Elise Hartwell is currently in Dr. Pfannenstiel’s Independent Study course. She crafted a blog post exploring book content creation on social media platforms in 2025, and the implications such content holds for society.
An Overview of Book Conversations
By: Elise Hartwell
There are so many things to take into consideration when it comes to this brave new world of content creation across the internet, but more specifically, book content creation and the conversations that happen within this space.
This post is part of a longer series discussing the ways in which consumers of book content on social media make decisions. The biggest question that I’ll pose is; with limited time and/or money, how do we decide what is worthwhile? I plan on breaking this question into smaller segments: what does worthwhile mean in this context, and what choices are made when picking who we will hear from.
But first, what is a content creator? Depending on the digital environment (i.e. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc.), a content creator in this context is someone who enjoys and talks about books. This could mean books or book-related items that they find interesting, things they dislike in the book space, and book related activities such as conventions, bookstores, and special events that are specifically for people who make this content.
An important thing to consider when it comes to content creators and their relationship with the people that follow them is that followers also have an impact in the content that gets made. The audience makes the choices on who to follow, how many people to follow, and where they leave their likes. Typically to fulfill all the wants of the audience, people will have more than one content creator that they listen to.
The reason that I feel that I can speak confidently on this topic is because I have been an avid reader for many years, partaking in a variety of genres. In high school, I discovered the world of BookTube, the YouTube community for readers, and in 2020, a month or so before lockdown I downloaded TikTok where I then discovered BookTok. Outside of that, this also is not my first time writing and collecting data on how this environment operates. Back fall 2024, I took Dr. Pfannenstiel’s web writing class where I focused my data analysis on different types of Bookstagram content. Given the findings of my previous research, I want to share more about BookTok in a more public space – through this blog.
When viewing social media, it seems that there are two main types of content creators: those that want to sell you something in the literal sense (1) and those that speak passionately about something they enjoy that makes you want to participate (2).
As enjoyers of this content, we are constantly working together to build a community of book appreciation. We view reviews about genres we enjoy, building a community of fantasy readers, or a community of romance readers, and more genres. In choosing which content creator to follow, we are making judgements on which conversations the community appreciates, which words and examples are valued by the readers. In this way, the viewers of book content are actively co-constructing the creator conversations about books – both viewers and creators co-construct book community through views, likes, shares, and posts.
As consumers of this content, we are constantly wagering our ‘virtual dollars’ when it comes to the creators we are willing to support in addition to our cultural engagement. Even if we don’t actually pay them through things like merch, Patreon, and other options, content creators can receive revenue for views and likes and other things (depending on the social media platform).
Being worthwhile could be defined as the decision of whether something is worth different factors such as time, money, and effort spent. So, for individuals, this can be wholly dependent on what you personally find to be important. For myself, as a college student, having such limited time and funds, I can’t just pick up every book on the bestseller lists or spend hours reading a novel. What happens if I don’t like it? I then must deal with the realization that I could have been doing things, like my assignments, that I probably could have gotten ahead of. Or found a different novel that I would have preferred.
For myself, as a woman of color, it is deeply important that these creators are people who reads diversely and openly talks about those books on a public platform. In a time when book bans are on the rise and marginalized stories are being suppressed, it’s important to see these voices uplifted. And it’s important to see this from the content creators that I follow as well as the culture they cultivate within their online communities. Outside of these larger important conversations, sometimes my decisions on those I take opinions from online are just based in the factors that the creators have similar favorite books or genres to me, and I feel that they can give me good recommendations on books with similar themes. Or that I just find them interesting enough through the way they present themselves to make me stick around.
With everything that I mentioned, it’s important to remember that the realm of social media is constantly changing, so all information that I’m discussing throughout this post and the rest of my blog series are for this specific moment in time, the fall of 2025.