How BookTok undermines the literary merit of women’s fiction

BookTok has turned the private pleasure of reading into a crowded public performance. A reader opens a book, records a reaction, lists tropes and waits for strangers to turn that reaction into a trend. For women’s writers, the platform has brought welcome attention to fiction long excluded by male-dominated gatekeepers, but its measure of success is dangerously narrow: a video must move quickly, provoke an immediate emotional response and keep an algorithm feeding it to strangers.

That visibility matters. BookTok recommendations can introduce readers to authors outside their usual circles and give booksellers a fresh way to discuss stock. Yet discoverability is not the same as literary value, and popularity is not a reliable verdict on quality. The problem is structural: when recommendation engines, publishing budgets and media coverage increasingly follow viral attention, the conditions that allow careful fiction to be evaluated can be mistaken for obstacles to be bypassed.

Visibility becomes the verdict

BookTok rewards the instantly legible. A romance hook, a satisfying revenge fantasy or a neatly signalled identity theme can be condensed into a thirty-second clip, while ambiguity, digression or an unresolved ending is often left outside the frame. Titles that invite a single dominant feeling travel further than books whose appeal becomes apparent over hundreds of pages.

The trap is to treat anti-viral criticism as a defence of an exclusive canon. A quiet novel can be excellent, and a mass-market book can be astute; genre readers are exceptionally skilled critics of emotional architecture, character chemistry and pacing. The damage arises when commercial visibility starts standing in for critical judgement. Publishers then acquire similar books, reviewers cover similar books, and the culture begins to imagine its tastes as natural rather than reinforced.

The algorithm shrinks the bookshelf

The recommendation engine also makes the catalogue resemble itself. Repeated “books like this” videos group titles by visual branding, familiar tropes and the personalities of creators. New releases from established authors can overtake debut fiction, even when the debut is more ambitious, because the newcomer has no existing audience to activate. The algorithm rarely asks whether a book is worth reading; it asks whether a viewer will stay, react and pass it on.

Melbourne’s Readings provides a clear example. An Aussie reader may arrive at its shelves with a phone full of recommendations rather than a shopping list, while a Sydney reader may buy the same edition from Dymocks, a second-hand shop or Booktopia. The feed’s language has entered the bookshop aisle, where a “book haul” now means both a purchase and persuasive content. A useful recommendation has become a demand for sameness.

Readers become marketers

Many influential accounts are not independent reading but performance with a business model. Unboxings, reaction videos, shelf displays and author interviews build parasocial trust, while affiliate links, gifted copies and sponsorship can turn that trust into measurable sales. Disclosure helps, but viewers may still mistake enthusiasm for impartial judgement. When the creator’s personality dominates the conversation, the book can become evidence of the creator’s taste rather than an author’s achievement.

The unpaid labour is substantial: hours spent filming, tagging, reviewing and answering fans produce attention that publishers and retailers can monetise. In Australia’s mixed market, where large chains share shelf space with independent presses and public libraries, that attention can be especially valuable to a small publisher whose edition reaches readers through online stores and library orders. A viral list can generate income without building the durable readership, royalties or critical attention that sustained editions require.

Genre labels still carry judgements

Labels remain powerful in women’s fiction. The old dismissal of “chick lit” still shapes assumptions that books about women’s lives must be trivial, while romance, fantasy and speculative work are often praised only when they abandon their supposedly commercial identity. BookTok can reproduce that hierarchy by making market-friendly categories newly respectable while treating feminist stories as content categories. Romantasy may travel; a novel about domestic violence that resists a tidy payoff may not.

Feminist criticism has long exposed the white, heterosexual and affluent assumptions behind supposedly universal stories. The documentaries on Britney Spears show how misogyny converts women’s public behaviour into spectacle, and BookTok can echo that appetite for judgement when women’s fiction becomes a performance of personal identity. A creator may package Indigenous, Asian-Australian, migrant, working-class, disabled or queer experience as a recognisable hook, replacing context with a marketable mood.

Popularity is not the opposite of quality

None of this requires declaring BookTok enemies. The platform has connected isolated readers, energised bookshops and allowed neglected books to circulate at unusual speed. Women’s fiction, particularly romance, has always relied on communities of recommendation; a video merely changes the meeting place. Readers’ pleasure is serious knowledge, and enthusiastic fandom can produce more exacting discussion than a conventional review that treats genre as beneath analysis.

Nor can literary institutions claim a monopoly on merit. Prize juries, specialist reviews, university courses and sustained conversations offer other ways of assessing a book, but these are also selective institutions rather than neutral detectors of value. The stronger lesson is to keep several routes open: close reading, informed conversation, library expertise and public access alongside recommendation algorithms. That would allow viral discovery to feed criticism rather than replace it.

Measuring value beyond the feed

Platforms could change by making their recommendation rules more transparent, rotating titles from smaller authors, crediting booksellers and librarians, and offering space for reviews that address structure rather than a favourite trope. Creators could distinguish personal enthusiasm from a publisher-backed campaign, disclose material benefits and discuss books they disliked without turning them into disposable material. Readers can treat a viral title as the beginning of a reading life rather than the end of a search.

Publishers have a further responsibility. They can invest in manuscripts that do not perform well on a feed, commission sustained criticism and avoid using women’s identities as a promotional shortcut. Australian funding bodies, including the Australia Council and state arts agencies, can strengthen the conditions in which women and non-binary writers are paid for research, time and experimentation. The goal is not to exile popular fiction, but to stop popularity from becoming the only story publishing is allowed to tell.

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Choose your next book for the quality of its language, ideas and characters—not because a crowded algorithm has already pronounced its verdict.