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Comment by EatingWithForks | Hacker News Reader

I think we're actually talking about different phenomena. It's not that booktok is driving sales for all books, it's that certain books sales are primarily driven by booktok and there's an attempt to figure out how to make that trigger consistently to drive traffic where publishers want it to go. Consider that Night And Its Moon is critically panned, but has a huge following on BookTok and was primarily got a book deal due to the initial pitch going viral on BookTok.

Of course one of the things to note is that the books with disproportionate BookTok audience whose sales are driven this way are often written by pretty, white, well-off women.

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Pretty aside (while not denigrating its value in videos), the book market has long been dominated (reading, writing, and publishing) by well-off white women.

Not always dominated, mind you, but when they took it over, they grabbed ahold of it with both hands.

By definition - isn't the market going to be dominated by successful participants?

Do you mean independently wealthy people? Long ago, this was definitely true - as you only knew how to read & write if you were rich, and you were definitely only buying books if you were rich.

Starting shortly after the printing press - yes, poor people weren't dominating the market. But it wasn't dominated by royalty (the vast majority of actual wealthy people of the time).

I don't know where you'd consider Alexandre Dumas - but he's kind of the typical successful writer from his generation. His family was somewhat upper-class, but definitely not wealthy for most of his childhood.

Charles Dickens was much less wealthy than Dumas. Mark Twain & Thoreau grew up definitely not in the upper class. Same for Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Dostoyevsky was not from wealth

Mary Shelley was wealthy. Jane Austen & Emily Dickinson were upper class - but not wealthy. But neither were highly successful during their lifetimes. The Bronte sisters were somewhat well off - less so than Austen and Dickinson - but not from a long-line of wealth, and even they weren't very successful in their lifetime!

Tolstoy AFAIK was the only super successful independently wealthy writer from the time. Poe, Melville, Henry James, and Victor Hugo were definitely well off, but "wealthy" seems like a stretch.

If you look at today - it is definitely not true. JK Rowling is by far the most successful author of the generation, and she was arguably poor before finding success with Harry Potter.

Suzanne Collins worked her way up from the bottom and had very middle class life before success with The Hunger Games.

Maybe you mean the majority of authors have not-poor spouses? They better! The median author probably makes less than $100 in their career as a writer.

> By definition - isn't the market going to be dominated by successful participants?

They said well-off, and when it comes to book sales being part of the successful masses is a few steps short of making you well-off.

> writers

Almost all of these are from the 1800s? That doesn't contradict the idea that a group "not always" dominated but has "long" dominated.

You only named two authors that are clearly recent enough to be relevant to the argument.

The early 1900s is a continuation - with men dominating, and the women being mostly upper class but not wealthy.

Wharton is rich (the phrase keeping up with the Joneses comes from her family), Woolf and Gertrude Stein are well-off and McCullers & Plath a bit less so. Harper Lee's father was a lawyer, and she's a one-hit wonder. Toni Morrison was not rich...

The vast majority of men - who dominate (not the women) - are not from well-off families: Steinbeck, Orwell, Sinclair, Tolkein, Fitzgerald, Lewis Carroll, Tennessee Williams, D.H Lawrence, Jack London (who claimed to be poor but wasn't), Kerouac, Vonnegut. Stephen King and Stan Lee were arguably poor.

Hemingway, Salinger, Conrad, Roald Dahl, and Joseph Heller are not from wealth, but definitely not poor.

Frank L Baum was wealthy, similar to Melville & Hugo - Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Jane Austen - but less so than Tolstoy.

Rowling said she was only able to write because she was on benefits, which allowed her a short reprieve from poverty.

> They better! The median author probably makes less than $100 in their career as a writer.

This is in agreement, not to contradict you, to be clear: The median author form whom writing is their primary income in the UK earns well below minimum wage from their writing, and the vast majority of writers do not have it as their primary income.

At the same time, as I've expanded on elsewhere in this thread, the household income of that same group is above the UK median.

This is only very recently true (and disregarding the "well off" part).

Women probably authored over 50% of books starting sometime in the 2010s. [1]

And dominate might still be too strong of a word to use, though it's likely true for some genres (ie. ~80% of books and sales in romance).

Going by the graphs on page 28 figure 2: Today, women are probably authors of around ~45% to ~60% of new books in the dataset (Goodreads/Bookstat(amazon)/US copyright) and still climbing .

[1] https://doi.org/10.3386/w30987

Do you have data on white women dominance?

