audiences, and driving significant sales growth for authors and publishers alike.

---

Spotlight on Leah Koch and The Ripped Bodice Bookstore

Leah Koch, a passionate romance novel enthusiast, shares her insights into the enduring appeal of romance literature.

• Defining Romance Novels:
  • Leah Koch [00:34]: “You need two things to be a romance novel. You need a central love story and a happy ending.”

Koch emphasizes that a true romance novel must conclude with the protagonists being happily together, steering clear of tragic endings that deviate from the genre's core.

• The Ripped Bodice Bookstore:
  • Jessica Mendoza [01:11]: “Leah loves romance so much that in 2016, she and her sister opened up a bookstore devoted to it. It's called the Ripped Bodice, and it's got locations in LA and in Brooklyn.”

The bookstore has become a hub for romance enthusiasts, offering a wide array of sub-genres and catering to specific reader requests, thereby illustrating the niche's profitability and passionate fanbase.

---

The Surge of BookTok in Driving Book Sales

The conversation shifts to how BookTok has significantly boosted book sales, particularly for romance and fantasy genres.

• Leah Koch [02:30]: “TikTok... was pulling in new audiences to romance. And it kept happening.”

Koch observes that initially unexpected book requests from customers correlated with viral trends on BookTok, leading to increased inventory orders in anticipation of sustained demand.

• Statistical Impact:
  • Jessica Mendoza [03:10]: “Since 2020, BookTok has driven major sales, especially in the romance and fantasy genres. In one survey, TikTok found that more than a quarter of its users bought a book or started following an author after watching a video on the platform.”

These statistics underscore BookTok's role in not only promoting new titles but also revitalizing interest in existing ones, contributing to a dynamic shift in the publishing landscape.

---

Penn Cole: A Success Story in the BookTok Era

Penn Cole, an author who has successfully harnessed BookTok's power, provides a firsthand account of leveraging social media to build a substantial readership.

• Genre and Writing Style:
  • Jessica Mendoza [05:34]: “Penn's own books fall into a genre called Romantasy...”

Romantasy combines romance with fantasy elements, appealing to a broad audience seeking both emotional and imaginative storytelling.

• Self-Publishing Journey:
  • Penn Cole [08:08]: “I was never afraid of the business aspect of being an author... I wanted to keep the money.”

Penn chose to self-publish to maintain control and financial benefits, a strategy that allowed her to directly engage with her audience on platforms like TikTok.

• Building a Presence on BookTok:
  • Penn Cole [11:04]: “Well, that is the million dollar question. If you knew how to answer that easily, you would make a lot of money.”

Penn discusses the trial-and-error process of finding the right approach on BookTok, emphasizing consistency and genuine engagement over seeking viral moments.

• Breakthrough Moment:
  • Penn Cole [12:31]: “And then two days later, you know, the sales dropped down to what they were before the views stopped...”

Despite an initial spike in sales from a viral video, Penn learned the importance of sustainable engagement rather than relying solely on virality.

• Collaborating with Publishers:
  • Penn Cole [15:38]: “Atria would publish Penn's novels in print and get them in more bookstores.”

Partnering with a traditional publisher like Atria allowed Penn to expand her reach, transitioning from self-published success to broader market penetration.

• Sales Milestone:
  • Penn Cole [16:25]: “I think by the end of the year we're going to hit a million copies sold in about a year and a half of the books being on the market...”

Penn's remarkable sales achievements highlight the potential for BookTok-driven authors to achieve unprecedented success outside conventional publishing constraints.

---

Publishers Adapting to BookTok Trends

Felicity Valance, Director of Digital Marketing for Penguin Young Readers at Penguin Random House, discusses how major publishers are adapting their strategies in response to BookTok's influence.

• Algorithm Insights:
  • Felicity Valance [18:34]: “So obviously the algorithm when we talk about TikTok...”

Felicity explains how TikTok's algorithm personalizes content feeds, allowing publishers to gain real-time insights into reader preferences and emerging trends.

