Common Readers

I’ve passed enough “As Seen on TikTok” tables at otherwise cozily untrendy bookstores that I can no longer picture a solvent mass publishing industry without this app. Roughly one in thirteen U.S.-sold print books in 2024—59 million—“could be tied” to book-specific TikTok videos, which first appeared en masse in 2019. Their creators formed the subcommunity BookTok during the pandemic, when the reading habits of locked-down Americans briefly defibrillated the industry: the U.S. book market grew 21 percent from 2019 to 2023 after growing at rates of just 3 to 4 percent pre-pandemic, according to Vox. Even when the market overall shrank by one percent in the first quarter of 2023, BookTok-viral authors saw “an increase of 43 percent over their 2022 sales figures.” Though BookTok is often celebrated by its users as a reader-driven free market, many large accounts get two thousand dollars for each video, and twice that with publisher usage rights.

Since then, that algorithmic retail logic has moved so far upstream that publishers pay for the promise of a viral book before they even market it. Take March’s big lit-scandal, Shy Girl. Self-published by Mia Ballard early last year to thousands of positive reviews, the novel was picked up by the “Big Five” publishing house Hachette, which promoted it as a “buzzy BookTok sensation,” and then pulled it after evidence emerged that it was AI-generated.

The most vocal flabbergastees were those who first made the book a sensation. On March 20th—the day Hachette cancelled its planned U.S. release—Brandon Baker, a BookTok reviewer whose blurb tops the book’s front cover, posted a video disclaiming support for AI use (while also stressing that AI detectors are “not very accurate”). Though Baker blurbed Shy Girl as “brutal, uncomfortable, and visceral,” he justifies his love for it in the video on the basis that it’s none of these: “When I read it, I was kind of, like, very fatigued on indie extreme horror. It just seems like every hyped-up indie extreme horror book that I had read at that point was just, like, the most disgusting, most brutal, most depraved, most shocking, most disturbing thing that I had ever read and that, I’m just, I just can’t handle that anymore. I don’t know what it is about me, but I just, I can’t, I cannot handle the most brutal things put to paper.”

If the book’s own blurber can’t even defend it on its own terms, one is left wondering how his rave review is any different than a pan. But this video—in which Baker uses the term “upset” three times to testify to his critical failure—works no differently than successful BookTok reviews. While TikTok’s stunted critical language sells legions more books—even good ones—than the literary critics who dismiss the platform, as a doubtfully salable fiction writer I’m less interested in how a book goes viral than in what this costs the reader.

Take one of the most-reviewed books on TikTok: A Court of Mist and Fury, the second volume in Sarah J. Maas’s romantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses. The series’s hashtag, #ACOTAR, has over two million posts. Videos in the highest range of likes often involve BookTokers reading from the book or clutching it verklempt. The more articulate reviews are no less reactive. One starts: “I was sitting right here, five minutes ago, and I finished the book, and I’m feeling every emotion possible … I’m feeling the depression and ecstasy of the [faerie kingdom] Hybern.”

These reviews claim, in so many words or none: “This book’s good or bad because of how it made me feel, so it will make you feel that way, because we’re the same kind of reader.” This isn’t new. The most influential work of Elizabethan literary criticism, Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie, holds that poetry is superior to philosophy because poetry delights the reader to action whereas philosophy just lectures him. Two centuries later, Samuel Johnson appealed to “common readers” who read for the pleasure of finding their desires reflected in literature, over the pedantic critics of this literature. What’s new is that now the reader’s appraisal of the work, regardless of its ambition, caves into their emotional response to it. On BookTok, evaluation is testimony: the reader’s response to a book isn’t evidence in service of a judgment, it is the judgment.

If a book is emotionally pleasurable, that it’s badly written devalues it no more than spit on a fire. Case in point: few of the comments on Baker’s Shy Girl mea culpa even criticize the book, let alone Baker’s acuity as a critic. Instead, they commiserate with his distress that the book was pleasurable: “i read it too last year and also thought the writing was off but assumed that was the author’s writing style 😭 it’s so unfortunate because i really did enjoy the story and i’m lowk embarrassed i gave it 5 stars.” BookTok’s critical language is structurally foreign to orthodox literary critics—who I’d hope would knock off at least half a star for a book where “the writing was off”—because BookTokers solve not for “What does this book do?” but “What does this book do for me?”

This critical foundation, personal though it seems, presupposes a reader equally knowable across anyone who can read at all—a predictable range of emotional responses rather than any particular mind. The best literature, meanwhile, rewards a reader who can value the opposite: the opacity of other minds, the surprise of direct encounter. This includes the modern progenitors of BookTok’s top genre, romance, with novels from Austen and the Brontës to du Maurier and Rhys peopled with characters flirting through the fogged-up glass of socioeconomically germane politesse.

