‘HOT GUYS’ AND ‘GRILLED CHEESE’
How TikTok Knows You Better Than Your Own Mother
What a producer learned when he tried #BookTok
TikTok makes me queasy.
I’ve handed over my personal data to Mark Zuckerberg in order to keep up with a goddaughter in Scotland. I’ve stayed on Twitter as Elon Musk has gone feral because a lot of New York editors and publishers are still there. To hedge my bets, I’m posting on Mastodon, too.
But TikTok? The Chinese company in bed with Xi Jinping? The app banned in full or in part in dozens of countries because — as sensible Canada said — it poses an “unacceptable” risk to privacy and security?
No, thank you.
The problem with my vow of Sino-abstinence is that — if you write about books, as I do — you miss #BookTok, the TikTok subcommunity that shares comments about literature in one-minute videos. I learned that Colleen Hoover’s weepies were riding herd over the bestseller lists from the New York Times, not from an app on my phone.
Behind the #BookTok boom
I had no idea how #BookTok even worked until I read “Page Turner: How TikTok Can Turn a Book Into Bestseller” by the BBC audio producer Sam Russell. If you’re similarly clueless, Russell’s article says:
“To join TikTok, you simply install the app and sign over your data to Xi Jinping. You then land on the FYP (For You Page). Here you see one-minute videos featuring, for example, male voice choirs, a physicist talking about antimatter, and a nice young lady selling tubs of her bathwater to her ‘simps’ (a TikTok word for men who dote on girls on the internet). Your engagement with each video — how long you watch it, whether or not you comment on it — teaches the AI what you’re into. In time, TikTok will know you better than your own mother. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett once commented on how terrifyingly quickly his FYP became the home of ‘hot guys and grilled cheese recipes.’ He didn’t know that’s what he was looking for, but TikTok did….
“When I saw the passion that people on #BookTok have for stories, I was more motivated to get on with my own. I finished my novel, Evergreen, late last year. I have decided to ignore traditional publishing routes and make my work available online. As well as releasing chapters of my book in podcast form, I’ll be posting minute-sized installments on TikTok. Users will be able to listen to Evergreen as a playlist, and it will also be available for ‘stitching’ and ‘dueting’ (TikTok functions that let you spice someone else’s content with your own) so my work can be judged in other users’ videos.”
Russell’s Evergreen has since come out as an audio fantasy serial, and you’ll find the prologue and a chapter on his TikTok feed, which has 772.5k likes. Not bad for a man who before the pandemic wasn’t writing a novel and didn’t know what #BookTok was.
@janiceharayda is an award-winning journalist and critic who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of Ohio’s largest newspaper, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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