When did they take it over?

90's? 1996 I think.

What happened in 1996 that changed the game? Wasn’t that the Primary Colors year?

> disproportionate BookTok audience whose sales are driven this way are often written by pretty, white, well-off women.

Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book? Its a pretty big time investment with basically no garuntees. I imagine its pretty rare for poor people who work all day to be successful writers.

Not to mention a probably strong correlation in higher education in an area that is not all that useful for getting a job,probably further tips the scale to well off people.

Basically what i'm wondering, is it really disporportionate relative to the industry at large.

>Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book?

I can say, after 30 years in the publishing business, that the answer to that is no. Many writers are not that well off. In fact, many struggle financially. Many have 'day jobs' to pay the bills.

It's true that many struggle, and as a result most writers are not full time. But first published novels skew quite old, and as I posted elsewhere the average household income in the UK at least for full time writers is well above average, so while I don't think it's high enough to say you have to be "fairly well off", it certainly helps buy you time. Doesn't necessarily buy you success, though.

>But first published novels skew quite old

Most of the writers I know started young, and not all writers are novelists. Most are not.

>and as I posted elsewhere the average household income in the UK at least for full time writers is well above average

That just means they married someone with a real job.

Most you know might well have started young - many do -, but in terms of getting books published, as per the subject here, the overall numbers are quite clear.

> That just means they married someone with a real job.

Yes, that was exactly the point - to a large extent writing is subsidized by other jobs, and so there is a significant element of privilege involved.

"Harry Potter" was written by Rowling who was on welfare.

You can't meaningfully rebut a statistic with a single counterexample.

All of this is applicable to where I'm from (global south); don't know how it is in western countries.

> Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book?

No. I'm aware of plenty of critically acclaimed writers who are not particularly rich. (Although there are plenty of people who got rich because of the books).

I guess most of them have/had other jobs, like teaching at a university for example. And some — especially people who were university teachers — tend to continue on that job.

> Not to mention a probably strong correlation in higher education in an area that is not all that useful for getting a job

A college degree in things like literature, political science, economics, and general science subjects (physics, chemistry, math, biology etc) tend to be inexpensive here, as compared to a degree in engineering or medical science.

> I guess most of them have/had other jobs, like teaching at a university for example. And some — especially people who were university teachers — tend to continue on that job.

University prof might not be a wealthy job, but class wise it is usually considered pretty high class. We're not exactly talking about the people putting 9-5 in doing manual labour at a construction site.

> A college degree in things like literature, political science, economics, and general science subjects (physics, chemistry, math, biology etc) tend to be inexpensive here, as compared to a degree in engineering or medical science.

Maybe, but its still a large investment for questionable financial gain. The opportunity cost is high. The pay-off (ignoring things like love of the subject and instrinsic value) is pretty low. Its a hard thing to justify if you're not at least upper-middle class.

> University prof might not be a wealthy job, but class wise it is usually considered pretty high class. We're not exactly talking about the people putting 9-5 in doing manual labour at a construction site.

Ah, yes. Agreed.

> Maybe, but its still a large investment for questionable financial gain.

No no, I don't think you realize how cheap education can be where I'm from. Getting admitted is an entirely different matter. And don't ask me how, but here there's an inverse correlation between how good a university is and how expensive it is. Like, here the best universities seem to be run by the government and are therefore much cheaper than private universities. Which is why it is also very hard to get into those govt run universities.

Also — I think this is a cultural thing — generally people here tend to want go to college, even if ultimately there is little correlation between what they study and what they end up doing (atleast, for non-engineering non-medical courses).

And, college degree is kind of expected for any job here. I don't know if that's what's caused the cultural default of going to college, or vice versa.

So yes, lots of complex, and sometimes contradicting dynamics at play.

There are inefficiencies with such an attitude, but I guess it is what it is.

(And, I'm not an expert in any of what I said above, so take all of that with a pinch of salt.)

I think the US has a very weird relationship with education. Here in Germany, you pay a small fee to the university, then an even smaller fee for something else and then like 150€ or so for public transport through the whole state. I think I paid something like 250 or 300€ a semester (graduated in 2016 in the state of North Rhine Westphalia).

Whether or not a degree provides financial success later in life is just not something people care about. You only have to pay back 50% of your student loans but 10k max. Even if your family is dirt poor you will be able to pay for that degree. And even if you end up as a taxi driver youll be able to pay it back (if you even have too... I think there's a certain income threshold you need to hit).

