BookTok is Good, Actually: On the Undersung Joys of a Vast and Multifarious Platform ‹ Literary Hub

In a banquet room in South Carolina, I'm giving the keynote speech at a writing conference. To inspire the audience, I tell the Cinderella story of Colleen Hoover, the bestselling author in America. Three days before my speech, her novel It Starts with Us sold 800,000 copies on release day. There are 120 writers in the room; only one has heard of Hoover.
For every bestselling BookTok title, you can find a hundred videos from creators telling you it's overhyped-and recommending something else to read instead.

It's a little lonely over here. I've been baffled by why my esteemed colleagues, who gather in the thousands at AWP to kvetch about how hard it is to make a living as a writer, are so incurious about the place on the internet where readers are buying a metric fuckton of books.