How to Decide What to Read
Micro reviews, trope reveals, mood boards, and aesthetic marketing. Plus, a Shadow Daddy update.
A universal experience: your TBR pile is towering, but none of the books fit your current mood. When I was in college, I’d drive in my little Scion xA to the Borders at Montclair Place and buy a stack of historical romance paperbacks that I hadn’t read yet, or I’d peruse the new in paperback table.
A few years later, I’d read reviews on SmartBitchesTrashyBooks or tune into my Amazon algorithm to find something to buy and download on my Kindle. And I still do all of these things, sometimes.
But Bookstagram and BookTok have introduced a new model of book discovery, and with that, new ways of providing book recommendations. Despite the fact that people are looking for an entire book to sit down and read, their attention spans are shorter than ever. And while some BookTok review videos are long and rambling enough I have to watch them on 2x speed, I’m here to talk about something I’m going to call micro reviews, as well as all of the other emerging methods to market your romance novel in a sea of other romances.
Micro Reviews and Decimal Ratings
Anytime I open TikTok, within a couple of videos or so, I’ll come face to face with a BookToker sitting alongside a towering stack of books, spines turned away from the camera. Usually, these are “yes, no, maybe videos.” Yes, no, or maybe: popular BookTok books. Yes, no, or maybe: Romantasy edition, and etc. Our BookToker tells us what to read in just a few words, working their way through the stack. A wrinkle of the nose - “no.” A knowing smirk - “yes, yes yes.” Another staple of the genre - clicking your acrylic nails across the cover of a book you really loved.
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But a new micro review template has emerged in my feed in recent weeks - “underhyped, overhyped, appropriately hyped.” And of course, the highest praise of all - criminally underhyped.
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This all makes sense in a media cycle defined by influencers recommending the same narrow set of romantasy novels and small town cowboy stories and dark romances - everyone is talking about more or less the same set of books, a new canon for the Kindle Unlimited reader. How can they have a different conversation about those same books? By taking the bold stance of not liking one and, as we’re seeing with the underhyped lists, finding a few books off the beaten path to recommend while still spotlighting the consensus picks as well.
Another frequent review of this type is six star reads - books so good they transcend the five star rating system. BookTokers and Goodreads reviewers stick to the five star system but love to subvert it, often reverting to decimals to achieve the desired rating (this was a 4.25 out of 5, for example). Watch any BookToker’s six star reads video and it is essentially a list of their favorite books, often some combination of Sarah J. Maas, The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah, Fourth Wing, the Magnolia Parks series by Jessa Hastings (fodder for an entire future issue of Romancing the Phone by itself, I’m sure), and maybe an Emily Henry for spice.
Describing one of her six star reads, The Fine Print by Lauren Asher, @lettersfrommads says “This is the first in the Dreamland Billionaires series. I actually just finished the second and it was not a six star for me. I loved it, I enjoyed it so much, it was like a cute 4.75.”
The Catch-22 of all of this is that the shorter the review, the harder it is to convince a reader to read something new. The structure of these type of BookTok reviews lends itself to perpetuating recommendations of the same 30 books over and over again. I would hypothesize that readers looking to BookTok for recommendations are often won over by the frequency with which they’re seeing a title promoted in these types of videos rather than the content of the review.
Winning Over the Mood Readers
Outside of the micro-review ecosystem, how are authors and publishers winning over readers? In recent years, the cover reveal has become a staple of both the traditional and indie pub marketing cycle for a book release. Announce your title, reveal your cover, share a blurb, drive pre-orders. But in the TikTok-powered book environment, a cover reveal isn’t enough. As we’ve previously discussed, covers are extremely important to readers who are increasingly aesthetic driven. A common BookTok video relies on audio that says,” Never judge a book by its cover…unless it’s this one.”
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But the readers of BookTok often need more than a cover to make a decision in an increasingly flooded landscape. What they need is a trope reveal. What they need is a mood board. What they need is an entire aesthetic.
On Instagram, the trope reveal often takes the form of a fan art illustration of the main couple, with curly arrows pointing in every direction toward the included tropes. There’s only one bed! She falls first! He falls harder! Secret baby! (tall decaf cappuccino!) See below from author Holly Jukes - I didn’t realize he teaches her to play guitar was a trope, but I can see it. Some authors and readers call that a micro trope - something too specific and small to be a trope, but more of a detail that they love. Another popular micro trope example might be something like forehead kisses or wife guy energy.
On TikTok, authors choose a song (strangely, usually a dubstep remix) to play as their tropes appear one by one in text overlaid on the video.
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Other ways to share the vibe of your novel and thus entice readers? Mood boards, which on TikTok have been translated to slide shows of images evoking the feel of a book set to music. While on Twitter and Instagram I see a lot of authors making static mood boards (think Pinterest) to promote their own novels, on TikTok, readers love to create video clips for books that bridge the gap between the page and real life. Note - if the below TikTok does, in fact, convince you to read Wild Love by Elsie Silver, good news! I’ll be talking about her books next week.
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Moving beyond aesthetics and mood boards, we get into weird AI generated character images and videos territory, which we’ll return to someday.
Readers finding their next reads on BookTok are choosing based on different criteria than readers of the recent past, valuing aesthetic and visual representations of books, tropes, and micro reviews in order to make quick snap judgments. The advent of indie publishing, Kindle Unlimited, and the relative ease of library ebook lending makes it easier and cheaper to read more books every year, meaning that readers need to make more and more of these snap decisions as they need to discover more and more books across a variety of platforms. It remains to be seen how much this will shift marketing strategy for books and publishing as this type of reading and reader becomes more entrenched.
Imaginary Celebrity Book Club
Is Joanna Goddard really a celebrity? I don’t know. But when I think about aesthetics and the internet, I think Cup of Jo, her long running, supremely powerful lifestyle blog (and now her substack newsletter,
). Cup of Jo is known for having one of the kindest and most engaged comments sections on the internet. She did try to launch a book club during the early months of the covid lockdown that quickly petered out, but I’d be interested to see what a Cup of Jo book club would look like today. Maybe her best friend Gemma, creator of the gone too soon My Lady Jane, could co-host? Their book selections could be an interesting mix of literary and commercial fiction, with an engaged audience that is generally a little older than the typical BookTok demographic. Call me, Joanna!P.S.: For all of you Shadow Daddy lovers out there, I have stumbled upon a cousin - bat boys. What a delight. This fan-created name for Azriel, Rhysand, and Cassian from ACOTAR (Illyrian warriors with wings, obviously). This has crossed over from fan art and AI generated content about the Bat Boys to BookTokers calling their boyfriends Bat Boy and inspiring their boyfriends to buy bat wing costumes, as seen in the below TikTok that has amassed 4.2 million views in two weeks.
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Next week: Elsie Silver, Chip Gaines, and the politics of the cowboy romance.
This is a fantastic summary! A few thoughts:
1) another term I’ve heard for 6 star reads is infinity or infinite ♾️ star reads
2) re: decimal ratings - I think readers feel bad rating books a 3 or lower (maybe even a 4 or lower), especially now that we often can engage directly with authors on social media. I feel like the decimals, especially between 4 and 5 and then new 6 star, are giving readers more options to rank books without offending authors
3) I wonder if Bat boy fall was influenced by its predecessor Rat boy summer?? https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a61102350/hot-rodent-men-summer-trend/