In May 2002, Newsweek magazine in the U.S. published a story, “Will the Blogs Kill Old Media?”—referring to the sudden popularity of blogs. At the time, it didn’t seem impossible. The blog (a truncation of the portmanteau weblog) burgeoned during the turn of the century, drawing readers away from traditional print outlets and toward internet personalities. 1999 marked the launch of the platforms Blogspot, Blogger, and LiveJournal, with WordPress and TypePad following in 2003.
Soon, the new medium was stratified into genres—fashion blogs, mommy blogs, travel blogs. Within the world of publishing, and specifically book publicity, the emergence of the literary blog was nothing short of revolutionary. Bookish blogs cropped up one after another—Bookslut (and, of course, Gawker) in 2002, the Millions in 2003, HTMLGiant in 2008, the Awl and the Rumpus in 2009, Unwrapping Romance in 2011. These were outlets for voicy, literary-minded young writers eager to share their opinions. Blogging not only circumvented the “gatekeeping” power of anointed literary critics at a handful of publications; it also filled a growing void as traditional avenues of literary coverage at newspapers and magazines began to narrow.
Then came the dawn of “microblogging” on such platforms as Twitter and Tumblr, which launched in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Twitter quickly became an essential tool not only for literary critics but for authors and publishers as well. Authors’ followings were soon factored into book deals, with the number of one’s followers prompting publishers to green-light book proposals, since a large following makes for more reliable publicity. Some publishers attempted to reverse engineer book deals by combing social media—including YouTube and Instagram, which launched in 2005 and 2010, respectively—for new projects, since established fan bases meant built-in publicity.
At the same time, readers themselves became “content creators” on social media. Just as blogs self-stratified into genres, users on YouTube and Instagram created their own subcommunities. On YouTube, enthusiastic readers carved out a corner called BookTube; on Instagram, Bookstagram.
Since the advent of the internet, readers have used various websites to stay connected and talk about books. “Consumers started telling each other about books with Amazon customer reviews a decade ago,” a December 2008 PW article noted. “Now they’re doing the same at BN.com and through general-interest gathering points like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and at a plethora of sites like Library-Thing, Shelfari, and Goodreads, dedicated to book conversation.”
But on BookTube and Bookstagram, readers cultivated their own brands and online followings, becoming what we now call “influencers.” Like the trusted literary bloggers before them, BookTubers and Bookstagrammers became a key source for book recommendations for many readers. (As of this writing, there are 78,000 videos and 8,800 channels that use the #BookTube hashtag on YouTube, and 73,290,494 posts under the #Bookstagram hashtag on Instagram.)
On YouTube, BookTubers’ videos—which mostly comprise unpacking book hauls, reviewing books, and making recommendations—have such titles as “Books you NEED to Read in 2022 *my favorite books that you’ll LOVE”; “I read 13 popular books... you need to read these!!”; etc. Then Bookstagram, which postdates YouTube by seven years, largely supplanted BookTube. Bookstagram content, for the most part, tends to comprise photos of books against pretty backgrounds, with captions containing the Bookstagrammers’ thoughts on said books. This simple combination can be potent. Popular Bookstagrammers have amassed tens and even hundreds of thousands of followers.
Then, in 2016, came TikTok. In 2021, the video-sharing platform surpassed Instagram as the most popular app among young Americans. And TikTok’s literary segment, BookTok, has garnered more influence than BookTube and Bookstagram ever did. Videos with the #BookTok hashtag have racked up a combined 82.2 billion views (as of early October), and videos with the hashtag #ItEndsWithUs—which addresses TikTok sensation Colleen Hoover’s wildly popular 2016 novel—have 1.4 billion (many of them clips of young women crying after finishing the book).
In the case of It Ends with Us and other books anointed “BookTok favorites,” including many of Hoover’s backlist titles, popularity on the app directly translated to sales. The common TikTok refrain “#BookTokMadeMeReadIt” is no exaggeration: in 2021, the year It Ends with Us started circulating on the app, Hoover’s print unit sales were 693% higher than in 2020. In response to BookTok’s selling power, bookstore across the country have erected “BookTok shelves” for shoppers to browse the app’s most buzzed-about books. Unique to TikTok, Barnes & Noble director of category management Shannon DeVito says, is “the staying power of these titles once they start trending on the app.” The bump in sales that follows a book’s popularity on BookTube or Bookstagram, on the other hand, is usually just a “flash in the pan.”
The power of celebrity influence also persists. Oprah’s power to sell books was highly regarded, but limited to television and never translated quite as powerfully to the online influencer era. But that doesn’t mean celebrity doesn’t have power online: in 2019, Vox deemed Reese’s Book Club “publishing’s secret weapon,” after its selection of Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing led to an astronomical bump in sales. Witherspoon picks one book each month, posts it to the @reesesbookclub account (which has 2.2 million followers), and promotes it for the rest of that month.
Despite the newfound power of celebrity within book publicity—that a single Instagram post from the right person can bump book sales, for instance—the practice of book reviewing, which also influences literary consumption, has been largely democratized. Publicists are eager to connect with readers and writers—as well as podcasters, YouTubers, Instagrammers, and TikTokkers—outside of establishment media, who now wield considerable power of their own. This is largely thanks to the book blogs that blazed a trail for non-establishment reviewing in the internet’s earliest days.
Today, most of the influential literary blogs of the 2000s are defunct; their home pages look as if petrified in amber. When Bookslut shut down in 2016, founder Jessa Crispin wrote in the Guardian expressing nostalgia for “the early days before money invaded the internet—the early 2000s in particular.” She recalled a time when the nascent internet allowed writers more freedom, and “the online book culture was run mostly by enthusiasts and amateurs, people who were creating blogs and webzines simply for the pleasure of it, rather than to build a brand.”
The concept of the “brand,” however, is not going anywhere, especially when it comes to book publicity. At every level of the publishing industry, brands must be cultivated—by publishers, authors, critics, bloggers, and influencers alike. Moreover, as the internet becomes increasingly participatory, consumer-driven book promotion looks to be the future. Readers are looking for genuine recommendations from other readers, which is the kind of publicity that money can’t buy. Of course, this kind of publicity can be engineered—strategically putting books into the hands of celebrities, influencers, and consumer reviewers—but organic word-of-mouth is still a powerful force.
With the proliferation of publicity channels, promoting books has never been so multifaceted, so far-reaching, and so out of publishers’ hands.
Sophia Stewart is an associate news editor at Publishers Weekly.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story appeared in the 150th anniversary issue of Publishers Weekly.