But when relatability is fiction’s primary metric of value, the algorithm shifts. The author becomes the provider of a service (the book) serving the emotional needs of the reader (who the protagonist reflects if the book is good). The stronger the reader’s therapeutic identification with the protagonist, the more recommendable the book. The wider the distance between the reader’s and protagonist’s desires or sense of what is deserved, the less recommendable the book. Yes, the Brontës’ implied reader was educated, English and at least bourgeois, but the BookToker’s implied reader is exclusionary, too, in a way that covers its tracks: the reader whose affective register is foreign to the book’s finds nothing in it.

Circumscribing readerly pleasure around relatability is its own engine of hazards. While the digi-chorus in Baker’s comment section crows to let people enjoy things, BookTokers still routinely shame BookTokers for reading performatively “above” or “beneath” oneself and for signaling virtue through book reading counts, regardless of whether these books are closer to Morning Glory Milking Farm than Finnegans Wake. One guy starts his review: “Most of you don’t love Infinite Jest. You love being the kind of person who’s read it.”

I sure do. I grew up in a suburb of households that bought Great Books of the Western World by the foot. I did consider my parents lining our living room with this lineage of human achievement to be its own human achievement; they were Balkan farmers’ kids, and because they had the quaint notion to study computers rather than collectivized fertilizer, we got to watch the dust collect on our leatherbound The Descent of Man. The human desire to be the kind of person who has read a certain book predates BookTok at least as long ago as Victorian triple-decker lending libraries and at least as recently as Oprah’s Book Club stickers; BookTok just shifts what books profit through this performance to the kind that can most readily move its reader.

This is as true of Japanese modernism as it is of romantasy. Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human—a quasi-autofictional novel finished in May 1948, one month before Dazai and his lover drowned themselves in a municipal Tokyo aqueduct—was first published in the U.S. by New Directions in 1958 and is now famous in unlikely online quarters as a surprise TikTok hit. The novel is about a failed alcoholic painter aristocrat, Ōba Yōzō, so unable to connect with humankind that he, as he explains in three slim notebooks, fails even to pity himself as he betrays lovers, solicits prostitutes, and attempts Christian prayer, communist study meetings and double suicide with his lover. New Directions re-released it with two other Dazai books in fall 2022. By March 2023, when a fourth Dazai came out, the New York Times reported nearly 7,500 TikTok videos in just one meme format. The TikTok tag #osamudazai has over 241,000 posts now; #dazai has 1.2 million.

This popularity spike did coincide with the TikTok virality of Bungo Stray Dogs, a manga-turned-anime featuring supernatural detectives and mafia agents named after Japanese authors—among them Osamu Dazai, a detective and agent garbed in a Columboesque beige trench coat and armed with the superpower “No Longer Human,” letting him nullify the powers of anyone who physically touches him. But the #dazai tag is also filled with readings from and reactions to books by the ur-Dazai no different from the #ACOTAR reviews. One video spurred many imitators in the form: “Everyone on this app is always like, ‘Oh, I was written by a man,’ ‘Oh, I was written by a woman’—try being written by Japanese classic novelist Osamu Dazai.” It’s been claimed TikTok-based Dazai royalties are the reason that New Directions—counting among its authors twenty Nobel laureates—could afford to install air conditioning in its office.

Granted, to mass enough review residuals off a suicidal Japanese modernist to cool the sweaty furrowed brows of publishing interns is more democratic than leaving it to Big Five conglomerates to sell the geriatric backlist of the international avant-garde. But rather than reporting the success or failure of the book’s craft, BookTokers report the book’s success or failure to reflect the reader back to herself. In doing so, they report a book’s capacity to oblige their limits, rather than the book’s demand on these limits. For a book to be legible to the BookToker, it must present someone enough like the reader to make them feel the pleasure this involves. But what kind of critic deems best those books that tell her that she and her desires are fully legitimate as is, and that the world as she experiences it is the world as it is?

The Bungo Stray Dogs mafiosi often say “The greatest misfortune for Dazai’s enemies is that they are Dazai’s enemies.” Perhaps the greatest misfortune for Dazai’s fans would be to read his words. Take these, from No Longer Human, documenting Yōzō’s dithering gloom:

Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer “Nothing.” The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy. At the same time I was congenitally unable to refuse anything offered to me by another person, no matter how little it might suit my tastes. … In other words, I hadn’t the strength even to choose between two alternatives.

Yōzō narrates his depression as if it’s someone else’s, foreclosing the opposite catharses of self-pity and schadenfreude. It’s an implacable distance impossible to capture through the lens of relatability, denying the reader the consolation of being “written” by the author.

