"the problem with booktok is that it romanticizes toxic relationships blah blah blah" NO!! the problem with booktok is that its a community that talks about, produces, and consumes published novels the same way people talk about, produce, and consume fanfiction. every issue with booktok (lowbrow subject matter, oftentimes poor writing and editing, a disproportionately heavy focus on erotica, books described via tropes (tags) instead of plot synopses, thinly-veiled misogyny) boils down to that. i don't give a single solitary shit if colleen hoover is writing toxic step-sibling incest romance! i've come across weirder shit this week on ao3!! what i do care about is the fact it reads exactly like an unbetaed oc-centric slash fic and this woman is expecting us to pay upwards of $20 for a copy!! girl i can read mid-tier fic for free any time i want i don't need you!!
OP you are so right.
Like I don't care about the fact that people are writing shitty "problematic" erotica. Write what you want, blah, blah, blah...
It's literally the lack of quality and "fanfic-ifying" of books that I can't stand. Books are more than a collection of tropes you like. Like you have to tell a story.
These books don't have the advantage that fanfic provides which is characters I already know and love.
Like yeah, I love enemies to lovers as much as the next person but I don't know these characters well enough to care why they are enemies to lovers.
And nobody is willing to put in the work to make three dimensional characters to make it worth my time.
And don't get me started about how unedited these books tend to be.
And don't get me wrong I love fanfic. It's a work of love that someone made for free. And because of that there is a lack of quality control. (Which isn't a problem.)
But it's the fact that you expect me to pay for these books and now I gotta start complaining.
speaking as a copyeditor and former bookseller, i don't even think booktok is bad in and of itself. it's very much not to my taste, but people can like what they like. we go through this whole panic over "junk literature" once every five years; we had it with fifty shades, we had it with twilight, we had it with danielle steele and vc andrews, and let's not pretend there's zero misogyny involved, because millions of men adore james patterson and james patterson cannot write for shit. let's not fall into an "our noble fanfiction versus their evil booktok" thing. we all like to read crappy wish-fulfilment schlock sometimes! that's not the issue!
what does trouble me is how "booktok" has monopolised the market to the point where it's starting to affect how books are published and bought and sold. everyone complains about the "okay so your book has gay biracial vampires in it, fine, what's it actually about" thing, but that's usually not the author's fault. it's a marketing tactic. and it's a marketing tactic that's becoming the default. it's okay that colleen hoover exists; it's... less okay that she's seemingly the benchmark by which all other authors are now being measured.
that's not even getting into how authors are expected to become influencers just to sell their own books, or the commodification of "aesthetics", or the forcible categorisation of all literature into a narrow set of tropes, or the anti-intellectualism, or this current boom of virtually identical novels that just keep reproducing in a hellish ouroboros of "well, this book sold well, so let's pick up another that's exactly like it" while authors who are doing genuinely exciting, unusual things get relegated to the back shelf because they're not "sellable" enough. it's exhausting.
...and yes, the lack of editing is a problem too.