And I think statistically speaking the unemployment rate amongst higher educated people is lower on average than for others even if you look at those "unemployable" degrees.

Going for a philosophy degree or a history degree because it's what you want to do is 100% something society accepts as a valid choice.

Oh and same with private universities. Some universities have a really good reputation for one degree but as a rule of thumb: if you have your degree from a private university in Germany, people will assume Daddy bought your degree.

You don't have to be, but e.g. in the UK the average full time author themselves earn below minimum wage, while the average household income for a household with a full time author is far above average.

And the vast majority of writers never make it to full time.

You can also get some indication from the average age at first publication (late 30's if I remember correctly).

Too late to edit, but I wanted to add hard numbers to this from [1]:

"the survey shows a drop in real terms (accounting for inflation) of 42 percent in median earnings from an equivalent of £18,013 in 2006 to £10,497 in 2018" [for those with whose primary, but not necessarily only, occupation is writer]

" It is a striking result that, as households, writers are doing rather well. Average (mean) earnings are over £81,000 per annum, typical (median) earnings £50,000 per annum." The median was lower than I remembered. (The UK disposable (post tax) median income is around 30k, which for a single earner household means around 39k gross, but will be a lower gross income for a two income household; if the writer earns the median, they'd meet the UK median disposable household income if the other person earns only 24k, so the majority of "writer households" are well above the median despite the low writer income)

"The fact that this household ‘subsidy’ is needed to make a living may contribute to the lack of diversity among writers. It is well known from demographic data (confirmed by our survey) that writers are mostly white (94%) and live in the South East. Is writing becoming more elitist as a profession?"

[1] UK Authors’ Earnings and Contracts 2018: A Survey of 50,000 Writers <https://www.create.ac.uk/blog/2019/05/02/uk-authors-earnings...> (2019)

> Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book?

Not necessarily, although I'm sure it helps. Quite a few writers started out by writing their book in between shifts of menial labour or just while they crashed on friends' couches. It's mostly about staying motivated to work on this thing that brings you no money while knowing that you could just give up and do a regular job instead. That's where most would fail while those who have a lot of money don't ever need to even consider it.

Which is pretty much, while by no means a guarantee, the formula for get influencer traffic and followings in general on easy mode.

Sorta. The issue is the traffic and followings from people who are there because you're pretty aren't the correct audience for what you're selling (assuming what you're selling isn't yourself so to speak). A million views from the wrong audience is less useful than 1000 views from your perfect audience.

This seems to happen in many communities. There's a community of people using chinese emulation consoles, and some of them are decent but a lot of them are absolute crap

But there's a constant influx of "My <crap console> has broken, what do I do?" It's always the same consoles, always the same faults, but led by some tiktok advert that convinces them to buy the same aliexpress tat without any research of why they shouldn't and what modifications they have to make to make it playable

Don't forget an athleisured ass to drive attention and an appropriate coefficient of sales.

I don't get the last point. What does being white or well off have to do with the ability to write books people wanna read?

Or is this just casual racism disguised as an attempt to virtue signal?

It’s not even virtue signalling, he’s just straight up saying “the crap is produced by white people”

> What does being white or well off have to do with the ability to write books people wanna read?

For actual ability, nothing, though the knock-on affects of being white and thus having a higher chance of greater economic standing from birth onwards, higher chance of good education opportunities, greater likelihood of good nutrition, and all the other aspects of existent systemic racism means that ability to have time to write is greater for white people (in the USA).

Pointing out the reality of systemic racism is not racism. Institutionalized white supremacy is very real in the USA and is so inherent it can have weird effects like how children prefer to play with white dolls: https://www.history.com/news/brown-v-board-of-education-doll... (it turns out this still happens today). So it follows that white women, for the same reason, might have an advantage on social media accessed by people living in a white supremacist system, or a system that still holds echos of white supremacy.

The argument, I think, is that these book sales are in big (-er than historically) part driven not by their quality, but by either physical attraction to the author or admiration for their perceived success.

Don't think it is virtue signaling, it is just observation on demographics. There are more well off white people, and more well off white women with spare time, and they get 'status' by being published authors, even thought writers don't make much money.

Others in the thread have posted some links to statistics.

But, this is not to say that there are not exceptions. There are some white women that have written good books, and there are non-white women that publish good books.

It was just observation on a general trend. There is a group with free time to pursue 'something' that doesn't make a lot of money because of the status they get from that 'something'. Hence they have a lot of influence in that market.

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