Episode 20: BookTok and the Audiobook Industry (Does Your Follower Count Matter?)

Lets talk BookTok. 

What began as a giant virtual book club is now a major marketing force. Publishers watch it, authors build campaigns around it, and Audible has created a dedicated BookTok destination. In this episode, I talk about how follower counts are becoming part of an audiobook narrator’s professional currency (particularly in romance and LitRPG) and what that means for talented narrators who aren’t interested in becoming full-time content creators.

BookTok can help listeners find our work and create incredible career opportunities, but we need to use it intentionally, protect our boundaries, and remember that an algorithm shouldn’t get to decide whether our work matters.

SHOW NOTES:

00:20 Block Party Spark
00:51 What Is BookTok
02:30 From Book Club to Industry
04:12 Follower Counts and Casting
07:03 Citing Narrators in Reviews
08:47 Fandom and Parasocial Risks
10:30 When Critique Turns Cruel
11:47 Using BookTok Intentionally
12:53 Promotion as Paid Labor
14:18 Closing Thoughts

LINKS:

• BookTok Helps Sell More Than 50 Million Books Across Europe
• FTC Guidance for Endorsements, Influencers, and Reviews
• Julia Whelan Has Narrated 600 Audiobooks and Counting—So Why Isn’t She Paid Like It?

Want to keep in touch? Me, too! 

Brenda Reads Audiobooks Linktree

and Check out my website: Brendascottwlazlo.com

For service inquiries, use the contact me form through my website. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So, my city block had their block party this weekend, and it was great. There was a bouncy house and fire trucks and water, sprinklers. It was wonderful. And I met a neighbor who has kids about the same age as my son, and we were chatting. And of course, we're going through the normal intros

Block Party Spark

SPEAKER_00 0:20

and, like, oh, what do you do? And I'm like, oh, I'm an audiobook narrator. And she was like, oh my gosh, that's incredible. I love reading and listening to books. I get all of my recommendations off of book talk. And I want to talk about book talk and how important it's becoming to an audiobook narrator's career because I have a very complicated relationship with it. I mean, I love book talk,

What is Booktok?

SPEAKER_00 0:51

but I also find it exhausting and occasionally horrifying. And for those who are just getting into it, book talk is kind of like a subgenre of TikTok that talks specifically about books, usually. A lot of romanticy, a lot of horror books, lit RPG thrillers. And there are people who create lists and dedicated reviews for these books. It can be a cool place to discover some really cool new stuff. Instagram has something similar, Bookstagram. It's a whole subgenre of these platforms. And when it started, or at least when I first became aware of it, it felt like this huge virtual book club. Like people were genuinely excited about books and they wanted to share that excitement with other people and they had found their community. It was great. And that version of BookTalk, I think it still exists. There are wonderful reviewers and creators who care deeply about the books and authors and narrators and want to give back to the larger community, and they introduce listeners to books they would never have found otherwise. And they can take a relatively unknown indie book and launch it to an audience almost overnight. But book talk is also an industry now. Audible, for example, has a dedicated book talk designation, and publishers who are building campaigns around these creators and authors are starting to think about whether a book is tropes or moments that can be turned into content

From Book Club to Industry

SPEAKER_00 2:30

and who has the highest follower rate that they can get the biggest reach out of. Reviews are now sponsored a lot of the time. Affiliate links are involved. People are being paid all over the place to cover a certain number of books within a certain amount of time for a certain amount of reach. A lot of people would call that marketing. It is marketing. But once money and access enter the picture, the whole thing becomes more complicated. I've seen creators expected to review an incredible amount of books every week. Sometimes they're given summaries and promotional materials to help them produce that content. But I can't speak to whether they're actually reading all of them. I don't know what that individual creator does or doesn't do before they review something, and I don't want to make a blanket accusation about an entire group of people. But I do think it's fair to ask how thoughtful a review can be when the goal is to move through five books a week and keep feeding the algorithm for a possibly compensated piece of content. At that point, are we still talking about a book club? And this matters to narrators because your follower count is increasingly becoming part of your resume. And I don't love saying that. I don't think follower counts tell you whether someone is a good narrator. Not to mention meet deadlines or make an author feel like their book is, you know, in

Follower Counts and Casting

SPEAKER_00 4:12

good hands. It does tell a publisher or an author that you have access to an audience, and that's becoming increasingly valuable, especially in the romance spaces and lit RPG and horror, where the relationship among authors, narrators, and listeners is really active online. The narrators who are really good at social media, they can experience incredible growth and build recognizable names and fandoms, and they are making a much faster beeline toward bigger books, publishing housework, and direct author requests. Some of those people are also exceptional narrators. I want to be clear about that. Being good at social media does not necessarily mean that you don't take the creative aspects as seriously. The problem comes when visibility starts being used as evidence of ability, of when everyone else is expected to perform a second unpaid job as a content creator just to remain competitive. Now there are brilliant narrators who hate being on camera. There are people who don't have the time to film and edit content every day. They are busy working. Some people are caregivers, some are disabled, some are just private. They've spent all of their creative energy on the actual audiobook creation and they don't have another charming 60-second video in them. I just don't want these people to be quietly pushed aside because somebody else has 50, 75, 100,000 followers. At the same time, I understand the reality. We live in the real world. If two people can both do the job and one of them can immediately promote the book to a larger engaged audience, of course, that becomes part of the conversation. I can still dislike it. But pretending it isn't happening just doesn't help us. So how much of our career now depends on being a narrator, and how much depends on being a public personality who also narrates? I don't know that the industry has fully answered that question yet. What makes this even stranger is that audiobooks are doing incredibly well on book talk, but narrators are still frequently being left out of the marketing. Someone will post a video called

