In the age of TikTok, all you need to know about a novel can be summed up in two or three keywords: “enemies to lovers,” “fake dating,” and “slow burn.” For rising authors and publishers, this is a new style of publishing strategy: these keywords sell books by catering to specific, predefined niches rather than offering anything that challenges or expands the reader’s perspective.

How BookTok shapes bestseller formulas

BookTok’s rise has done something unprecedented for the publishing world, making reading viral. That sounds great, right? In some ways it is, but in the rush to market books in easily digestible 15-second videos, we’re losing sight of what makes storytelling meaningful. 

Tropes — which used to be a fun way to describe trends in fanfiction or niche corners of literature — have now become a novel’s primary selling point. It’s no longer enough to know what a book is about; readers only want to know whether it fits into their narrow, curated box of preferences.

Let’s be clear, good literature will always exist. While complex, boundary-pushing novels aren’t going anywhere, your average Barnes & Noble or Indigo is filled with books that fit perfectly into the social media-driven world of tropes. For example, the publishers of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us marketed the book as a romance novel, but it contains heavy themes such as domestic abuse. All it took was a few viral TikToks, and suddenly, readers were requesting it as a birthday present, thinking they were picking up a breezy rom-com. This lack of clear communication, the reduction of complex ideas to bite-sized tropes, and the focus on social media virality have set the stage for a world where storytelling doesn’t matter as much as scratching the reader’s pre-existing itch. 

This isn’t inherently bad — there’s a reason these books resonate with so many readers — but it’s indicative of a broader shift in how fiction is being produced and sold.

This shift isn’t just limited to marketing from publishers, it’s actively changing the way authors approach their craft. Writers are now keenly aware that if they don’t include easily recognizable tropes, publishers and readers might overlook their work. The pressure to cater to the social media-driven marketplace has led to an oversimplification of storytelling, where plot complexity and character development take a backseat to ensure the book hits the “enemies to lovers” beat at the right moment.

From slow burn to no burn: when plot becomes predictable

Romance fiction has been particularly vulnerable to this trend, with contemporary romance thriving on trope-heavy marketing. Readers know exactly what they’re getting before they even crack the cover, and for many, that’s the point. It’s not about discovery or emotional connection — it’s about predictability.

This approach does work for certain genres. For instance, romance fiction is one of the most popular fiction genres on the market, and it’s no secret that these books follow a formula. Readers expect to see the same tropes play out time and again: a meet-cute, a love triangle, and an emotional confession just before the final chapter. There’s comfort in the familiar, and the success of romance fiction is a testament to that. 

The danger here isn’t just in reducing stories down to their tropes but also in creating a reading culture where readers view books as products to fulfill their present needs. A reader might pick up a book because it promises “slow burn,” but what happens when that’s the only thing driving their interest? The plot becomes secondary, the characters become flat, and the emotional arc of the story is reduced to a predictable trajectory. This kind of ultra-specialized consumption reduces art to algorithmic satisfaction.

The new blueprint for bestseller success

In a way, the reduction of literature to tropes mirrors our broader online culture. We swipe through dating apps based on superficial interests, and scroll endlessly through customized feeds, and now we’re buying books not because they have intriguing stories, but because they fit a predetermined mold we already know we like. And for the publishing industry, this is working — at least for now.

But here’s the thing, while tropes can be fun and familiar, they shouldn’t be the foundation of storytelling. When we allow the marketing of books to revolve solely around tropes, we strip away what makes stories captivating in the first place — their ability to surprise us, challenge us, and evoke genuine emotion in us. 

There’s a fine line between catering to audience demand and stifling creativity. Right now, it feels like we’ve crossed that line. Authors need space to tell their stories without the pressure of ticking off trope boxes, and readers deserve more than just a checklist of familiar themes.

We’re at a critical point where the dominance of BookTok, with its viral videos and emphasis on tropes, is reshaping the shelves of bookstores in a way that’s hard to ignore. The real risk isn’t that good literature will disappear — it won’t. The danger is that the mainstream, popular books you see dominating displays at bookstores will become more about checking off boxes than telling compelling stories — stories that matter. 

Novels should do more than just scratch an itch. If we allow BookTok’s obsession with tropes to dictate the future of publishing, we might just find ourselves in a world surrounded with books that are little more than algorithmic content — perfectly suited to our narrow tastes but devoid of the complexity that makes literature truly transformative.