[EatingWithForks]

I think we're actually talking about different phenomena. It's not that booktok is driving sales for all books, it's that certain books sales are primarily driven by booktok and there's an attempt to figure out how to make that trigger consistently to drive traffic where publishers want it to go. Consider that Night And Its Moon is critically panned, but has a huge following on BookTok and was primarily got a book deal due to the initial pitch going viral on BookTok.

Of course one of the things to note is that the books with disproportionate BookTok audience whose sales are driven this way are often written by pretty, white, well-off women.

[falcolas]

Pretty aside (while not denigrating its value in videos), the book market has long been dominated (reading, writing, and publishing) by well-off white women.

Not always dominated, mind you, but when they took it over, they grabbed ahold of it with both hands.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

By definition - isn't the market going to be dominated by successful participants?

Do you mean independently wealthy people? Long ago, this was definitely true - as you only knew how to read & write if you were rich, and you were definitely only buying books if you were rich.

Starting shortly after the printing press - yes, poor people weren't dominating the market. But it wasn't dominated by royalty (the vast majority of actual wealthy people of the time).

I don't know where you'd consider Alexandre Dumas - but he's kind of the typical successful writer from his generation. His family was somewhat upper-class, but definitely not wealthy for most of his childhood.

Charles Dickens was much less wealthy than Dumas. Mark Twain & Thoreau grew up definitely not in the upper class. Same for Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Dostoyevsky was not from wealth

Mary Shelley was wealthy. Jane Austen & Emily Dickinson were upper class - but not wealthy. But neither were highly successful during their lifetimes. The Bronte sisters were somewhat well off - less so than Austen and Dickinson - but not from a long-line of wealth, and even they weren't very successful in their lifetime!

Tolstoy AFAIK was the only super successful independently wealthy writer from the time. Poe, Melville, Henry James, and Victor Hugo were definitely well off, but "wealthy" seems like a stretch.

If you look at today - it is definitely not true. JK Rowling is by far the most successful author of the generation, and she was arguably poor before finding success with Harry Potter.

Suzanne Collins worked her way up from the bottom and had very middle class life before success with The Hunger Games.

Maybe you mean the majority of authors have not-poor spouses? They better! The median author probably makes less than $100 in their career as a writer.

[Brybry]

This is only very recently true (and disregarding the "well off" part).

Women probably authored over 50% of books starting sometime in the 2010s. [1]

And dominate might still be too strong of a word to use, though it's likely true for some genres (ie. ~80% of books and sales in romance).

Going by the graphs on page 28 figure 2: Today, women are probably authors of around ~45% to ~60% of new books in the dataset (Goodreads/Bookstat(amazon)/US copyright) and still climbing .

[1] https://doi.org/10.3386/w30987

[Mat3777]

Do you have data on white women dominance?

[paulcole]

When did they take it over?

[bawolff]

> disproportionate BookTok audience whose sales are driven this way are often written by pretty, white, well-off women.

Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book? Its a pretty big time investment with basically no garuntees. I imagine its pretty rare for poor people who work all day to be successful writers.

Not to mention a probably strong correlation in higher education in an area that is not all that useful for getting a job,probably further tips the scale to well off people.

Basically what i'm wondering, is it really disporportionate relative to the industry at large.

[2143]

All of this is applicable to where I'm from (global south); don't know how it is in western countries.

> Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book?

No. I'm aware of plenty of critically acclaimed writers who are not particularly rich. (Although there are plenty of people who got rich because of the books).

I guess most of them have/had other jobs, like teaching at a university for example. And some — especially people who were university teachers — tend to continue on that job.

> Not to mention a probably strong correlation in higher education in an area that is not all that useful for getting a job

A college degree in things like literature, political science, economics, and general science subjects (physics, chemistry, math, biology etc) tend to be inexpensive here, as compared to a degree in engineering or medical science.

[Finnucane]

>Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book?

I can say, after 30 years in the publishing business, that the answer to that is no. Many writers are not that well off. In fact, many struggle financially. Many have 'day jobs' to pay the bills.

[vidarh]

You don't have to be, but e.g. in the UK the average full time author themselves earn below minimum wage, while the average household income for a household with a full time author is far above average.

And the vast majority of writers never make it to full time.

You can also get some indication from the average age at first publication (late 30's if I remember correctly).

[WalterBright]

"Harry Potter" was written by Rowling who was on welfare.

[WilTimSon]

> Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book?

Not necessarily, although I'm sure it helps. Quite a few writers started out by writing their book in between shifts of menial labour or just while they crashed on friends' couches. It's mostly about staying motivated to work on this thing that brings you no money while knowing that you could just give up and do a regular job instead. That's where most would fail while those who have a lot of money don't ever need to even consider it.

[ghaff]

Which is pretty much, while by no means a guarantee, the formula for get influencer traffic and followings in general on easy mode.

[atrus]

Sorta. The issue is the traffic and followings from people who are there because you're pretty aren't the correct audience for what you're selling (assuming what you're selling isn't yourself so to speak). A million views from the wrong audience is less useful than 1000 views from your perfect audience.

[ChrisRR]

This seems to happen in many communities. There's a community of people using chinese emulation consoles, and some of them are decent but a lot of them are absolute crap

But there's a constant influx of "My <crap console> has broken, what do I do?" It's always the same consoles, always the same faults, but led by some tiktok advert that convinces them to buy the same aliexpress tat without any research of why they shouldn't and what modifications they have to make to make it playable

[LightBug1]

Don't forget an athleisured ass to drive attention and an appropriate coefficient of sales.

[imperio59]

I don't get the last point. What does being white or well off have to do with the ability to write books people wanna read?

Or is this just casual racism disguised as an attempt to virtue signal?

[komali2]

> What does being white or well off have to do with the ability to write books people wanna read?

For actual ability, nothing, though the knock-on affects of being white and thus having a higher chance of greater economic standing from birth onwards, higher chance of good education opportunities, greater likelihood of good nutrition, and all the other aspects of existent systemic racism means that ability to have time to write is greater for white people (in the USA).

Pointing out the reality of systemic racism is not racism. Institutionalized white supremacy is very real in the USA and is so inherent it can have weird effects like how children prefer to play with white dolls: https://www.history.com/news/brown-v-board-of-education-doll... (it turns out this still happens today). So it follows that white women, for the same reason, might have an advantage on social media accessed by people living in a white supremacist system, or a system that still holds echos of white supremacy.

[FrustratedMonky]

Don't think it is virtue signaling, it is just observation on demographics. There are more well off white people, and more well off white women with spare time, and they get 'status' by being published authors, even thought writers don't make much money.

Others in the thread have posted some links to statistics.

But, this is not to say that there are not exceptions. There are some white women that have written good books, and there are non-white women that publish good books.

It was just observation on a general trend. There is a group with free time to pursue 'something' that doesn't make a lot of money because of the status they get from that 'something'. Hence they have a lot of influence in that market.

[somethingreen]

The argument, I think, is that these book sales are in big (-er than historically) part driven not by their quality, but by either physical attraction to the author or admiration for their perceived success.

[bowsamic]

It’s not even virtue signalling, he’s just straight up saying “the crap is produced by white people”