Trend Watch takes an informal look at book publishing trends, as seen through the lens of Manuscript Wish List (#MSWL) and TikTok, among other platforms. See past installments.
What you’ll find in recent #MSWL posts: As usual, there are calls for manuscripts inspired by events in sports news, politics, tech developments, and other viral content, such as the inspiration that agent Kate McKean drew from a joke about the Brussels public transit system having a mystery bus that takes commuters to different, unknown parts of the city each day. (It does not have such a bus.) Editor Ashley Hearn seeks “messy characters,” Nadia El-Fassi bemoans that SFF dealing with themes of faith have fallen out of fashion, and Chelsey Emmelhainz pushes back against the recent popularity of fungi motifs in favor of “cool bug fiction.”
On TikTok, CapCut, with its ability to overlay cropped out video clips of pop culture references onto hand-picked images and text from the user, has become a source for popular trending memes across BookTok. CapCut is a video editing app created by ByteDance, the same company that owns TikTok, so it’s no coincidence that the app is so well suited to creating the kind of click-and-adapt memes that make up a significant portion of TikTok’s content. Although CapCut has been around since 2020, it recently reached 200 million users after a PC version released in October 2022.
To engage with CapCut created memes, TikTok users must first download the CapCut app. Then you click on the CapCut credit in the post you wish to build from in TikTok, and it will seamlessly deliver you to CapCut to customize the template step by step and publish back to TikTok.
Recent popular BookTok trends using CapCut include:
- Ron Swanson, “I’m not sure I’m interested in that”
- “Dumb Ways to Die” by Tangerine Kitty
- The Cars Lightning McQueen cheer clip
- Riding off Pedro Pascal’s popularity from his buzzy lead role in The Last of Us, a clip of him and Nicolas Cage from the film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent with the backtrack of “Make Your Own Kind of Music”
Other audio clip–driven memes: “Do you feel bonita?” from Family Guy, “That is not a crime” from Dhar Mann, “You Problem” by Cloudy June x emlyn, the “Questioning how much I want this” clip from Braden Bales’s “Chronically Cautious,”among others.
Another emerging trend across TikTok and social media is the rise of de-influencers. While influencers promote the products they love, de-influencers push back against this trend by revealing the products that don’t live up to expectations and by otherwise speaking out against widely promoted items. This includes confessions about those gorgeous special editions on #BookTokkers’ shelves that aren’t always worth the splurge and also about what books they DNF’d (did not finish) or didn’t feel lived up to the hype.
It’s likely not a coincidence that in tandem with this, #BookTok darling Colleen Hoover is getting some backlash to her long-standing popularity. Her early 2023 attempt to release a coloring book based on her bestseller It Ends with Us (which involves domestic abuse) led to heavy pushback and ultimate cancellation of the coloring book, and that likely also contributed. Regardless, Hoover’s titles continue to dominate bestseller lists.
As TikTok faces scrutiny from the US government, it has made efforts to self-monitor. Notably, it announced a one-hour-a-day limit on users under 18 years old (although it is easy to get around) and it removed the direct messaging function for users under 16 years old. It also announced a new monetization channel called Series, which will allow users to release content up to 20 minutes per post (twice the current 10-minute limit) and set their own prices for subscribers to access them. Users must submit an application to gain access to the feature; time will tell if this proves a viable way for #BookTok influencers to fund their work on the platform. TikTok has also updated its invite-only Creativity Program, which has long helped creators on the platform with especially large followings. The update is intended to address payouts that influencers have complained are too low.
The latest on TikTok
- US Senate bill would allow the ban of TikTok as well as any technology deemed a security risk. The fate of the bill is uncertain, but it has bipartisan support. An executive from TikTok will appear before Congress later this month. Read David Shepardson at Reuters.
- TikTok’s parent company seeks a book acquisitions editor. The full-time position is based in New York. Responsibilities include signing “authors with potential through multiple channels.” Qualifications? “Familiar with bestsellers and the book trends on social media platforms.” Take a look on LinkedIn.
- The London Review of Books tackles the TikTok/BookTok phenomenon. “Readers of fan fiction and YA, once the underdogs of the book world, have suddenly accrued a disproportionate cultural capital. But it is unclear whether they are shaping the commercial literary landscape or being shaped by it.” Read Malin Hay.
Emily Wenstrom is a freelance writer and platforming expert and writes award-winning speculative fiction for teens and adults as E. J. Wenstrom.
E. J. Wenstrom believes in complicated heroes, horrifying monsters, purple hair dye and standing to the right on escalators so the left side can walk. She writes dark speculative fiction for adults and teens, including her new release, a young adult dystopian novel titled Departures (August 10, 2021). When she isn’t writing fiction, E. J. Wenstrom is a regular contributor to DIY MFA and BookRiot, and co-hosts the Fantasy+Girl Podcast. Learn more at her website.
