This project is a work of long-form journalism that investigates how social media—specifically a subsection of TikTok called BookTok—has changed the American trade publishing industry. (Trade publishing concerns itself with publishing fiction and non-fiction books for general readership. It is distinct from academic or educational publishing, which this project will not explore. From this point on, trade publishing will be referred to simply as publishing.) This story also focuses on who the people creating content for BookTok are, and why they’ve chosen to make content.
Decoding the changes in the publishing industry is difficult: even professionals who work in publishing acknowledge that their industry can be inaccessible. But decode it we should, because the publishing industry serves an important role in the dissemination of information. Books are also a great way for journalists to share detailed pieces of investigation about complex issues.
But that’s just why books matter, not why this story matters. This story matters because for as long as long as I’ve been around, the press on the publishing industry hasn’t been great. The general assumption in the press and the media is that the publishing industry is slowly being eroded by more entertaining forms of media like TV and social media, but it turns out that’s not actually true. The industry posted record numbers in 2020 and, ironically enough, it was fueled by social media. Online communities like BookTok and Bookstagram drive sales and give authors a larger platform to self-advertise.
These platforms help to shape a crucial part of the information environment. Books are cultural objects; they hold social significance and affect our thinking, and if the people writing and reading books hold different views than those who’ve been writing them in the past, it wouldn’t be outlandish to suppose a significant change may take place, or has already taken place, in the information ecosystem. It’s this change that this project hopes to document.
Historical Overview of the American Trade Publishing Industry
In the 1960s, the American trade publishing industry was composed of multiple independent publishing houses that sold books to thousands of independent bookstores across the country. Today, the industry is dominated by five major publishing houses who sell most of their books though retail stores or Amazon (Thompson, 2013). To understand how digital media is affecting the publishing industry, we need to understand why these changes took place, and how they shaped the dynamic of the industry today.
The first major upheaval in the publishing industry was the emergence of retail chain bookstores. The two biggest retail bookstores, Barnes & Noble and Borders, both began as small operations. But by the 1990s, both were rolling out huge new locations across the country. Book superstores made books available and accessible to the general consumer and gave publishers a chance to dramatically expand book sales. But the superstore system was not without its drawbacks: For one, retail stores could use their market dominance to command steep discounts from publishers, which they did. This practice prompted the American Booksellers Association to file a lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, Borders, and the five major publishers, alleging that the publishers were giving retailers preferential pricing in direct defiance of the Robinson-Patman antitrust law (Thompson, 2013). Both cases were settled out of court, and no wrongdoing was admitted, but the lawsuits did lead to a much more transparent and clear book pricing system in America. Chain stores also drove independent stores out of business, either though predatory pricing practices or just by being well-run stores in an industry that had yet to catch up to modern business practices. As we’ll see later, retail bookstores won’t remain the villain of this story, but in the 90s, they decidedly were (Harris, 2022). Nevertheless, at the time superstores marked a chance to boost book sales and sparked a “hardcover revolution” that devalued the mass-market paperback while promoting the eye-catching book covers that readers are accustomed to today.
Barnes & Noble and Borders weren’t the only retail stores that got involved in the publishing business. Superstores like Walmart, Costco, and Target all began distributing books as well. The superstores tended to prefer commercial bestsellers that moved off their shelves quickly. They could move enormous amounts of product at wafer-thin margins because of the economies of scale afforded to them by their massive size, and they quickly became huge players in the publishing industry (Thompson, 2013).
The last player to enter the game was Amazon. It was the first and remains the most powerful player in the online bookselling market. With its almost-limitless selection of titles and its prime position in the e-book market, Amazon is in a position to dictate terms to the publishing industry in a manner no other corporate entity enjoys. Amazon can also afford to charge much lower prices for its books, but that isn’t necessarily a good thing for consumers (Carr, 2015).
The rise of powerful retailers matters because publishers don’t interact directly with consumers. They are dependent on retailers, wholesalers, and independent bookstores to sell their books to the public. This places publishers in a precarious position between authors and retailers—a position that’s become more precarious thanks to the rise of the literary super-agent.
