The Wrong Doors

by Luke Wink-Moran

The Last Bookstore stands in downtown Los Angeles. The store’s central room is an open, two-story chamber filled with bookshelves that occasionally give way to faux-marble columns and green leather couches. A staircase in the back corner leads up to a labyrinth of books that rings the second story. I walked up the staircase accompanied by my friend Sammie, who’d been living in LA long enough to guide me through traffic with tips like, “Just merge. Blinkers only encourage them to speed up.”

We walked past shelves where dusty old tomes stood cheek by jacket with glossy bestsellers until we found a tunnel of books lit by fairy lights. We tried to walk down the tunnel, but found our way blocked by a pair of teenagers who had set up a six-foot tripod to take timed selfies under the lights.

“I hate LA,” said Sammie, and wandered off. I stayed for a moment longer, looking at the obstructing phone, the tripod, the everything, and I remembered that places like this—rambling, whimsical bookstores—are no longer where people find books; these days, independent, brick and mortar bookstores are a rarity, and even huge retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon are no longer novel shopping experiences. No, the planet’s newest bookseller is right there at the top of that tripod. Well, to be precise, it’s not just that phone. In fact, that isn’t even the preeminent phone of this narrative.

No, that particular device was in an apartment in Vancouver. Inside the apartment, a white bookcase presided over a dark room. Night had fallen, so no light from the windows reached the imitation ivy trailing from the bookcase, and no sunbeams lit upon the shelves’ contents as they stood partially concealed behind the plastic leaves.

Two studio lights flared on, illuminating the bookcase, the ivy, and hundreds of fantasy books. There were other genres—speculative fiction, romance, sci-fi—but they were bracketed on either side of the bookcase to leave most of the space to their spell-wielding counterparts.

“So much light,” said Rachel Sargeant as she stepped in front of the bookshelf and clipped her phone (the phone) onto a tripod and set it to record a video. Phones sometimes flip their videos backwards to simulate the effect of a mirror, which can make it hard to read text, so Sargeant checked the video by holding her arm in front of the camera and scanning the feed to make sure she could read the script tattoo on her forearm, a quote from Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys that says be afraid and happy.

Sargeant grew up in Vancouver. An only child and an awkward kid, she spent a lot of time on her own. She liked the library and the mini-Jurassic Parks she created with dinosaur toys in the ferns behind her parents’ house. She also enjoyed visiting her grandparents’ cabin in the B.C. Interior. The cabin stood next to a lake, and when Sargeant followed a nearby dock out over the water on a clear day, she could see an intact deer skeleton lying beneath the water. But her favorite way to pass the time was reading.

Sargeant remembers looking for Welsh kings with the Raven Boys, crying for hours over Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series, and stepping out of reality to find its fantastic antithesis just behind countless magic doors hidden within the pages of books. This idea—fantasy as the inverse of reality—was the inspiration for Sargeant’s first tattoo: the words fantasy and reality melded into a single calligraphic design called an ambigram that reads Fantasy when upright and Reality when upside-down. These days, Sargeant has many more bookish tattoos, among them a line of text that reads As Travars—the words of a spell used to jump between realities.

Sargeant picked up a stack of books and passed them one by one in front of her phone’s camera. She floated the first book across the frame before fanning the pages of two more into the lens. She flipped the last two end-over-end. To understand the why behind these book-crobatics, we need to shift through the glowing glass of the phone screen and see where this video is headed, which is as easy As Travars.

We’re standing in front of a bright white wall paneled with vertical screens: each is a video of Sargeant recommending books, making jokes about books, and in a few cases, getting a tattoo related to books. Up on the lefthand corner of the wall is—Have you guessed it?—the word TikTok in sharp bold letters. We’re looking at my desktop screen, and this is Sargeant’s TikTok account, @amodelwhosread, with over 140,000 followers (which isn’t bad considering that Cait Jacobs, who accidentally founded BookTok, has around 300,000 followers).

Let’s take a look at one of the videos; this one is the final product of Sargeant’s recording session. Now—thanks to some precise editing—when Sargeant passes the vermillion cover of D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding in front of the camera, it transforms into a rose-colored copy of The Gentleman’s Books of Vices, which shifts into the pink-green aurora cover of For the Love of April French in a fanning of pages, all to the tune of Saweetie’s “Closer” (feat. H.E.R). These books were sent to Sargeant by a publishing imprint after she agreed to publicize them on her channel in exchange for the books themselves.