• Releasing Older Titles:
  • Felicity Valance [20:20]: “We're aware of books from our backlist that the read itself really speaks to what the reader's interested in...”

Publishers like Penguin are re-releasing and repackaging older titles to align with current trends, leveraging BookTok's ability to breathe new life into established works.

---

Challenges and Criticisms of BookTok's Influence

Despite its successes, BookTok faces criticism and challenges, particularly regarding the perceived literary value of its promoted books.

• Perception of Quality:
  • Felicity Valance [22:45]: “I have absolutely heard that...”

Felicity addresses the criticism that BookTok-endorsed books are not of high literary quality, advocating for the acceptance of diverse reading tastes and the enjoyment that comes from various genres.

• Authorial Struggles:
  • Penn Cole [23:47]: “They sort of get painted with a broad brush where people discount my books and assume they're going to be fluff...”

Penn shares the emotional toll of dealing with stereotypes and negative perceptions, highlighting the pressure authors face in maintaining quality and managing public expectations.

• Mental Health Impacts:
  • Penn Cole [25:35]: “I had to start going to therapy...”

The relentless demand and scrutiny from an active online presence can lead to significant mental health challenges for authors, underscoring the need for supportive communities and coping mechanisms.

---

The Future of BookTok and Publishing

The episode concludes by contemplating the lasting legacy of BookTok, especially in light of potential regulatory challenges.

• Potential TikTok Ban:
  • Jessica Mendoza [25:23]: “The Supreme Court has agreed to hear TikTok's challenge to the ban before it goes into effect...”

Despite the uncertainty surrounding TikTok's future in the U.S., the influence of BookTok has set a precedent for how social media can reshape publishing dynamics.

• Empowerment of Readers:
  • Penn Cole [26:46]: “It's giving readers power that they have never had before...”

BookTok democratizes book discovery, empowering readers to influence publishing trends and giving authors more agency over their careers.

• Enduring Changes:
  • Penn Cole [27:16]: “I think TikTok is changing and will continue to change everything about publishing...”

Both Penn and Felicity agree that BookTok's impact will persist, fostering a more reader-driven industry where publishers must remain adaptable and responsive to emerging trends.

---

Conclusion

"The Journal" episode effectively captures the transformative role of BookTok in the publishing industry, highlighting both the opportunities and challenges it presents. Through the experiences of authors like Penn Cole and insights from publishing professionals like Felicity Valance, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of how social media is reshaping how books are marketed, discovered, and consumed.

Notable Quotes:

• Leah Koch [00:34]: “You need two things to be a romance novel. You need a central love story and a happy ending.”
• Penn Cole [12:31]: “And then two days later, you know, the sales dropped down to what they were before the views stopped...”
• Penn Cole [26:46]: “It's giving readers power that they have never had before.”
• Felicity Valance [22:45]: “I have absolutely heard that...”

---

Note: Advertisements, intros, outros, and non-content sections from the transcript have been excluded to focus solely on the substantive discussions and insights presented in the episode.

Transcript

[Jessica Mendoza]

Hey, it's Jess. We're off on Memorial Day, but with summer reading season coming up, we wanted to bring back an episode we made a few months ago. It's on Booktok, the corner of TikTok that's all about books and how it's transforming the publishing world. Here it is. For Leah Koch, the romance novel is life. She's loved romance since she was a teenager. What is it that draws you so much to this type of writing?

[Leah Koch]

Great question. Let's quickly define what a romance novel is. You need two things to be a romance novel. You need a central love story and a happy ending. And the happy ending, sometimes people try to get around for some reason, but you can't. They have to be together and happy at the end. They do not have to be heterosexually married with a baby. But, like, one of them can't get hit by a bus.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Cause that's a tragedy, right?

[Penn Cole]

Yeah.

[Leah Koch]

Or a train a la Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina is not a romance novel. She dies.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Got it. Got it.

[Leah Koch]

Anyway, I read to have fun.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Same.

