The girls are reading again… but only about white characters written by white authors?
By | Raven Miller
There’s been a boom of reading content across all social media platforms since the pandemic but there’s one pioneering it more than the others and that’s TikTok.
If you’re a bookworm, I'm sure while scrolling through the platform you’ve stumbled upon something called “Booktok" whether it was by choice or not. Booktok is just book TikTok in shorthand and is a section of the app where creators talk about books, giving reviews and recommendations to their viewers. It’s had a big impact throughout the past couple of years, there are even sections just for Booktok books in physical bookstores.
Names like Colleen Hoover, Sarah J. Maas, and Emily Henry are some of Booktok’s literary darlings, with the platform boosting their sales and giving them life-changing careers. These women all have something in common though, they're all white.
Under the Booktok hashtag on TikTok, there are over 225 billion views, yet there are almost no recommendations of books written by people of color or containing them as the main characters.
Unfortunately, there’s a reason for that. The publishing industry isn’t pushing, paying, or signing POC anywhere near the amount they are of white authors. According to the article Just How White is The Publishing Industry by Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek, in 2018, 89% of fiction books published were by white authors which only leaves 11% to be written by POC.
And the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag that was trending on Twitter back in 2020 showcased how white authors were getting paid much more than authors of color, sometimes the payments even being upwards of 10 times more.
TikTok pushing these books by white authors is going to make the divide even bigger, and unfortunately, Booktok is also a heavily white-dominated space. The problem is that the people on the app are only promoting white stories and don’t see the point in looking for stories that are about people who don't look like them. This fact, and the publishing industry's lack of diversity make the pushing of white stories into a constant cycle. It seems like the algorithm on the platform is only pushing the same books repeatedly while the other stories fall by the wayside.
So what can we do? We know that our stories are important and it’s hurtful to see them debut and then vanish while Colleen Hoover can come out with 4 stories a year about white people that get a spot and stay on the bestseller list.
POC stories exist, they’re just buried. And this isn’t the fault of us, It’s the fault of white readers that only care about white stories. Now we can’t single-handedly change the publishing industry, but we can surely try to read and promote more of our work to prove that we also belong in this space.
Sources
McCall, Tyler. (2022). Booktoks racial bias. The Cut. https://www.thecut.com/2022/ 11/booktok-racial-bias-tiktok-algorithm.html
Jean So, Richard, Wezerek, Gus. (2020). Just how white is the book industry. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/11/opinion/culture/diversity - publishing-industry.html
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