This year's Book Fair has gathered some of the literary world's new powers – American Ayman Chaudhary, British Jack Edwards, and Swedish Jasmine Darban.
None of them feel particularly comfortable with the epithet influencer.
I just say that I review books online. I'm a book reviewer, says Ayman Chaudhary during a seminar on Saturday.
"A little in common"
Booktok emerged for the first time during the pandemic in 2020. Four years later, the phenomenon has billions of views, and bookstores have set up special booktok shelves.
But talking about booktok literature is wrong, thinks Jack Edwards.
It's a sales pitch, just like "classics". In the classics shelf, Jane Austen stands next to Nabokov and Charles Dickens. It's the same with booktok. Many of the books that trend there have very little in common, he says during the seminar.
Emotion-driven
The breakthrough is much about emotions, about telling which emotions a book has evoked immediately after finishing it. Such things get much more response than more thoughtful posts, all three testify.
Edwards takes as an example when he just finished reading the last page of Dostoevsky's "White Nights", told on Tiktok about how he was struck by the love depiction – and how the novel from 1890 suddenly ended up on Amazon's bestseller list earlier this year.
It's not about which book has the biggest marketing or happens to have been released the same week. It's about which book resonates the most with people. I like that about this, that it's like a meritocracy, he says.