[Leah Koch]

And romance novels are fun.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Leah loves romance so much that in 2016, she and her sister opened up a bookstore devoted to it. It's called the Ripped Bodice, and it's got locations in LA and in Brooklyn. The store is full of passionate experts who can help you find pretty much any kind of romance.

[Leah Koch]

So if you ask somebody for cowboy werewolves, number one, they're going to take your request very seriously. And number two, they're going to say, okay, here are the two options that we have. But if you're interested in that, you might also be interested in cowboy mermaids or werewolf doctors.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Romance has always had its audience. But Leah says that over the last few years, she's seen a surge of interest. At first, it was just a few people coming in with surprising requests.

[Leah Koch]

They started asking for things that I wasn't expecting. So series that I had read and enjoyed but weren't, like, top of mind. The first person I was like, totally. By the fifth person, I was like, how do you know about this series?

[Jessica Mendoza]

Yeah.

[Leah Koch]

And she was like, oh, my God. It's all anyone's reading on TikTok.

[Jessica Mendoza]

TikTok, or specifically BookTok, the part of the platform that's all about books was pulling in new audiences to romance. And it kept happening. Customers would come in and ask for a book because they'd seen it on TikTok.

[Leah Koch]

Very notably, to me, it was actually translating to sales. And young people were coming into the shop, and they were coming with shopping lists of things that they had seen on TikTok. And so we would start clock like whatever they were asking for. We're like, okay, we need to order more copies because next week, like this is gonna be the thing that everybody wants.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Today people are still showing up at the ripped bodice because of TikTok. But the influence of Booktok has gone way beyond a single independent bookstore. Since 2020, BookTok has driven major sales, especially in the romance and fantasy genres. In one survey, TikTok found that more than a quarter of its users bought a book or started following an author after watching a video on the platform. And some of the largest publishers in the US are finding new talent, rethinking their strategies, and seeing windfalls from old titles. Because of TikTok. Authors, influencers, agents and publishers all told us that today, TikTok's fingerprints are all over the book industry. Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. Coming up on the show, TikTok and the book industry, a love story.

[Felicity Valance]

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your fridge stops working, you don't sit around waiting for all your food to spoil. You find a solution. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find great talent fast. It moves your job post to the top of the page so it's the first thing relevant candidates see when they start searching. And it truly does make a difference. Sponsored jobs receive 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs, according to Indeed data. Plus with Sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions or long term contracts. You're only paying for results. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more vis@ Indeed.com journal. That's Indeed.com journal right now. And support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com journal terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Author Pen Cole reads a lot of different books in the romance genre.

[Penn Cole]

I'm actually getting into sports romance lately, which is fun. I read my first hockey romance.

[Jessica Mendoza]

I love that you can just sort of take the word romance and add a different word and it's a whole category of books. It's amazing.

[Penn Cole]

Exactly. Billionaire romance? Yes. Hockey romance, Mafia romance. It's a whole thing.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Penn's own books fall into a genre called Romantasy, a combination of romance and fantasy that typically has a few main ingredients. A strong, usually female main Character, a love interest who often starts out as an enemy, and then some kind of supernatural element like dragons or sorcerers or in a lot of cases, fairies. And the plot is usually peppered with spicy sex scenes. It's the kind of novel Penn had dreamed of writing, but she didn't think she could make any money in it.

[Penn Cole]

And so I went into a different career for many years, thinking, well, someday I'll write my book. Like, I'll get there some. And then during the pandemic, as I think many people did, I sort of reassessed what I wanted out of life and whether I was really happy with where I was. And I realized that I really wanted to write that book that I'd always been kind of dreaming about writing. So I took a risk and I wrote my first book.

[Jessica Mendoza]

That book is called Spark of the Everflame. It's the first in a four part series, the Kindred's Curse saga. And it's got a feisty heroine, a hot immortal prince, a human rebel faction, and a whole lot of will they, won't they? Penn read me a snippet.

