Tired and Wired, BookTok Edition
what's hot and what's not
Hi friends! Thank you so much for the generous reception of my news on Monday. It has been a whirlwind. Sometimes, when I don’t have a topic in mind for a week, I just sit down with TikTok and see what comes across my FYP. This week, everyone was sharing their May reading wrap ups, and everyone else was sharing their what I’ve read so far this year posts. So it feels like a good time for another BookTok trend round up: things people are loving, things people are hating, and things that just keep going strong. Our very own yes, no, maybe, if you will. So let’s dive right in:
Tired
The number one complaint I’m hearing recently from readers on and off BookTok? They’re tired of enemies to lovers stories where the characters aren’t actually enemies. I think with the veritable flood of enemies to lovers romance over the past several years, the bar has gotten higher for animosity. This tracks with our understanding of readers preferring extremes in genre fiction - they want super cozy or super dark, with not a lot in between. Of course readers are also going to want the enemies to be more extreme. I’m seeing a lot of FMCs falling for the man who killed their mother, father, brother, friend, I’m seeing stalkers - it’s not enough to just be from rival families any more.
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Another thing to watch out for? Series fatigue. I’m seeing lots of videos from readers looking for stand alone romantasy or completed series and posts about spiraling while you wait for the next book in a series:
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I also thought this slideshow, about strategies for how to remember what happened in the previous book in a series, was interesting:
https://www.tiktok.com/@bookswithhayley/photo/7509982439393987871?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7444283283494012459 (Substack, please let me embed gallery format TikToks someday).
Deinfluencing has been around as a concept for awhile now, particularly in the beauty space, but I’ve never seen it applied to books until now:
I’m sensing a lot of overwhelm related to towering TBRs and the sheer amount of reading BookTok creators are doing to keep up. There’s still a lot of chatter about women on BookTok reading too much or lying about how much they read, so I thought this video, where a creator shares how many pages they read every day in a week, was interesting:
(Sorry these are all gallery posts, I didn’t intend them to be!)
Wired
Dark Academia: With the popularity of Nocticadia, I’m seeing more and more dark academia romances on BookTok. Of particular note: Blood and Betrayals by Alexis Rune and Jeanette Rose (not a lot of reviews yet, but if this one blows up, you heard it here first).
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Romance dark academia feels a little bit different than the more literary dark academia that has been popular on BookTok for the past several years - I’m seeing a lot of books set at magical schools, and of course they’re dark, because dark romance is so popular right now. It’s the Zodiac Academy effect. Another example: the Fey Spy Academy series.
Audiobook trends: All of a sudden, I’m seeing a lot of separate “what I listened to this month” posts, with creators breaking out their audiobook listening from their reading. They’re also sharing posts like “books you should listen to instead of read” and there is a growing demand for duet narration (where, even if a book is single POV, the MMC’s dialogue is read by a male narrator).
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I’m even seeing headphone reviews - in general, I’m noticing a lot of BookTokers doing paid promotions for products outside of books in order to monetize their videos. As we learned directly from Smitty last week, a lot of creators are very conscious of maintaining authenticity on the platform and don’t accept paid promotion from publishers to review books. It makes sense that they would look to book-adjacent products (another popular one is Fourth Wing-themed sweatshirts) in order to make their content profitable.
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Holding Steady
Romantasy is, as always, all over my FYP. What is interesting right now is that everyone is posting about underhyped romantasy or new god tier romantasy books or the next Fourth Wing, but no one really seems to have come to consensus on what any of those books are. So I’m getting a ton of varied and interesting romantasy recs from these posts. We’ll see if they coalesce into two or three books that might be the book of the summer in the next few weeks:
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The one book I’ve seen more consistent hype for is A Dance of Lies, a new romantasy featuring a wounded dancer who has been imprisoned for two years and is now forced to become a spy for the King. Sounds like a banger, looking forward to picking this one up. Another micro trend to watch is ballet - starting to notice more FMCs who are dancers in the past few weeks.
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Silver Elite: the discourse that refuses to die. Somehow, we’ve circled around to readers sharing how much they loved the book and apologizing for it - I saw three or four videos exactly like this in an hour or two of scrolling:
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Obsessive men: I almost put this one in wired, but I feel like we’ve been talking about it for months in the context of why readers love dark romance.
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Finally, I’d love if y’all could weigh in on ideas for upcoming newsletter topics - I’m planning a deep dive into how authors are using TikTok Live, a survey of the current state of monster romance, and a fun post about how to plan a reading vacation, but I’d love to hear about the current book trends you’d like an explainer on or a book you’re seeing everywhere and want to know more about. If you could fill out this survey, I’d appreciate it!
xoxo
I like the deinfluence trend for books :)
I'm team reading vacation but that's also because I'm going on mine next weekend and want to compare notes :)