Literary agents as we think of them today didn’t exist until about 1970, but agents have been around since the 1850s. The first agents served mostly to advertise authors’ work and sell their stories to publications. For a long time, an agent’s first loyalty was to the publishing house, and authors were treated as ignorant subcontractors who the publisher could control by means of the agent. This changed between the 1970s and the 1990s, when the rise of retail chains gave successful authors an unprecedented volume of sales, which made popular writers much more valuable to whichever publisher they worked with, especially because most publishing houses depend on a small number of popular writers for most of their sales (Thompson, 2013). The second thing that changed the strength of authors’ bargaining positions was the growth of the motion picture industry. Hollywood was looking to authors for new stories, and the rights to those stories became more and more valuable to the publisher, who might collect a percentage of their sale. Also, because English was the dominant language in an increasingly globalized world, the rights to a book that sold well in America could be sold all over the world.
To Morton Janklow and Andrew Wylie, these changes in the publishing industry were the portent of a new age for literary agents. Janklow and Wylie were both outsiders to the publishing industry who became literary agents more or less by accident. Janklow was a lawyer asked to represent the book of a friend, and when he saw the contract his friend had been offered, he was incredulous at how unfair it was to the author. From that point on, Janklow and later Wylie (who emulated Janklow and was the first literary agent to become notorious for poaching clients) switched to a new model of agenting. They represented their authors’ interests first and drove hard bargains with publishers to command high advances and profitable deals. This shift in the industry’s dynamic meant that publishers no longer had the same degree of control over the people on whom they depended for stories, and publishers had to pay increasingly high fees to keep important authors happy. The rise of the literary super-agent is the second factor that nudged publishers into the middleman position that they occupy today, because while publishers still control the distribution of content, the price they have to go to get it is far higher and their authors are far flightier (Thompson, 2013).
The last factor that shaped modern trade book publishing was the rise of the publishing corporation. Where once there were hundreds of independent publishing houses, now there are five major players and some medium and minor houses. The five major houses grew by buying and integrating other publishers, either to solve a problem of succession or to expand their revenue in a saturated market (Thomson, 2013). So the company we now know as Penguin Random House is actually a company that began as Random House, then bought up several other publishing houses before being bought itself by an international multimedia corporation called RCA (a lot of media corporations bought publishing houses in the 1980s, either because they wanted to have first-dibs on books rights or because they were international corporations trying to get a foothold in English-language publishing, like the French company, Hachette Livre). Penguin Random House now belongs to Bertelsmann, a German company, and is a prime example of the new corporate culture that pervades the book industry.
The new corporate culture isn’t necessarily a bad thing, some imprints (formerly independent publishing houses which were bought but retain their company culture) operate the same way they did before they were acquired. Some imprints have become more budget-driven, but that profits can go towards less profitable imprints focused on publishing niche high-quality work.
That is publishing as it stood about a decade ago. A large, consolidated industry in the mature stage of its life cycle, forced into an increasingly weak position between retailers and authors. Five major companies vied for books and market share and had the resources to outbid any small or medium-sized company for any book they want. Then e-books and social media took off and shook the industry up again, but not in the way one might expect.
The digital revolution in publishing.
When e-books first emerged, most people were skeptical that they would ever become a problem for the book industry. Technological determinists disagreed, pointing to the music industry as an example of how an industry might go entirely digital, but booksellers argued that books were qualitatively different that music; for one thing, books were longer, and few people had trouble carrying one or two around. Also, while a lot of songs sounded better in digital formats, the reading experience on most early e-readers was not great. Both sides were kind of right.
After poor early sales, Amazon launched its Kindle and garnered a significant amount of market share. This wasn’t as big a problem for publishers as most people think; most publishers don’t care whether their book is published as a book or as an e-book. Admittedly, publishing e-books was a legal and operational hassle, but either way, the publisher is serving its core function—an intermediary that sells the work of an author to a third party who sells it to the end consumer. Whether that author’s work is delivered on a dead tree or a glowing screen doesn’t matter to the publisher as long as they make a profit on the sale. The problem for publishers is the price (Thompson, 2013).
Most consumers don’t know that a large part of publishing is about more than just putting a book together. It’s also about finding and nurturing writers’ careers, editing their work, marketing their books, sending them on publicity tours, and investing an enormous amount of capital to make sure the writer’s work is as good as possible before it hits the open market. To some consumers, an e-book with no physical costs incurred should be less expensive. But that isn’t the case. There’s a huge amount of work that goes into making an e-book, (creating databases, managing copyright, formatting files for distribution, etc.) and for books to maintain the quality that consumers have come to expect, a price of around $25 is not an unreasonable ask, which is why it was such a big deal when Amazon decided to drop the price of all the New York Times bestsellers on Kindle to $9.99.