[Penn Cole]

I was made of swinging fists and rash words, my edges too jagged and my temper too hot. Nothing about me was delicate. Sometimes I wondered whether Henry's taste had changed or whether he thought he saw something different in me. The nurturing healer who stepped up to care for her family in her mother's absence. But I didn't choose to be a healer, nor did I choose to take my mother's role. And I didn't want gentle or delicate. I wanted to burn.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Ooh, I got little shivers there with that last line. When Penn started writing that first book in 2021, she'd already decided that she wanted to self publish. She'd been to law school and worked as a consultant for small businesses, helping them with branding, social media and growth. So she was pretty savvy when it came to launching her own career as an author. Why did you choose to self publish?

[Penn Cole]

I was never afraid of the business aspect of being an author. The idea of marketing my book, of handling, you know, all of the financial details, the legal details, figuring out what the COVID would be, all of that stuff excited me. So I knew pretty early on that I wanted to self publish because, frankly, if you're gonna do all of that work yourself, you wanna keep the money. Cause when you traditionally publish, you end up giving away quite a bit of your money. And so I thought, well, if I'm willing to do the work, I might as well, you know, reap the benefits of it.

[Jessica Mendoza]

And Penn quickly learned that a lot of that work needed to happen on social media.

[Penn Cole]

You have to be where the readers are and find ways for them to see you and to know that you even exist. Because you're not going big promotions that these huge publishing houses get. Your books aren't going to be on the shelves at Barnes and Noble. You're not going to be, you know, listed as a hot book to read in, you know, Vogue magazine or something.

[Jessica Mendoza]

So even before she'd finished writing her books, Penn made an official TikTok account. And it was there that she found a lot of the readers she was looking for. They were on booktok. Booktok really took off during the pandemic when many readers were stuck at home. One of the first books that went viral on booktok is Colleen Hoover's dark romance novel, It Ends with Us.

[Penn Cole]

Colleen Hoover was doing something when she wrote It Ends With Us because believe me, when I started this book, my life ended.

[Jessica Mendoza]

And it's crazy to think that this one book will probably change my life forever. This book did make me cry. I think it's an important read and I can understand why it got so popular on TikTok. Hoover's book had already been considered a commercial success when it came out in 2016, but when users on BookTok picked up on it, the sales went bananas. Hoover's publisher told me that by 2021, weekly sales for It Ends With Us were 100 times more than what they'd been two years before. Hoover later published a sequel, and earlier this year It Ends With Us was adapted into a movie. Other authors have also broken through, like Sarah J. Maas with her fairy series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, which I devoured way too fast. There's also Rebecca Yarros and her novel 4th Wing. And while not everyone makes it as big, BookTok has raised up other romance and fantasy authors. TikTok says that this year There was a 300% increase in posts with the hashtag romantasy. And the romantasy genre has grown into a $471 million category. So Penn Cole was able to ride this wave on booktok. How did you try and build a following or a community on booktok? What's the secret sauce there?

[Penn Cole]

Well, that is the million dollar question. If you knew how to answer that easily, you would make a lot of money.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Penn didn't have all the answers, but she did have a strategy to win over booktok readers. She published the first three books of her four part series quickly within A few months knowing Romantasy fans love a good binge. And she used the self publishing platform on Amazon so Kindle readers could access the book and physical copies could be printed on demand. Penn also posted about once a day on TikTok and other social media platforms. Was there a specific goal you had in mind?

[Penn Cole]

I think in the early days, I really thought you needed to go viral. I thought that I was shooting for that video that got a million views and that that would make or break my career. I have since learned that is not how it works at all. It is so much more complicated than that.

[Jessica Mendoza]

And so what changed your mind and how did you, like, adjust?

[Penn Cole]

At some point, I think I did have a video. It wasn't one of my videos, but it was a video somebody else made about my book.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Here's the video and brilliant, beautiful, epic, thriving, jumps off the page, writing punches you in the face, makes you reread a paragraph with tears in your eyes, thinking, oh, my God, that is so poignant and beautiful. Half of the video was posted just a few months after Penn released her first book. Shout Out. Pen Cole, this author, she was just exquisite.