Sargeant’s TikTok account is one of thousands dedicated to content about books, made by people like her who loved books for their entire lives but had limited avenues to share their enthusiasm until the internet came along. If you scroll down from this video, you’ll see another from another creator, and another, and another, and another. You start to recognize titles, authors, creators, and after a while you just, sort of, buy things. According to NPD BookScan—a point-of-sale tracking system focused on the publishing industry—readers bought 825 million books in 2021, making it the bestselling year for print books on record. Kristen McLean, executive director and industry analyst at NPD BookScan, attributes the sales spike in large part to BookTok. I went to LA (and spent a frazzling amount of time on social media) to find out how this new online community has changed publishing. I also wanted to find out who was making this content and why. 

So how did we get here? How did we go from independent bookstores to this tumbling kaleidoscope of content? Well, I’m so glad you asked. Let’s go shopping.

Back in LA, I meandered around the cobbled streets of an outdoor mall called The Grove until I found what I was looking for—a large Barnes & Noble. Inside the store, sleek escalators glided up three open stories stocked with vibrant books that caught the eye like birds of paradise blooming in a conservatory.

I stepped onto an escalator and rose towards the second story. Not long ago, a book superstore like this was an anomaly: until the 1960s, most bookstores were independent operations like The Last Bookstore. They eventually gave way to superstore chains like Barnes & Noble, which were in turn eclipsed by Amazon in the early 2000s. Somewhere along the way, a new generation of literary agents realized they stood to benefit more by advocating for the authors—who could now sell books at an unprecedented scale —so agents started bargaining in their author’s favor (before, they typically sided with the publishers); agents demanded higher advances and played publishers against one another in bidding wars to drive up prices.

Meanwhile, huge media corporations started buying and consolidating publishing houses until they became The Big Five: Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan.

Before BookTok, retailers did try to bring books into the digital era. When Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, everyone thought that the books were going to follow music and film and become a completely digital experience, but as of 2020, only 25% of American adults preferred e-books over print (while another 5% preferred audiobooks). There are some practical theories as to why, but perhaps the reason is less concrete: 

“With something as ephemeral as a story,” said Rachel Sargeant, “it feels good to hold a physical copy of it, instead of it being out in the ether. That’s why we started writing stuff down. We wanted to capture stories and hold them.”

Which might be why when books did make the jump to cyberspace they remained paradoxically physical by moving onto social media platforms that prioritized photos and videos. BookTok was the first platform dedicated to books that went viral, but it wasn’t the first of its kind. As I mentioned before, prior to joining BookTok, Rachel Sargeant made YouTube videos about books, and before that she blogged about them. These early platforms didn’t sell many books. That wasn’t the point. It was just a place for people to talk about their favorite hobby with whoever cared to listen. But BookTube, Bookstagram, and Book Twitter all predated BookTok, which turned book content into a viral sensation and big business.

BookTok took off when Cait Jacobs started creating TikToks about books and using the #BookTok hashtag—which now has over 35 billion views—back in 2019. Jacobs is an author from Long Island, NY, who recently released her debut book, Medievally Blonde, a retelling of Legally Blonde set in medieval times. Jacobs does credit other bookish creators as being her inspiration, but hers was the account that drew the largest following. Other creators started making BookTok videos of their own, and the community grew. In early 2020, TikTok’s algorithm picked up bookish content and flung it across the world, where it struck a chord: For some reason, people were interested in books again—maybe because it was the beginning of the pandemic, and most of us were stuck inside, afraid, and isolated. Maybe the harsher the word Reality looks, the more solace it provides when flipped upside-down to read Fantasy. Whatever the reason, when the pandemic hit, people turned to BookTok to escape, and the market showed it. In 2020 alone, trade hardback sales revenue jumped from $2,965 to $3,400 million dollars, an appreciable change compared to the smaller fluctuations in years prior. BookTok hits sold so well that these days most Barnes & Nobles have an entire shelf dedicated solely to #BookTok, which is why I’m escalatoring around this store trying to find one.

I passed a copy of D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding standing in an LGBTQ+ book display before I found the BookTok shelf on the third floor of the Barnes & Noble and inspected the titles. Many of the people who joined BookTok were teenagers or hadn’t read since they were teenagers, and they gravitated towards the genres they knew—namely young adult, fantasy, and romance—lifting indie authors in those genres into traditional publishing, as in the case of Stacey McEwan.

Stacey McEwan grew up on the Gold Coast in Australia, where she had a very normal childhood dedicated to playing sports and reading books. Her favorite genre was fantasy, until she discovered romance. Then it was fantasy romance.