Amazon was taking a loss on this deal. Every book they sold at $9.99 occasioned some loss to the company, but Amazon never planned to make a profit on those sales. Amazon’s plan was to convince as many people as possible to buy the Kindle by offering e-books at low prices. The problem for the publishers was that this stunt permanently skewed consumer perception of how much an e-book should cost, which gouged e-book profits for publishers for years to come. The five Big Five and Apple actually banded together and took Amazon to court over this, and after a hard-fought legal battle they earned the right to dictate what prices their books would appear at on Amazon, creating a new system called the “agency model” (Carr, 2012). E-books, because of Amazon’s dominance in the industry, are a big threat to publishers. This is one reason that Barnes & Noble has gone from villain to hero. Now that Borders is out of business, Barnes & Noble is the one major bookseller that offers publishers a place to sell books outside of a superstore or Amazon (Harris, 2022). However, the meteoric Kindle sales predicted in the early 2000s never materialized, and after steady growth through 2014, e-book sales leveled off and declined. So it seems that the threat has abated (Lee, 2022). But what about social media?
The emergence of any new media technology inevitably reshapes the media ecosystem, and it’s almost always accompanied by someone announcing this new technology is the death-knell for another type of media. This has been happening to the book since at least 1820, when the book was pronounced dead because of the hot new media, the newspaper (Phillips & Bhaskar, 2021). And journalists have continued to claim that publishing is doomed until present day (Bowles, 2020). But despite the emergence of TV, radio, video games, and social media, the publishing industry is still here. And in fact, it may be growing precisely because of these new types of media.
To see why, we first need to examine two statistics. The first dispels a common misconception and the second indicates an interesting trend. The first statistic, from Statista’s Book Publishing in the US report, is the likelihood that someone in any age group has read a book in the past year. It turns out that the 18–29-year-old age group is actually the most likely to have read a book in the past year. (Shaulova & Biagi, L, 2022) The second trend is a chart of the publishing industry’s profits from 2017-2021. The profits are fairly steady up to 2020, when we see a sharp decline typical of any industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, but then, a sharp increase that tops off well above pre-pandemic levels (Lee, 2022). Why? Well, in part, because of social media.
There’s a reason that e-book sales leveled off after a while. People are digitally exhausted. Reading on a screen might have seemed novel and fun for a while, when people began to spend the better part of most of their days staring at a screen, the effect started to wear off. Physical books became prized again, and when everyone was stuck at home during the pandemic, the digital fatigue and yearning for physical books became even more prevalent. Certain sectors of the social media world were already cordoned off and marked “Bookstagram,” “BookTube,” and “Book Twitter,” and in 2020 a new one emerged: “BookTok.” In these sectors, content creators posted book reviews, recommendations, and reactions that drove several books, like The Song of Achilles to the bestseller list, and led to 825 million books being sold in 2020, the highest number of sales since NPD BookScan started tracking total book sales in 2004 (Kaplan, 2022). Social media became not a distraction from books, but rather a gateway to them. This might be due to the increased commercialization of most social media platforms, which gives corporations ample opportunities to market their products by sending them to popular creators or by taking out ads. Digital marketers at publishing agencies see social media less as a challenge to their industry and more as an excellent place to build one of the most important assets an author can have: their platform (Woll, 2014).
Before social media, an author constructed their platform mainly through marketing and publicity. They went on book tours, appeared on talk shows, and (if they were lucky) talked to Oprah. An author’s platform became a critical selling point for any publisher, who—forced to navigate an industry in which they never know which book will sell well and which will flop—typically grasps at anything that might indicate strong sales. A platform is so important that it can launch as author’s entire career, as in the case of a man who went viral on YouTube for a speech and, after gardening several million views, signed a $6.75-million-dollar deal with a publisher for the rights to his story (Thompson, 2013).
Not every author is going to go viral, but publishers are very aware that by plugging resources into digital marketing, SEO, and an author’s online presence, they can grow their presence and reach consumers in a way they never have before. That’s why most authors are required to have blogs now: it’s a way for them to engage with their audience and build their platform. All of which is to say that rather than a problem for publisher, social media might be a way for them to finally gain some surety that a book will be a hit before it’s published, a feat they’ve never been able to accomplish before. But what about streaming?