[Penn Cole]

And I saw a spike and I thought, this is it. Like, I've made it. My book's gonna be huge. And then two days later, you know, the sales dropped down to what they were before the views stopped, because that's what virality is. It's a moment, right? And I think I learned after that that this is a long haul thing.

[Jessica Mendoza]

So Penn refined her strategy. She made sure every post had details like what hashtags to use and a description of her series.

[Penn Cole]

It was a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall and waiting to see what sticks. I had joined a lot of groups on TikTok for authors, and I was, you know, uploading art and making memes out of my characters. I was, you know, doing videos about me as an author. And so it was just every single day trying something new and hoping that something would strike a chord with readers.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Girl, how much time did this take?

[Penn Cole]

So much time. So all of the time.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Eventually, Pen found her footing on TikTok. Readers who were fans of other Romantasy books started picking up on her series.

[Penn Cole]

I just finished the first book in the Kindred Curse saga, the Spark of the Everflame, and it was absolute perfection. I was so obsessed and binged it so quickly, within like a day and a half, that I am currently charging my Kindle so that I can read the second part.

[Jessica Mendoza]

I can't for the life of me remember which one of my mutuals read.

[Penn Cole]

And raved about this book, but whoever.

[Leah Koch]

You are, I love you.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Mwah.

[Penn Cole]

I started to see my book growing in sales without a viral moment, at a very steady, regular pace. And it was just by talking to people, replying to comments, when people said, oh, I'm interested in that book, or asking questions about it, you know, looking at videos that people who had read my book, if they made a video about it, thanking them, and talking to them in DMs about what they liked or what their theories were really engaging with them. The first month I sold maybe 100 copies, I can't remember exactly, and it was like $1,000. And I was stoked. I was so excited. I thought I had just had the greatest, you know, debut release of all time, making that thousand dollars. Of course it cost me way more than that to put out the book, so I was still deeply in the red. And then the next month it like quadrupled. And then the next month it like added a digit.

[Felicity Valance]

Wow.

[Penn Cole]

And it, it grew and grew and grew. I think by the end of the first year, I think we'd sold like 300,000 copies of the books. Those numbers were just kind of mind boggling.

[Jessica Mendoza]

A lot of this growth came from ebook sales. But Penn felt that if she wanted to get bigger, she needed to actually get her book into bookstores, which is really hard to do without a publisher.

[Penn Cole]

There's still a huge segment of the market that doesn't read ebook at all. So I knew that I had the potential to really grow my reader base in a significant way if I could get into those bookstores. But that door was pretty much shut to me other than a handful of bookstores that had stopped my books.

[Jessica Mendoza]

One publisher caught Penn's eye, Atria, which is part of one of the biggest publishing houses, Simon and Schuster. Penn liked how Atria worked with social media. And Atria was into Penn too. The brand was keeping an eye out for self published authors who'd already built a big audience. In July of this year they got together. Atria would publish Penn's novels in print and get them in more bookstores. And so far it's made the difference. She hoped it would.

[Penn Cole]

I think by the end of the year we're going to hit a million copies sold in about a year and a half of the books being on the market, which is unheard of. I mean, even the average traditionally published book is only selling maybe five figures if they're lucky. Right. It's just, it's crazy to think about.

[Jessica Mendoza]

As publishers take note of success stories like Pen's, they're also recognizing that TikTok offers really precise information into what readers want. And that new insight is shaking up the publishing industry. That's next.

[Felicity Valance]

This episode is brought to you by Cibo Global Markets.

[Jessica Mendoza]

CIBO is a global exchange operator committed to building trusted markets worldwide. CBOE delivers cutting edge trading, clearing and investment solutions and products in multiple asset classes including equities, derivatives and fx. Learn more about the exchange for the.

[Felicity Valance]

World [e-mail].

