Tag Archives: Undergraduate

General

BookTok: Finding Trusted Creators – Elise Hartwell

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.

BookTok: Finding Trusted Creators

By: Elise Hartwell

Reviews of books shared on Amazon and Goodreads seem to be very inflated these days. Since both sites are owned by the same parent company, it’s difficult to differentiate what is at times an honest recommendation versus what is a ‘marketing recommendation’. Contemporary readers, especially readers since the pandemic, search for more than just book recommendations. Readers want discussion about books, discussions centering reading genres to find multiple book recommendations, multiple conversations. Readers seek out reading communities. And it seems, since the pandemic, the reader community has grown because people are in need of community.

Readers have turned to social media to share and discover books.

When it comes to the topic of how to find the book content creators that you “vibe” with, it does involve some homework for yourself. Tropes exist beyond the English Literature and Rhetoric classrooms. Within online communities, tropes serve as inside jokes and catch phrases that help readers feel like part of the community, like they ‘get’ the joke.

Drawing from the use in literature and rhetoric classrooms, tropes are a shared definition and understanding of the different motifs that can be reimaged again and again to create new and innovative stories.

In order to find a content creator who likes the same tropes that you like, you must explore the genre. Walk around a bookstore, see what’s popular, read what catches your eye. Get to know the genre you enjoy, so you can find the community discussion that you “vibe” with.

Once you know the tropes within your genre that you repeatedly like and why, then you can turn to BookTok (on TikTok). By knowing the tropes of the genre you enjoy, you can find content creators with similar tastes in books. Through these content creators, you can expand your reading and interest.

Though BookTok commonly focuses on books from romance, fantasy, and their intersection of romantasy, there is a reader space out there for every genre. A creator’s use of hashtags is used across all of the BookTok genres. They serve as a good indicator for what you might be looking for and help you better determine the content that “vibes” best with you and your interests.

  • Explore what you like and find creators who share this
    • Read across the genre, decide what you liked
  • Walk around at the bookstore to understand the vastness of the genre you enjoy reading
  • Think about what you liked in your favorite books in that genre
    • Consider what hashtags you would use to explain why you liked the book, then search for those hashtags to discover community
General

Bookstagram, Booktok, BookTube & the Content Within – Elise Hartwell

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.

Bookstagram, Booktok, BookTube & the Content Within

By: Elise Hartwell

There are so many great books to choose from, with more published every day. With the rise of social media spaces, there are more ways to access book recommendations across all genres. Creators across platforms upload web content to share book reviews, announcements, and recommendations. Here, I provide information to help you navigate the three most popular social media spaces for learning about books being published in your favorite genres.  

Across social media platforms, there exist different ways of communicating that serve the different interests of their users. This communication within a space is called discourse communities, which are defined as groups where people with shared goals, interests, and ways of communicating come together. This could mean keeping up with friends and family members both near and far. Staying in lockstep with strands from your favorite brands. Learning new things about whatever may interest you. Most social media users navigate messages from multiple discourse communities, within the same platform, on a daily basis. For me and many other readers, we exist in book discourse communities. Whether it means we post content or just consume it, we engage with conversations, reviews, and general love of genre conventions within our social media feeds.   

Instagram is known for its photo collage style, making it simpler for people to consume. In its essence, the viewer mainly looks at the image and potentially reads the captions. When it comes to Instagram, also known as Bookstagram, I mainly view posts of visual lists. On Instagram, this also seems to be the place where more authors are directly communicating to their audience, including responding to some follower comments. It’s a place where I can keep up to date with my beloved authors and their upcoming releases, and see authors engage with their followers and build a discourse community around their version of the genre. When I discover a new author or book, content I want to appear in my feed, I just move over to the explore page and scroll until I find a book or list that interests me. Right now, Bookstagram is the space for authors to connect with their readers, to build community between author and readers. 

TikTok really made headway in popularizing short-form content, usually ranging between one to three minutes, and sometimes extending all the way to ten minutes. Its book community, also known more popularly as BookTok, was made for book lovers to communicate with other book lovers about their favorite books through content like reviews and recommendations. The most popular genres on the app are primarily young adult, fantasy, and romance, but truly, there is a creator out there for everyone. These genres are tagged within BookTok to help readers find these discussions.  

When it comes to finding creators in this space, the things I look for are if they read diversely, have inspired opinions around the books their talking about and not just talking about a book because it’s popular, and lastly, though not entirely book related, if they uplift others because that is something that’s important to me as a consumer of this content. The books and genres creators discuss in their videos matter when I am deciding who to follow.  

YouTube’s book community seems to have predated the previously mentioned platforms. YouTube largely supports long-form content. The book space on YouTube, called BookTube,  operates similarly to BookTok where the creators discuss their favorite books in the form of reviews or recommendations and reading vlogs – also similar to BookTok, BookTube is content by readers, for readers. In a sort of crossover between YouTube and TikTok, when US TikTok was originally shut down, I saw a lot of those creators begin to move on to YouTube. I feel that this digital migration started to evolve the content in the discourse community, even with some of the creators who predate TikTok, started to incorporate more discussions around the other platforms. Finding content creators on YouTube is very similar to how I operate with finding creators on TikTok. I have to like the content they produce and need to have a similar interest in the book they talk about.  

Each of these spaces serves different purposes depending on what I want to get from it. The experiences you have within the space are truly what you make of it. You, as the user, have the ability to decide on the content you see. The choices I make can influence the content I receive, but I still have to make my own decisions even with that content. I can search for BookTok, but I still choose which content I interact with and which I swipe past.

General

An overview of book conversations – Elise Hartwell

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.