The BookTok explosion

There’s something incredibly joyful about today’s book communities: they’re loud. It’s the thing I return to when I try to dissect the role of BookTok in publishing. Beyond the viral overnight hits and past the discourse, there is the impact of BookTok on the books being published—and I find it’s difficult to unpick that from what seems to be a wave of united efforts. I suppose, in part, because many people in publishing are also on BookTok.

Let’s rewind, to the LGBTQ+ books I loved as a teenager: They Both Die at the End, The Song of Achilles, Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, dozens of options by David Levithan and imported, US published books by Nina LaCour. Before there was BookTok, I suppose, there was Tumblr. And there was Bookstagram. And there was BookTube. Maybe it’s the fact everything is algorithmic now, with content pushed to the forefront and out to a wider audience, but the book communities of yore (or rather, the 2010s) felt smaller, and in a bubble that the wider industry occasional pierced. In comparison, BookTok feels like a way of directly talking to publishers, of shouting about books we all love and demanding more.

As a teenager, LGBTQ+ books never felt niche, but they certainly felt positioned as their own category—regardless of their genre, their queerness came first. I was never offered queer children’s books, so YA is where I found that diversity—and at the time of ageing into adult books, I found that diversity slipped away again. I think it’s why YA will always be a home for me, and why it was the first genre I gravitated towards writing in.

I grew up with queer books available to me because of the efforts of the people working in publishing when I was younger. As I stepped into those ranks, it was something I wanted to continue. When I started acquiring books in 2020, I was actively looking for stories of queer joy and stories where queerness was incidental as other topics took centre stage. And given how many of these books I lost at auction, I know I wasn’t the only editor who wanted that. I’m not sure all of us were teenagers who read queer fan fiction long before we realised we ourselves were queer, but I definitely think a driver on a personal level is to publish books we just really want to exist. Then, later in 2020, enter BookTok.

There have been networks championing diversity and fighting the powers that be for variety in their leads for all the years I’ve been in publishing, and that started before I joined. Just as I felt I was continuing work that began before me, BookTok felt like as if it was picking up the baton, working in tandem with the efforts of those championing diversity within publishing houses. With this support, many authors found their backlists rocketing, and new work wasn’t being shot down in an acquisitions meeting or assigned a lower tier or a reduced budget that would eventually phase them out. Instead, new and exciting queer voices, as well as those who had been writing queer stories for years, could find solid ground.

Celebrating queerness

As an author, things I thought I would have to fight for were never even a discussion: having a bisexual male love interest in Girl, Goddess, Queen, my bisexual and asexual lesbian leads in The End Crowns All (and being able to explore asexuality within a romance, within a fantasy world—all while the action rolls on) and my “everyone is queer except for the token straight character” thriller Then Things Went Dark. Those battles had already been fought for me by my predecessors, and BookTok had made very clear that those things did not put my books into a niche away from the mainstream. Far from trying to strip my books of their queerness, every editor I’ve had has celebrated it, and made me feel comfortable as a queer author.

As a queer content creator, LGBTQ+ book recommendations are one of the things I am asked for the most. And just look at the way TikTok not only reads queer books but also champions them: LGBTQ+ history month reading lists, trans-rights readathons and a push to diversify your reading lists.

And this, I think, is the greatest thing BookTok has done for the industry. The LGBTQ+ books I could find as a teenager were predominantly books by and about white, able-bodied, cisgendered people. They focused on trauma, on forcible outing and explored the way being queer made life harder. I appreciate those books, I think they’re necessary and unfortunately relevant, but I am so happy for the breadth and intersectionality of LGBTQ+ fiction now on shelves—and for the way readers and publishers have united to push them.

This is not to say the battle is won. With book bannings, threats to trans rights, the publication of anti-LGBTQ+ books and the continued focus on the bottom line—and the white, cis, straight books that predominantly take centre-stage—we still have a long way to go as an industry.

But those in publishing who want change have BookTokers rallying behind them, and as Helen says in The End Crowns All: together we’re getting a little louder.

Bea Fitzgerald is the author of YA novels Girl, Goddess, Queen (out now) and The End Crowns All (published 18th July) and adult thriller Then Things Went Dark (5th September).