[Jessica Mendoza]

Booktok has jolted the publishing industry, which is usually pretty stagnant. Circana Bookscan, a publishing tracker, says that in a typical year, overall print sales grow or shrink by about only 1 to 2%. And this year was no exception. But for BookTok authors, it's a different story. In the U.S. bookTok authors sold 20% more books in print this year than the year before. That's 55.4 million books. And that has piqued the interest of some of the country's biggest book publishers.

[Felicity Valance]

Hi, I'm Felicity. I'm the director of digital marketing for Penguin Young Readers at Penguin Random House.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Felicity Valance has been in legacy publishing for nearly two decades, and she says BookTok allows her to reach readers in a way that she was never able to before, even on other social platforms.

[Felicity Valance]

So obviously the algorithm when we talk about TikTok, is the more you scroll and engage with certain pieces of content, the more it will feed you that content, whether it's creators that you follow or things that you save. TikTok will then say, oh, this person likes this. We'll give them more of that.

[Jessica Mendoza]

And that's different than how algorithms worked with other social media platforms in the past.

[Felicity Valance]

In the past, Correct? Yeah. It used to be either chronologically or just like who had the most clicks and engagement, who had the most views. That's what you were being served.

[Jessica Mendoza]

That shift from being shown what is generally popular to what you were interested in meant that readers didn't have to look for content about the books they liked. It was just served up to them. In fact, that's what happened to me. Booktok kept feeding me content and I kept eating it up. There were straight up book reviews, sure, but people also use memes. They make skits about their favorite plot points, they joke about story tropes, and they share their opinions on everything from character arcs to book covers. So now with booktok, someone like Felicity, from her perch at Penguin Random House, is able to see in real time what readers actually care about, what books were featured in the videos with the most comments, which titles were being recommended the most, and then she can respond accordingly.

[Felicity Valance]

So I think there's a lot of listening to readers that TikTok has really amplified. We're able to sort of see trends emerge. You know, romantasy isn't a word that we all talked about three years ago. So seeing romantasy come out of places like TikTok, publishers and editors were able to sort of say, right, what could I acquire that suits this? Our sales team are able to say, what do we have that already exists on our list that could suit this reader's interests?

[Jessica Mendoza]

That second look at old titles in particular has led to a slew of re releases in the Booktok era because publishers realized if you give its packaging a glow up and put it in the hands of the right influencers, a book years or even decades old can see a fresh uptick in sales.

[Felicity Valance]

We are aware of books from our backlist that the read itself really speaks to what the reader's interested in. But maybe it doesn't look right amongst what's on the shelves right now. And so is there an opportunity for a reader to rediscover that if it had the new jacket? But also I think it's more a case of new readers discovering it. We're aware that a book that we know to be existing for a long time, they may have never heard of. I'm still flabbergasted when people sort of bring up old books and be like, I found this new great book. It's called the Fault in our Stars. And I think, what. How is that not monolithically heard about, but people do. And so we're really aware of it's not an old book repackaged to them, it's just a new book.

[Jessica Mendoza]

And BookTok hasn't just changed how publishers are thinking about marketing their catalog. Felicity has also been trying to work with authors and influencers to get her books in front of the right readers.

[Felicity Valance]

So we kind of pivoted our resources a little bit and said, you know what, let's focus on creating content for this platform more for our key core audience.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Would you say that TikTok today is more influential than say, a Publisher's Weekly review or, you know, a ranking, a top 10 books of the year ranking?

[Felicity Valance]

It really depends on the book. It totally depends on who the readers are. And I think all of those things still matter in their own way. And the lightning strike of TikTok can be happening one day and then the next day it's not. And if I had the viral button to press, I'd press it every day. If only, if only, I'd love it.

[Jessica Mendoza]

Despite the powerful impact that booktok has had on publishing, it also comes with challenges. For one thing, romance and fantasy are often taken less seriously by the broader literary mainstream. If you look up chatter about booktok on other corners of the Internet, you'll find a lot of haters. Here's one tweet to give you a Booktok style. Books are anti literacy, anti art and reading stuff like that is not the same as reading actual literature. I brought this up with Felicity. There's the criticism that BookTok books are not that quote unquote good. How do you respond to that? And have you heard that?

