Is BookTok Dying?
What the US takeover of the app means for trend-driven reading
Hello, and welcome back to Romancing the Phone! I’m so sorry for my unexpectedly long absence - it has been a busy start to the year for me (which you will probably see in Publisher’s Marketplace soon). Plus, I took off Friday, January 20 in solidarity with the general strike for Minneapolis, and then I got a cold and felt like I couldn’t string a coherent thought together. Then I was in New York celebrating my angel Madeline Taylor and the release of her thrilling romantasy, Heir of Illusion. But! I’m back, and today we’re going to try to tackle the current state of BookTok, where influencers and readers might be fleeing to get their recommendations, and more. On Sunday, paid subscribers will get my thoughts on the current state of contemporary romance. And if there’s anything else you’re interested to dive deep on in the coming weeks, let me know!
So, without further ado…
Corporate ownership of TikTok transferred in January to TikTok Data Security Joint Venture LLC (a super normal and not at all threatening name). This LLC has 3 managing investors: Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. Since the takeover, posts about ICE have been censored or banned. Users have also been complaining that the algorithm is broken, and what is TikTok without its algorithm?
There has been a desire among some users to leave TikTok for months or years, but no obvious alternative has emerged. The newest challenger is Upscrolled, an Australian social media platform launched in 2025 and purports to have an algorithm with “no manipulation” that mostly shows users content chronologically. Still, the platform is currently much smaller than TikTok - reports say 400,000 US users had downloaded by the end of January.
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What does all of this mean for BookTok? A great question that I don’t think we can definitively answer yet. That said, anecdotally, my sense is that romantasy is still going strong on BookTok, but I’m seeing a lot of contemporary romance creators move back toward Instagram.
Across social media, but particularly on BookTok, there is a real sense of fatigue. Series fatigue, spice fatigue, trope fatigue - I could go on. And it makes sense! The pandemic reading boom is basically Kindergarten aged now. There are bound to be some growing pains. And as the world has continued to grow steadily scarier, the power of these books to help readers escape diminishes. So what do you get when your most consistent source of dopamine no longer quite does the trick? A lot of frustration.
And all of this just in time for the annual Valentine’s Day drop of dismissive and/or poorly researched articles about the romance genre. There continues to be a real desire to punch down at readers, particularly women readers, using BookTok as a pejorative:
Is this man mad at people (women) for enjoying a movie he didn’t love? Discontent is coming from every direction.
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Series Fatigue and Romantasy Fatigue
There has been a long simmering fear in romance publishing that romantasy is in its death throes. I think reports of romantasy’s demise have been greatly exaggerated - for one thing, romantasy isn’t new. Just like other romance sub genres, it may cycle in and out of popularity, but nothing every truly dies. What people are responding to, however, is reader fatigue. With so many trilogies and even longer running series, with years between release dates, readers have hit a saturation point - they aren’t as willing to commit to a new series without knowing when it will end. Just see this video, which is recommending series based on completion status.
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The other hot romantasy trend: standalones. Readers still want romantasy, but they want it on their terms.
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Disclaimer: I may or may not represent Sheila Masterson, author of The Poison Daughter 😉.
Still, there are always exceptions to the rule.
“Just when we thought shadow daddies were getting played out…”
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Conclusion: romantasy is alive. Readers are just engaging with the sub genre in new ways (and also sometimes the old ways). Much like a shadow daddy, it will live many lives over the course of thousands of years.
Spice Fatigue
Readers and content creators are still yearning for yearning, but is this just another way of describing spice fatigue? Super spicy romances have had their day, and now readers are seeking buildup as opposed to maximalism. Spicy scenes just hit different after hundreds of pages of hands brushing and physical torment.
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Plus, readers are seeking deeply emotional experiences in their books in 2026 - they want their sex scenes to mean something, rather than be a copy and paste attempt to hit some kind of sexual quota. A common misinterpretation of the appeal of genre romance is that it’s purely smut or pornography. But the reason romance works, when it works, is the emotional journey the characters go on to reach their happily ever after. This is why there can be infinite stories inside of one story structure.
With Heated Rivalry, we’ve also seen that things can be better: a massively successful, emotional, respectful adaption of a queer romance novel that elevates the material, that takes itself seriously, that understands and embraces what readers come to romance for. Doesn’t it set everything else into kind of stark relief? This season of Bridgerton is good, but are the subplots meant as a distraction from the central romance?
For more on this, read this excellent piece by Caroline Siede for the AV Club.
Trope Fatigue
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With many BookTok content creators, I’m seeing a shift away from trope-based pitches and toward highlighting books that feel different in some way.
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One of the best places to find these different books: romance reddit.
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The solution to the death of the algorithm and the flattening of the genre? Hyper specific recommendations from real people. Romance reddit is almost always one of my first stops on the internet when I want to find out what people are reading.
In conclusion: everyone is scared (understandably so - the world is scary right now), and this pervasive fear has led to anxiety in every corner of the romance market, from readers to editors to writers. Is TikTok dead? Is romantasy dead? Does anyone even like books anymore? But reports of the genre’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Even if BookTok continues to fizzle, the readers and content creators will still exist - they’ll just find somewhere new to hang out. They always do. One thing the romance community is excellent at doing is reinventing itself, over and over again. Next year, I might be posting about an entirely new romance genre that is ascendant, one we couldn’t see coming, but readers will still be buying books. Change is hard, but it’s inevitable. And we as readers seem like we’re ready for something new. Personally, I vote for the return of campy vampires (Christine Feehan, anyone?). More soon. xoxo
I'm in the UK and have seen literally no difference to TikTok since the change 🤷🏻♀️ except for seeing videos of people saying their videos were blocked, but seeing the 'blocked' videos in my feed as well.
Thank goodness! To me, TikTok and the whole "trope" obsession feels anathema to anything I love about writing and reading.