It would be naïve to argue that publishers will ever recover the ground they’ve lost to streaming services, but ceding that ground might not be the blow most people imagine it be. This comes back to what most people think a publisher’s role is: making and selling books. But it’s more complex than that. Publishers don’t just sell books. They sell stories. And, just like when the movie industry took off and directors looked to publishers for stories, so too do streaming services look to books for content. It could be argued that now more than ever TV is dependent on books for stories, because of the voracious pace at which Netflix and other services are vacuuming in and churning out content. Just look at some of the top shows in the past few years: The Queen’s Gambit, based on a novel by Walter Tevis; The Witcher, based on a series of bestselling novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski; Lupin, Maid, Shadow & Bone, The Handmaid’s Tale, Game of Thrones—the list of popular streaming shows based on books could fill up the rest of this paper. In the modern ultra-saturated multimedia environment, good writing essentially serves as the software around which the entire multimedia package is built, and a lot of the best writing is in books (Thompson, 2013).
That doesn’t mean that publishers are safe. The internet has made it easier than ever to self-publish, and anyone anywhere can throw their book up on a webpage with no trouble at all, but without the cultural and financial backing of a publishing company, most books won’t find the commercial success or wide audience required to be profitable or even popular. The point being that the interdependent nature of streaming services and social media’s leverage as a publicity and marketing tool serve to bolster the industry more than they hurt it.
What really hurts publishing is competing with corporate monoliths like Amazon and other wholesalers. But because most people don’t know the dynamics of the industry, the attribute the industry’s struggles to new technology and not to the business environment in which it’s competing.
With all of this going on, one might see TikTok as a boon to the industry, but it might not be as beneficial as it appears. Publishing is in the midst of a movement to hire a more diverse workforce, (Valdes, 2022) and part of that push was prompted by social media platforms like TikTok. But TikTok’s algorithm has been shown to create “filter bubbles” based on race in the past (Mellor, 2020), and in the world of publishing that might mean white creators and authors are disproportionately advantaged by the new technology.
For the majority of its history, publishing has been an industry run by straight white men for straight white readers. For hundreds of years, people of marginalized identities have been barred from getting their stories into print. One of the reasons people started making book content on social media was that they wanted to circumvent the publishing gatekeepers. Online, people could talk to other readers who shared their sensibilities, enjoyed the same genres, and/or came from their culture, which might be why book-related social media predated BookTok by a decade or more.
It’s hard to place the exact date that book-related social media began, but it’s a fact that some people who joined BookTok had been talking about books online for years: they blogged; they made YouTube videos; they shared their thoughts on Instagram and Twitter; BookTok may have been the first book-related platform to go viral, but it was merely another manifestation of the same need of people who were excluded from mainstream publishing to find somewhere to connect. The difference with BookTok was that the platform became powerful enough to make its views into mainstream.
So BookTok has in some ways made strides towards changing the prevailing straight white culture in publishing. The #BookTok shelves in Barnes & Noble are undoubtedly more diverse many other shelves in the store, and most of the members of the BookTok community are women, BIPOC, or LGBTQ+, which means that readers are finding writers who represent them as they’ve never seen themselves represented before, and those writers are getting book deals in part because of their BookTok platforms. But if TikTok is making it difficult for people of color to succeed on the platform, the ethos of the BookTok community may not be enough to counteract the actions of the algorithm, and the current move for diversity may falter if TikTok lends its marketing power primarily to white authors.
In fact, the current move for diversity in publishing isn’t the first to attempt to change the industry. Two others preceded it.
The first attempt started in the 1960s when Civil Rights activists demanded schoolbooks tell the histories of nonwhite Americans, published by nonwhite Americans. Publishers responded with a wave of new hires that included none other than Toni Morrison, but the wave ebbed in the 1970s leaving an industry that was still overwhelmingly white. The second wave began in 1992 when publishers took note of the high sales drawn by writers like Morrison, now a published author. Publishers established several imprints run by Black editors, but sales dried up when the publishing executives pigeonholed the imprints by demanding that they primarily publish “street lit,” and by 2012 a generation of Black publishing had collapsed (Valdes, 2022).
