Photo courtesy of Bethanne Patrick via Literary Hub. The landscape of publishing has changed as a result of the increased literary discourse on TikTok.
By Sophie Frank ’26
Books Editor
In late May, Sarah Stusek, an author by the handle @sarahshoooots, posted a TikTok that would motivate discussions about the increasing power of online reading communities.
According to TikTok user Cami Twomey, Stusek’s video featured a greenscreen filter behind her head showing a four-star review of her book, “Three Rivers,” written on the reviewing platform Goodreads. Stusek read a portion of the review aloud; while it was mostly positive, the reviewer said they found the ending to be a bit predictable.
When Stusek demanded an explanation for the review, the side of TikTok known as BookTok — a community of readers who frequently utilize platforms like Goodreads — was quick to respond and criticize her for mistreating her readers. Stusek responded with a series of TikToks that further alienated reviewers.
Prior to the video, the book had only been read by a handful of people who received an advanced reader copy. However, as Stusek continued posting, Goodreads users spammed her page with negative reviews. Many of the reviews came from users who had not yet read the book but had instead been soured by her social media presence. “Three Rivers” currently sits at around a one-star rating. Stusek’s social media comments and the ensuing backlash resulted in her publisher, SparkPress, parting ways with her, which they announced in a tweet on May 31, 2023.
Stusek’s controversy does not mark the first time an author has experienced mass backlash from online reading communities. Cecilia Rabess’ debut novel, “Everything’s Fine,” about a young Black woman who falls in love with her white conservative coworker, drew harsh critique from fans as well, according to the New York Times. Rabess went viral after a Twitter user, who had received an ARC of the book, posted the summary online. Readers who had not read the book quickly assumed that it was problematic or that Rabess — a woman of color — was racist for writing it.
It is unclear how much the online reaction contributed to the book’s slow early sales. Regardless, in an interview with The New York Times, Rabess described the reviews as a targeted campaign of harassment that left her feeling vulnerable as a woman of color and concerned that her career would be harmed.
In recent years, there have been many stories of authors facing social media harassment, most frequently on Goodreads and TikTok, as retribution for perceived problematic behavior. Many of these stories were documented by The New York Times in June 2022, where the Times analyzed how the online campaigns against authors were marked by misinformation and assumptions, namely those where people review a book before it has been published, thus lacking the nuance that reading it would provide. These platforms are powerful tools to discuss art in a manner unprecedented before the advent of social media, and they are proving to have both positive and negative repercussions for the publishing industry.
It is easy to see the positives about these online spaces. Goodreads, a site that allows people to review and catalog books as well as interact with other reviewers, creates a community centered around books and can be genuinely educational, allowing readers to consider diverse perspectives and discover new books. Goodreads and BookTok, by virtue of being online-only spaces, are widely accessible. Books that are heavily discussed on BookTok often experience a significant uptick in sales, and BookTok might be encouraging people to read more overall — the Publishers Association credited a 5 percent rise in book sales in the UK in 2021 due to BookTok.
Siggy Ehrlich ʼ26 is a student at Mount Holyoke College who uses Storygraph, a book reviewing and tracking platform similar to Goodreads.. Both sites provide users with personalized statistics and insights into their reading habits.
“I like the sites mainly for tracking what I read,” Ehrlich said.
However, since the mainstream explosion of BookTok and Bookstagram, an online community of readers based on Instagram, readers have been given unprecedented power that has, in several instances, harmed authors. One Time Magazine article discussed a pattern called “review bombing”: what happens when a group en masse spams an author’s Goodreads page with negative reviews, overwhelming the positive reviews and dragging down their star rating. Often, the targets of review bombing campaigns are authors of color who speak out about politics or what they consider problematic behavior on social media. People who disagree with an author’s opinions may express their feelings by review-bombing, even if the author’s comments may have been entirely unrelated to their books.
Queer authors often find themselves the target of review bombing campaigns or social media backlash when their identities become the subject of public debate. Take, for example, the case of Becky Albertalli, the author of “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda,” a queer coming-of-age novel adapted into a movie in 2018. The media outlet Them reported that as the book became more widely known, fans began to criticize Albertalli for writing it. A common stance was that it was harmful for Albertalli, a supposedly straight author, to profit from a queer story. However, in 2020, Albertalli posted an essay on Medium where she discussed the discourse and came out as bisexual. She writes about how hard it was to discover her queer identity in her 30s with a social media spotlight on her and how she felt pressured into coming out because of the speculation and discourse surrounding her identity.
“Let me be perfectly clear: this isn’t how I wanted to come out. I’m doing this because I’ve been scrutinized, subtweeted, mocked, lectured and invalidated just about every single day for years, and I’m exhausted,” Albertalli wrote.
Ehrlich finds Albertalli’s story to be indicative of an ongoing problem within online reading communities.
“I read a lot of LGBTQ+ books and [have] a major problem when people complain that the author isn’t LGBTQ+ because they may just not be out,” Ehrlich said. Albertalli’s story shows the dilemmas some authors face as they navigate new relationships with online reading communities: do they come out before they are ready, or fear that their career and reputation will suffer as people make assumptions about their identities?
Authors have always had a relationship with their readers and have never been exempt from criticisms of their work based on their personal lives and identities, and vice versa. But in recent years, especially as online reading communities reached new levels of popularity during the pandemic, as Vox reported, it has become clear that these communities have more cultural power than ever. These spaces join a wide-ranging cultural conversation about the increasingly intertwined relationship between consumers and creators and how technology has aided this relationship, in this case TikTok, Twitter and Goodreads. It is a conversation the book world will continue to reckon with as it figures out how to step into a new digital age.