“I used to tell people that I wanted to be an author or a journalist,” recalled McEwan, “but that I would most likely end up a teacher because I knew how difficult it was to succeed.”

McEwan’s opinion was informed by an author who came to her school and told her that she probably wouldn’t make it as a writer—that she’d need to win a lottery to be successful. So McEwan left high school planning to spend the rest of her life writing but doubting that she’d ever be published. She wrote in secret for years, occasionally submitting a manuscript to a publisher but tossing the story as soon as she received one or two rejections. She got married, started a family, and taught during the day while writing at night. Then she found herself stuck at home again during the pandemic.

“And instead of doing something productive like writing a book,” said McEwan, “I downloaded social media, and I had this instant connection with people I didn’t know, so I filmed a few little videos—just little inside jokes about popular fantasy series—and waited for the backlash that didn’t come. Nothing happened.”

Nothing, that is, until McEwan posted a TikTok called “The Exact Recipe to YA Dystopia.” The video featured a gloomy teenage protagonist at a support group for dystopian characters that included a distractingly handsome and perpetually broody male, there to help the protagonist shoulder the burden of her useless parents and tortured past.

“My dad never hugged me,” confessed the broody male, “but I have a lot of abs.”

The video went live at around 10:00 p.m., and when McEwan woke up the next morning it had hundreds of thousands of views. By the end of the month, her account, @stacebookspace, had 40,000 followers. People started sending her things to promote. Authors were flooding into her comments section, and she discovered how supportive BookTok community could be

BookTok is a place where people can connect and talk about their favorite genres—or defend them as the need arises; most BookTokkers are women, BIPOC, or LGBTQ+, and their reading tastes don’t typically align with what, say, high school English would recommend. One of the advantages BookTok affords its users is the ability to connect and defend their genres against the dismissive attitude that some people take towards young adult, fantasy, and romance books. It also gives readers a chance to examine why people dismiss their favorite genres in the first place.

“Historically, the things women like tend to get devalued,” said Rachel Sargeant. “For example, a lot of people tend to look down on YA because it’s just something that women and young girls write, which is absolutely not the case. You change so much as a teenager, and you’re learning so much about yourself and your world, and having really amazing stories where you can connect with a main character who’s the same age as you is very, very valuable.”

Sargeant explained that YA is also a very innovative genre; ironically, because people don’t take it seriously, YA can take more chances with themes, genres, and narrative styles. And the funny thing is, many trends in adult literature come from YA when readers leave the genre and start writing or reading as adults. The most obvious example of this trend is the recent creation of a new genre called “new adult” that uses YA storytelling techniques to deal with more mature themes, but you can see more subtle traces of YA in other genres as well.

Stacey McEwan, for instance, grew up reading YA fantasy and dystopian novels and brought the magic and obsession of the genres into her own work. And when McEwan joined BookTok, she was surrounded for the first time by other writers who were happy to celebrate and parody their genres for each other’s entertainment. She went from telling no one about her writing to sharing her secret with thousands of people. The funny thing was, very few people in her real life knew about the secret universe she’d found.

“It was this thing I did in a Batman fashion,” said McEwan, who, indeed, was donning an author ego every night after her kids went to bed and trying to complete her current manuscript, terrified that she’d lose the attention of her audience and that the opportunity to publish a book while she had followers interested in buying it would slip away.

But it didn’t. McEwan finished her book, a fantasy romance novel called Ledge. Publishers had rejected on her previous manuscripts, so she decided to self-publish. She put up a TikTok announcing the book launch, and two publishers and a literary agent immediately emailed her and invited her to send them the manuscript. Why were they interested now? What about her work had changed?

The audience. Publishers operate in an environment of profound uncertainty; it’s very difficult to know if a new book will be a hit of a flop, but if an author’s debut book announcement gets over 400,000 views like McEwan’s did, that’s a good indication that the book will sell. McEwan signed a book deal with Simon & Shuster, and Ledge was published in 2022 and sold to readers around the world. 

McEwan’s cover was finally blown when a friend sent her an advertisement for Ledge and said, “Hey, this author has the same name as you. Wouldn’t it be funny if this was your book?” to which McEwan replied that it was.

Having a BookTok following can make an author an extremely attractive to publishers, and because most BookTok users are women, BIPOC, or LGTBQ+, voices that have been excluded from publishing are finally reaching readers who’d rarely seen themselves in books before.