Narrator Credits in reviews

SPEAKER_00 6:56

The Five Best Audiobooks I've Listened To This Month, and they'll have like 13,000 likes and 500 plus comments, and they show the cover and they name the book, they name the author, and they spend several minutes talking about how emotional or funny or sexy the listening experience was, and they never mention who narrated it. That's wild to me. If you're recommending the audiobook, the narrator is a part of what you're recommending. The pacing, the characters, the emotional life, the accents, all of that came through a performance. Now, I don't think most creators on those platforms are leaving out narrators because they're trying to be disrespectful. The industry's trained people to think of the author and the title as the important information, and the narrator is something buried in the product description. That's why when you look on Audible, you can see the author's entire bio, and we get one line, which is our name. If you make content about audiobooks, please name the narrator, narrators, us. Like give us some visibility in a system that is increasingly using visibility to make professional decisions. And then there's the fandom side of book talk, which can be amazing and also get deeply uncomfortable, especially in romance. These are narrators who've developed incredibly devoted fan bases. In many cases, it comes from a combination of excellent work,

Fandom and Parasocial Risks

SPEAKER_00 8:47

consistent social media engagement, and a willingness to interact with listeners, but these relationships can become parasocial very quickly. Sometimes the fandom centers on a male narrator with a particular kind of voice and persona, and the attachment becomes intense enough that certain fans will defend him through almost anything. If criticism comes up or misconduct is alleged, the response is immediately, I don't care, I love his voice. That's not a healthy relationship with a performer. With anyone. A voice can be attractive, a performance can mean something to you. You can be a fan of someone's work and have it touch your soul. That's a very high compliment. But none of that means you know the person. And it certainly doesn't mean every concern about that person should be dismissed because they sound good reading a spicy scene. Once someone becomes part of a listener's identity or a fantasy life, any criticism of that person can feel like a personal attack. And that's when a community can turn into a defense squad, and BookTalk has certainly been accused of that on occasion. We need to be able to enjoy somebody's work without appointing ourselves as their PR team. Then there's another side of this, which is what happens when criticism becomes targeted cruelty. There was a moment where people would start public discussions about narrators they hated, and then tag those narrators in the conversation.

When Critiques turn Cruel

SPEAKER_00 10:30

I am baffled. I understand reviewing a performance. Narration is art and people are allowed to dislike it. Sometimes a narrator isn't a right fit for a book for you. Sometimes a creative choice doesn't work for you. All that is fair territory for a review. But why are you tagging the narrator? What is the goal? Do you believe they need to receive an alert, telling them their voice ruined your week? Are they supposed to apologize? Are they supposed to change the voice that comes out of their body? No. Narrators don't need to be pulled into that conversation about whether someone likes their voice. And this is also where narrators need to protect themselves. You don't have to search your name, you don't have to watch every review, you don't have to try to engage because someone tagged you. And this brings me to the question I keep coming back to. How do we use this space without letting it use us? I don't think the answer is for narrators to leave social media. For some people, that may absolutely be the healthiest choice, but as an industry-wide

Using Booktok Intentionally

SPEAKER_00 11:47

strategy, it's probably not that realistic if you're trying to grow your career. BookTalk has real power. It helps listeners find us, but here is the challenge. We have to decide what we actually want from it. What is our goal? Maybe your goal is to promote new releases, maybe you enjoy talking about the craft. Decide whether you read reviews, decide how much access people get through your direct messages, decide which parts of your personal life are never becoming content. And I'm working on this one. Decide when you're off the clock. And yes, social media has to be allowed to have an off the clock. I also think we need to be more honest about promotional labor. If a publisher or author expects a narrator to produce a series of videos or promote a pre-order or participate in a live event and bring their existing audience to the project, then that's part of the job now.

Promotion as Paid Labor

SPEAKER_00 12:52

That's part of what they're asking the narrator to do. And some big five publishers are offering compensation for those things. Great job. If you do a promotional video, if you read an excerpt and send them the clip, they put it on their social media and you get compensated for that. And at least under union contracts, that's becoming a part of the negotiation. But we should be allowed to talk about that clearly regardless. Is promotion an informal hope or is it an expectation? Is it included in the compensation? Are assets being provided? Is the narrator being credited in the campaign? Will a lack of social media participation affect future casting? These are things I would love to be more open and transparent in our community because we're all thinking them. I want us all to be talking out loud to get those answers. And the answers may not always be the answers we want, but at least everyone should know what the job actually is now. So where does all of that leave us? I don't think book talk is ruining audiobooks, but I also don't think it is an uncomplicated force for good. It's a community, it's a marketplace, and occasionally it's a very loud high school cafeteria.

Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_00 14:18

And it's introduced thousands of people to a narrator's work, and it's also convinced narrators that every quiet week is a career crisis, and every low-performing post means nobody cares about them. There has to remain room for the narrator who's wonderful in the booth and terrible at TikTok. There has to be a place for people who want a sustainable career without turning their entire personality into an ongoing influencer marketing campaign. And for those of us who do participate, I think the goal is to use BookTalk with some intention. Show up in a way that you can maintain, make things you actually enjoy making, and forget about the things people say you should be doing. Support other creators who talk about audiobooks thoughtfully and ask to be credited. Credit other narrators and step away when the space starts making you feel as though your numbers are a measurement of your worth. BookTalk can help people find your work, but it shouldn't get to decide whether the work actually matters. That's it for this week's podcast. I am always honored to know that you are listening and that you are allowing me to rant and rave about different topics that are ruminating in my head. I hope that you have an incredible week. I hope you have a block party and take care of yourselves. And I will talk to you soon.