What the BookTok Bestseller Machine Reveals
The most important thing about any story is how it makes us feel — which we can explore through its emotional vibe structure
Anyone with a connection to the world of publishing probably knows that one of the most explosive, unprecedented drivers of book sales these past few years is the social media platform TikTok. On #BookTok, a community of passionate readers — predominantly young women — post short videos of themselves having strong emotional reactions to stories they’ve read.
“The most popular videos don’t generally offer information about the book’s author, the writing or even the plot,” Elizabeth A. Harris explains in the New York Times article How TikTok Became a Best-Seller Machine. “Instead, readers speak plainly about the emotional journey the book will offer.”
“This is how it makes me feel, this is how it’s going to make you feel,” explains Milena Brown, a marketing director at Doubleday. “And people are like, ‘I want to feel that. Give it to me!’”
And emotion really moves the needle when it comes to book sales.
“We haven’t seen these types of crazy sales — I mean tens of thousands of copies a month — with other social media formats,” says Shannon DeVito, director of books for Barnes & Noble, in another New York Times article How Crying on TikTok Sells Books.
The articles describe how author Madeline Miller’s novel The Song of Achilles sold about ten times better after going viral on TikTok in 2021 than when it was first published in 2012 and won the UK’s prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction. It eventually topped two million in sales, thanks to a 7-second video of a reader appearing cheerful as she starts the book and bawling as she finishes it.
“I feel speechless in the best way,” says Miller, who is not on TikTok herself. “Could there be anything better for a writer than to see people taking their work to heart?” The boost allowed her to continue writing rather than going back to teaching during the pandemic. “It really has changed my life,” she says.
Inspired by BookTok, some stores have even started shelving books by “how they will make you feel” instead of more traditional genre categories. (Arguably, even the more traditional genre categories attempt to convey something about the emotional vibes on offer in any particular tale — the suspense of a thriller, the swoon of a romance, and so on.)
Stories are Emotional Virtual Reality
So, is seeking a particular emotional experience when we choose stories to inhabit really unique to TikTok? Or to the demographics of readers most active on the platform, the genres of stories they prefer?
Or is this cultural phenomenon simply illustrating, in a particularly dramatic and powerful way, something more universally true about what we all desire when we read for pleasure — a powerful emotional experience? Perhaps a particular flavor or vibe of emotional experience that calls to us at a certain moment in our reading lives.
Even if we pick up a book for other reasons — the author is buzzy, our book club is reading it, we trust the curatorial aesthetic of whoever published it — probably the biggest reason we would keep reading all the way through is because, page after page, we’re enjoying how the book makes us feel.
There’s something radical, hedonistic, almost subversive about this. No emotional experience is closed to any of us just because it’s not what we were born to, or not what life is handing us at the moment. We can access any emotional experience we like, as long as it has been crafted into a story. If it hasn’t, we can craft that story ourselves. In our heads, on paper. For ourselves alone, or to share with others.
Stories are our species’ oldest and most powerful emotional virtual reality technology. I sometimes picture them as video game cartridges, lined up with masking tape labels on each one, a hand-written sentence explaining exactly what emotional virtual reality experience is on offer here.
The sentences that would be written on each label are, in a deep sense, what this whole Lit in One Sentence Substack is about.
Why Does Any of This Work?
Why do we feel anything at all when we enter a story? How do squiggles on a page — or stories in any format — translate into powerful emotional experiences coming to life in our own bodies?
The answer is fairly simple, and rooted in our brain’s mirror neuron system. When we read about someone doing something, it activates the same brain regions as if we were performing that action ourselves. This is the same system that would cause us to wince if we saw someone get hit by a car or to curl up protectively if we suspect a monster is about to jump out at characters in a horror movie.
And it makes perfect sense why our brains have evolved this way.
Let’s say you are an ancient hominid ancestor of current humans. Your neighbor tells you she was out hunting a tiger when it heard a twig snap under her foot, turned around, and started stalking towards her. She’s lived to tell the tale, and if you listen to her story of how, you can emotionally encode that learning so that you’ll know what to do if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.
You know who’s head you’re in: your neighbor’s. You know what she’s doing: escaping a tiger. And you know what’s at stake: life and death, or at least being grievously mauled by a tiger. That’s all you need to know to stop and pay attention, to begin to mirror your neighbor, to feel the adrenaline spike she must have felt.
Every event in her story will make you feel something based on whether it moves her closer to or farther from her goal. She trips and stumbles over a rock, you feel the fear of that setback to her escape. She realizes she can use the rock to distract or threaten or injure the tiger? You feel the relief of her being one step closer to escaping. Your body is encoding that knowledge in a way that is much more powerful and engaging than if someone was simply telling you that, to escape a tiger, you should do X, Y, and Z. (I actually have no idea what the most effective strategies are for escaping a tiger, in case you can’t tell!)
Your neighbor might have something of a prehistoric best-seller on her hands. Everyone would probably sit around the campfire and listen to that. I would even be interested to read a story about that today, if someone could write it convincingly from the perspective of a prehistoric human.
But to get pulled into a story, those are the things our brain needs to know: who we’re mirroring, what they’re doing, and why it matters to them that they do this thing. In other words: character, journey, stakes.
So it is in this faux-historical example I just made up, and so it is in every other story produced or experienced by any human brain.
What is “Lit in One Sentence”?
Everything we recognize as a “story” is going to answer these three questions — whose head are we in? what are they doing? why does it matter? — in some way. Whether the answers are very good or not. Whether the story’s creator(s) ever thought about it that way or not.
And something really interesting happens when we take any complete story and start articulating the most unique, powerful, dramatic answers that story has to offer to these three questions. When we look at how the creator(s) of that particular story ended up aligning these elements.
We get a sort of thumbnail or bird’s eye view of the biggest emotional promise that specific story has to offer. We get a sense of that “emotional virtual reality” experience we would have if we choose to spend time in it.
We get at an essential emotional vibe-iness that runs from its first word to its last, a sense of the emotional “whole” that every smaller unit of story adds up to.
I’ve never seen anyone else talking about literature in exactly this way. But the more I push myself to come up with great one-sentence “superstructures” — a literary craft term we invented right here on this Substack — for any existing story, the more fascinated I am by how much insight this unlocks about how any story achieves its unique, highly specific emotional vibes.
So, that is the project of this Substack: the rigorous study of emotional vibe-iness in literature, using one sentence superstructure as a tool to see how any of a story’s parts relate back to its whole.
If you are in any way a story structure nerd like me, or if you’d simply enjoy learning what a wide range of literary works are about in a single sentence — quicker than a BookTok video, and far more specific! — I hope you’ll consider subscribing and supporting this work.
Have a look around. I already have superstructure sentences and craft lessons up for a range of contemporary and classic novels, stories, fairy tales, films, and plays — with much more to come!
Note: An original version of this essay appeared on January 6, 2024 as the first post launching this new Substack. It has been revised to better incorporate and speak to some of the discoveries we made during this project’s first few months.
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