Ayman (who’d prefer not to use her last name to protect her privacy) got into reading later in life. Her parents immigrated to America from Pakistan, and she grew up in Memphis, Tennessee speaking Punjabi and Urdu at home. As a kid, her reading comprehension was behind that of her peers, so she decided that she was bad at reading and that she hated it. Then dawned the golden era of dystopian YA, and Ayman fell in love with The Hunger Games, Divergent and the Shatter Me series by Tahereh Mafi—that is, until high school English made her hate reading again. Throughout high school, the only books that interested Ayman were new installments of the Shatter Me series. Mafi’s books were some of the few that let Ayman step out of the world and into another reality next to characters who looked and acted like her.

“Growing up as a Muslim woman in the South,” said Ayman “I didn’t see myself in any sort of media, and while you can’t necessarily miss something you never had, I did feel like something wasn’t there.”

It wasn’t until Ayman joined BookTok in March of 2020 that she started to realize what she’d been missing.

“BookTok started recommending these characters that looked like me, who came from my culture . . .  It wasn’t just about being represented but being represented well. I don’t want to read a book about a hijabi who rips off her hijab for a white man. I want to read about her slaying demons, riding dragons, stuff like that.”

Ayman started to make her own bookish content later the same year, and now @aymansbooks is one of the most recognizable accounts on BookTok, with close to a million followers and over 120 million likes. Now Ayman not only gets recommendations but has a huge platform of her own from which to provide them. But readers and writers on social media don’t just share diverse books recommendations, they’ve also amplified a demand for diversity within the publishing industry itself.

That demand started in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd when, like many industries, publishing was held to account for its history of prioritizing white customers and employees and their interests. Protests from publishing professionals led to an industry-wide effort to hire a more diverse workforce. The changes in the industry were spurred in part by online campaigns like # PublishingPaidMe which revealed, for instance, that while science fiction author John Scalzi had signed a deal for $3.4 million in exchange for 13 books, fantasy writer N.K. Jemisin only received $25,000 for each book in her Broken Earth trilogy. The campaign also revealed the low starting salaries paid to editorial assistants that made it hard for anyone in a marginalized community to work an entry level publishing job.

“People are calling us out for things that we need to be called out for,”  said Natasha Miñoso, Social Media Marketing Manager at Penguin Random House. “I think social media is a huge part of it. It’s also the times and people in the industry screaming about it from the inside. It starts with who’s in the room. For my team, it’s at the forefront of everything we’re doing.”

Miñoso runs Penguin Random House’s social media accounts. She doesn’t promote any particular books. Rather, her team is dedicated to demystifying publishing and promoting reading as a lifestyle, specifically a lifestyle for Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQ+ readers and writers, as well as other readers and writers who’ve been kept from the world of publishing in the past.

So everything is great, right? New authors are entering the space. Publishers are prioritizing new voices, and writers can draw sales just by posting on TikTok.

But while there is a move for diversity in publishing, TikTok’s algorithm, like many algorithms, can pick up biases.

“So Amazon, for example,” said bestselling author Nana Malone, “The first book I published, Sexy in Stilettos, the people Amazon sent that book to were urban lit and Black romance. They never pushed it out to contemporary romance. They never pushed it out to rom-com. They never pushed it out to chick lit. And I would get these reviews like, ‘This isn’t urban lit,’ because it’s not. It’s a rom-com. She just happens to be Black.”

Malone started writing while she was living in New York in “the summer of Bridget Jones’s Diary.” She can still remember sitting on trains and watching everyone read that book with the little orange banner. Later the same summer, she went to Borders, bought the book, read it in three hours, and thought, “I can do this.”

A lifelong reader, Malone was born in New York and lived in Ghana until she was six before returning to the East Coast. She was the only nine-year-old she knew with a complete collection of Agatha Christie novels, and she spent a lot of her time in the library ensconced behind a fort made of books which, as she grew older, began to place more and more of its structural integrity on romance.

“I was fascinated by relationships,” said Malone, who used to creep down the stairs and lean out around the corner to watch her mother’s soap operas undetected. “And love stories are the best kind of relationship build because they inform everything. Even when you’re telling other stories, like thrillers, it’s all rooted in love.”

It took Malone eight years to write her first novel, which never saw the light of day. The next manuscript took her six months, and now she’s the author of 115 books. When she started writing, she knew she wanted to write more Black characters in the predominantly white “Romancelandia,” but readers’ response to Black characters was negative: Malone’s books sold better when the cover didn’t feature a Black woman, and she found that only when she removed the tags for African American romance or interracial romance, and only tagged her videos “contemporary romance,” did Amazon push them out to consumers. Later, at one of Malone’s book signings she was approached by a social media professional who loved her work and asked why no one was talking about her books on TikTok.