But before BookTokers promoted Yōzō’s listless vacillation with their own emotional weather reports, Dazai would’ve never clouded my local bookstore’s trending-books table. While his eerie work was, like Alphaville’s, big in Japan—it’s still one of the country’s ten bestsellers—he was no more likely to rub paperback spines with A Court of Thorns and Roses than Reader’s Digest was to serialize 120 Days of Sodom. Likewise for the platform’s other small-press success: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian who died a decade before its 2022 re-release. The book—little-read when first released in French in 1995, and soon after in English—sold 100,000 copies in 2024; Barnes & Noble, the largest retail bookseller in the U.S., now lists it as its top BookTok bestseller. It’s about a girl who, caged in an underground bunker with 39 women, leads their escape from armed male captors up across a barren Earth.

One popular and representative BookTok review of Harpman may as well have been about Dazai: “Hey, real quick question about whoever recommended this book on BookTok: What the fuck? Hey, what the fuck was this? Hey, what the fuck? This book will haunt me until my dying day. I hate it. I felt like I was going to puke. Every shred of hope I had crushed at every turn. What the fuck? I love books that stick with you; not like this, no sir, not like this.” While this warning is at least somewhat a pretense calibrated to pique the viewer and viralize the fervor, its claims about the book testify only to the personal dramatics of the reader’s response (much like Baker’s blurb for Shy Girl).

Even for a book about the impossibility of being known rather than books about the fantasy of being known completely, BookTok’s primary metric of literary value—the reader’s identification—reigns. I Who Have Never Known Men’s young narrator is a blank slate with no experience before the cage who doesn’t even know her name. Read any other literary novelist beloved on BookTok—Sally Rooney, Agustina Bazterrica, David Foster Wallace, Jon Fosse, Ottessa Moshfegh—and for all their formal differences, you’ll find similarly alienated narrators affectless enough to reflect your own estrangement.

Where this identification fails—as with Lapvona, a medieval satire by Moshfegh about rape, cannibalism and incest unlike the “sad girl lit” label associated with her work—reviewers reel. “Everyone who said that Lapvona was gonna be a flop because we don’t have a girlboss protagonist was kind of right,” says one reader. “Reading from the perspective of the protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation was so addictive because she’s miserable, so that one quality makes her relatable, because we’re all just a bunch of sad bitches.” Another was so “completely unnerved and uncomfortable reading this book” that she literally drops it by way of review.

If I thought I could ever reach a market as broad as Moshfegh’s, I’d partly want to keep my books off readers’ floors by filling them with recommendable characters with agreeably unnerving emotional payoffs. Maybe I’m coping for an inability to ever move so many readers in a way they’ll like me for, at least while aqueducts still exist, but I hope I’ll never live a day my agent will hand me a list of BookTok tropes to cram in my microfiction, or where readers will film “I was written by Selen Ozturk” videos, or where BookTokers just won’t know how to spend all their experimental-prose review royalties.

When I do write now, I deliberately aim to avoid writing something that could feasibly be praised or panned as “sad girl lit,” mostly because I’m not riveted enough by moodiness in myself and others to compound civilization’s published introspections of dissipated young women archly navigating modern life. When a book tries to portray alienated people to alienated readers, it may concede the mood with an airless style that flattens the extremes of human suffering, or it may make an honest bid at common pains which no one else could have written—the kind of novel peculiarity that BookTok’s critical language can’t transmit. Avoiding confessionalism, then, also feels like the same reflex that has me use fewer em dashes than I used to so as not to seem like AI—which is its own form of stylistic impoverishment—and so what I do write is opaque to itself in ways I don’t intend. What I intend are the urgent, retroactively inevitable turns that prose can take when the acute emotion it gives you is not the book’s main value, but when this emotion is downstream of the prose’s unimprovable extremity that dies in paraphrase. There’s a line in No Longer Human: “If we knew the antonym of crime, I think we would know its true nature.” BookTok reviews take legibility for value; but if I’m illegible, it’s because when I try to write plainly what I mean that seems worth writing, there’s usually no “there” there until I’ve written around it.

So long as these reviews testify to no more than relatability, their boosting Dazai, Harpman or anyone is no help to the future of great fiction except that it sometimes air-conditions the torrid halls of its publishers. I’d sure rather publishers keep their lights on with a little cash off organic enthusiasm for a book about a Japanese aristocrat’s attempts to refrain from suicide than with a lot of cash off PR blitzes for this month’s sardonically internet-brained novel about coming-of-age disillusionment with late-capitalism-soured gender relations, so let’s let a million short-form flowers bloom if it gets eyes on greatness. But while one reader through word of mouth over one thousand through an app makes no book more worth reading, successful BookTokers don’t convey what makes books worth reading. While some great writers go viral, whether their work can is a different question.

Image credit: Ali Eminov (Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0)