Modern algorithms can follow the same formula as the former publishing executives. For example, Amazon can tag a romance book staring a Black character as “urban lit” instead of romantic comedy. So it’s not impossible for this latest push for diversity in publishing to be undercut not by executives but by the very platform that gave new life to book sales.
TikTok has already apologized once to Black creators for not treating them fairly, and even months later, Black creators said little had changed (Ronsenblatt, 2021). What this means for the industry and the push for diversity is as yet unclear, but it’s worth considering who is benefitting the most from the huge sales boost that TikTok afforded publishers and authors.
While I was pursuing my degree, I encountered the work of writers and journalists like Joan Didion, John Hersey, and Dave Eggers who used first-person narration and/or literary style to turn an exploration of complex themes into an entertaining narrative. I found this style of storytelling to be extremely effective, and because I knew this would be a long story that dove into several history lessons and socio-cultural musings, I thought the first-person, semi-literary narration style might help vivify a story what might otherwise turn out to be a very stodgy story indeed.
I also wanted the story to be character-driven; I didn’t want to just include floating quotes from my sources. I wanted to convey who they were, why they did the things they did, and why that mattered. This was in large part a story about the BookTok community, after all, so I wanted to give an accurate picture of who the people in that community were. Also, I find issues and themes much easier to understand when they’re manifested by people.
Once I decided to write in the first person, I knew that I needed to do something that I could scaffold the entire story on, and I knew I needed to talk to people who exemplified the topics I wanted to feature. I found the people I needed to talk to before I decided what I wanted to do. I talked to BookTokkers, authors, content creators, and publishing professionals, and I made sure to ask about their lives as well as their thoughts on the changes in the publishing industry. Furthermore, I wanted to get a sense of what these people’s lives were like when they weren’t in an interview setting, so we also recorded moments from the interviewees lives via Zoom, which is how I gathered the information for the scene set in Vancouver.
As for the action to scaffold the story on, I eventually decided that a trip to Los Angeles might help me encapsulate all of the themes I wanted to explore and remain engaging at the same time. LA had small, independent bookstores. It had massive chain stores, and—most importantly—it had a TikTok headquarters. I thought that rambling from one location to the next à la A Room of One’s Own or Ulysses might be a good way to make the conceptual shifts in the publishing industry a little more concrete and bring those ideas to life in a way that I didn’t think I could in Tucson. I applied for and received a travel scholarship from the School of Journalism, and spent 4 days in LA reporting to gather the information I used.
I also used photovoice and data journalism to gather information for this project. I drew from respected news sources and academic texts like Michael Thompson’s Merchants of Culture and Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing, as well as The Oxford Handbook of Publishing and several other books listed in the reference section. These sources have been critical to my understanding of the history and dynamics of the publishing industry, but they don’t include industry statistical trends. For those, I turned to Statista, IbisWorld, and Mintel Academic. Each of these databases contained a unique set of data related to the trade book publishing industry, including total revenue, predicted growth, and analyses of the trends and factors affecting the industry.
My primary limitation was access. Because this article discussed trends and dynamics amongst the most powerful players in the publishing arena, ideally it would include interviews with high-ranking officials within those organizations; they’re really the best sources when it comes to which way the industry is heading, what the industry’s main challenges are, and how social media factors into their business plans. However, while input from the higher-ups would be extremely valuable, so is their time, and an interview with a graduate student might not be at the top of their priority list. I could have borrowed quotes from interviews that the executives and chief editors did with other journalists and academics, but because those interviews may not have centered around my topic, they may not yield quotes that I can legally use or apply to my topic.
My next limitation was the scope of data that project required, which included but was not limited to industry financial records, historical coverage of the publishing industry, any information that showed a beneficial relationship between social media and the publishing industry, any information that showed a beneficial relationship between the publishing and streaming industry, e-book industry trends, and audiobook industry trends. I could access most of this information through the University of Arizona library, but assimilating it and translating it into a readable story was a challenge.
Time was another constraint. The world of social media moves very fast, and sources about this topic that are even five years old already seem outdated and irrelevant. Another challenge I faced was making sure my article was not itself irrelevant by the time it’s publication date. Therefore, the data and interviews will form the backbone of my story because they are more likely to be current than analytical studies, which take a bit more time.