“And I was like, is that a real question?” said Malone. “I joined TikTok a little late, like early 2022. And it was going well for a minute, and then I made the mistake of showing my face—Shadowbanned—so fast I have never recovered.”

When a creator is shadowbanned, TikTok simply stops showing their content to users. This can happen because someone reported the creator’s content or for some unknown algorithmic reason.

“Anyone can report your video,” said Malone. “And they don’t tell you why. You’re never given a reason. You’re never given an opportunity to resolve things.”

Malone would wait and post other, innocuous videos that didn’t mention race and in which she didn’t appear, and they did ok. But whenever she appeared in a video the views would drop. She stopped using TikTok. But while she focused energy on Instagram, @nanamalonewriter, she kept track of BookTok trends.

“As BookTok was becoming the behemoth that is was, the only books anyone was talking about were written by white authors,” said Malone, who went on to add: “So TikTok as a platform, Amazon as a platform, any platform where the algorithm can be loaded against you is very difficult for authors of color.”

This problem is compounded by the fact that publishers are looking for books that go viral on TikTok, which is worrying, because the current move towards diversity in publishing isn’t the first to try to change the industry. Two other waves preceded it, and they both failed when their impetus faded.

The first attempt started in the 1960s when Civil Rights activists demanded schoolbooks that told the histories of nonwhite Americans, published by nonwhite Americans. Publishers responded with a wave of new hires that included none other than Toni Morrison, but the wave ebbed in the 1970s leaving an industry that was still overwhelmingly white. The second wave began in 1992 when publishers took note of the high sales drawn by writers like Morrison, now a published author. Publishers established several imprints run by Black editors, but sales dried up when the publishing executives pigeonholed the imprints by demanding that they primarily publish “street lit,” and by 2012 a generation of Black publishing had collapsed.

What if this latest push for diversity in publishing is undercut not by executives, but by the very platform that gave new life to book sales? Wondering what TikTok had to say on the matter, I left Barnes & Noble and made my own small contribution to the traffic in order to visit the TikTok headquarters in Culver City.

The TikTok HQ was a glass office building girded with colorful external stairways, Chutes and Ladders-style. I walked up to the building and saw a small sign that pointed right to TikTok US Data Security and left to the TikTok lobby. I swiped left and made it three steps up a lime green staircase before a security guard under the stairs asked me what I was doing. He had a stubbly white beard and looked as though if he were wearing Converse, they would be steel-tipped. I descended the stairs.

“Oh, no, they don’t let anybody up there,” said the guard—I didn’t catch his name, but he had big Hank energy—“unless you make an appointment. Then they let people up there all the time.”

And—honestly?—fair: I should have made an appointment, but when I called the number listed for the location, I got a message that said the number was not available and the mailbox was full, but if I’d like to send an SMS . . . you get the idea. This wasn’t the first time I’d been given the wrong number on “accident,” and, true to form, I assumed it was an honest mistake and tried to reach out again. I went to TikTok’s “Contact” page, only to find a deck of press releases about TikTok, and no contact info. This time I took the hint. It’s funny—publishing has always been an enigmatic industry, but even though it’s finally trying to demystify itself, the new face of book sales is still a mystery. Well, I tried. Left with no alternative, I was forced to go to the beach and relax.

The breeze running across Venice Beach smelled like salt, sand, and weed. I parked illegally by accident, but I didn’t realize that as I walked down the boardwalk, and I was feeling pretty good. I passed a line of beach houses. In one yard, I saw a weather-beaten whale rib suspended between two wooden columns. In another, a lion-haired surfer dad played soccer with his little lion-haired clone. Their shouts faded as I walked out onto the pier.

The wind picked up as the sand below me gave way to waves. The clouded sun covered the sea in a grey-blue ombre pattern that made it hard to tell if an intact deer skeleton lay beneath the water’s surface. It occurs to me that Rachel Sargeant didn’t mention being accompanied by anyone when she walked out over that lake in the B.C. Interior to find a deer skeleton, perhaps because she grew up without any close friends who liked to read as much as she did—no one around who hoped to find another world just on the other side of the right door. Perhaps reading prepares one well for the pursuit of other solitary pastimes like looking for skeletons. And there is magic in solitude, but there is also isolation. Maybe we don’t always need to find a door that opens onto another world; maybe we just need to find a door that opens onto someone saying, “Damnit, wrong one.”