[Felicity Valance]

I have absolutely heard that and I will fight people about that. No, that sounds very aggressive. But I think to judge someone's reading tastes like that is really dangerous. Reading is such an enjoyable pastime that we want people to not feel pressured to read the right books. We want them just to be entertained and have fun or be serious or learn. And yeah, I don't like the idea of saying BookTok books are bad. I think people have different tastes. And also the tastes of someone who reads 20 books a year versus the person who reads two books a year are wildly different.

[Jessica Mendoza]

How does that play into this? Maybe broader view that genres like romance and fantasy and young adult fiction are not like taken seriously.

[Felicity Valance]

I mean, I think it's like all entertainment orientated towards women that that tends to be given a side eye. And I don't love it because I think that's wrong.

[Jessica Mendoza]

This is something booktok authors feel as well. Here's Pen Cole again.

[Penn Cole]

It's very real. I actually just had a conversation with my publisher. They wanted to put viral book talk hit booktok sensation Pen Cole putting it in ads pretty much everywhere that you need to describe the book because that that communicates to booksellers in particular bookstores and buyers for these big book chains that that's sort of a code word for this book has a lot of fans, it has a big reader base. But for readers I think it has a very different connotation. And I had to sit down with my publisher and say I'm not sure that putting this in reader facing spaces is necessary necessarily the best idea because there is a big group of people that feels as if BookTok books are not any good. It sort of gets painted with a broad brush where people discount my books and assume they're going to be fluff. They're not going to be serious. The writing quality will be bad, they'll be unedited. Or they were, you know, make all these assumptions about what's inside my book without ever giving me a chance.

[Jessica Mendoza]

And like with all social Media, people on TikTok can be mean and being in it all the time can be rough on authors.

[Penn Cole]

I can't even count the number of times I have cried or, you know, had to just go and get offline because someone said something really mean. And of course they have every right to say that, right? Like we want people to give honest reviews. But as an author, seeing it can, can be hard.

[Jessica Mendoza]

The worst part for Penn was having to push back the release of the fourth and final book in her series. Because being a BookTok author is a lot of work and it leaves less time for, well, writing.

[Penn Cole]

Of course, most of my readers were so supportive and so kind about it and said, take all the time you need. But I mean, to be very honest about it, I had to start going to therapy. I had to seek professional help because it was, I felt so, so guilty. I really beat myself up over it. I, I thought I was given this opportunity to have a best selling book that was doing really well and that I was going to ruin. Starts to have an effect, no matter how mentally strong you are.

[Jessica Mendoza]

One thing we should note looming over all of this is a possible ban on TikTok in the U.S. a ban that's meant to start in January. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear TikTok's challenge to the ban before it goes into effect. Still, there's a real risk that the platform goes away. But even if that happens, a lot of other social media sites now operate the way TikTok does. So BookTok's legacy is likely to live on. That's especially true for readers, and in particular those who love cowboy werewolf romances and sexy fairy love stories. Penn says booktok has given these readers more agency.

[Penn Cole]

Traditionally, you know, for as long as books have existed, it has been a handful of gatekeepers in the biggest publishing houses that have decided what readers are going to read. And now publishers are rushing to keep up with what the readers are saying they like, as opposed to publishers telling readers this is what you get to choose from.

[Jessica Mendoza]

It sounds like you think TikTok will have a lasting effect on the publishing industry.

[Penn Cole]

I think TikTok is changing and will continue to change everything about publishing. It's giving readers power that they have never had before. It's allowing authors to hold onto their rights to make money outside of the publishing machine. I think the publisher, publishers who pay attention and who adapt rather than resisting are going to really rise to the top. So I think that has. It's really like a sea change that is in the process of occurring right now. I don't even think we know yet the full effects of how it's going to change. Publishing.

[Jessica Mendoza]

This episode was originally published in December. The Journal is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow with a new episode.