BookTok: An Unexpected Gem

A community of book lovers, a few curses, and some wardrobe issues. 

What do these have in common? Thousands of views on social media.

For this week's episode of A Book and a Dream, Megan takes a dive into the world of TikTok and the strange encounters and epic viewership that can nurture a bridge between author and reader.

As mentioned in the episode, you can order your copy of Heart of Smoke by visiting https://books2read.com/heartofsmoke

You can also view all of Megan's controversial(?) TikTok videos by visiting her TikTok profile here: https://www.tiktok.com/@meganorussell?

Transcript

Megan: [00:00:02] Now, the fact that the two videos that have gotten strangely big on TikTok for me are one about boobs and one about saying [bleep] seems to say a whole lot about me as a person.

Announcement: [00:00:16] Welcome to A Book and A Dream with Megan O'Russell: an author's adventure in writing, reading, and being an epic fangirl.

Megan: [00:00:27] Hello, my name is Megan O'Russell and welcome to Episode 58 of A Book and A Dream. What do Fantasy, fashion, swearing, and TikTok have in common? It turns out, quite a bit. I've had a very interesting week on social media with thousands of views on some very random videos.

Megan: [00:00:47] But yeah, I'm going to save that story for just a minute because first, I wanted to talk to you about the fact that it is the Heart of Smoke book release week. Now, this is the first book in a brand new dystopian series. I am really excited about sharing it with the world. And it also has to do with the TikTok story. So first, here's a little blurb from Heart of Smoke.

Megan: [00:01:09] One will betray her, one will save her, one will destroy her world.

Megan: [00:01:13] Ooh.

Megan: [00:01:14] Do the work, steal the goods, keep her sister alive. A simple plan Lanni has been clinging to. With the city burning around her and vampires hiding in the shadows, makin it...making it until morning is the best she can hope for. But order in the city is crumbling, and the thin safety that's kept Lanni alive won't be enough to protect her family. The people who live in the glittering glass domes, lording over the city, safe from the dangers of the outside world, have grown tired of the factory filth marring their perfect apocalypse.

Megan: [00:01:45] With a new...when a new reign of chaos threatens her sister, Lanni faces a horrible choice: accept the fate she was born to or join the enemy she's sworn to destroy.

Megan: [00:01:56] [Melodramatically Sung] Bwah-bwah-bwah-nah!

Megan: [00:01:58] So that is the blurb for Heart of Smoke. You can kind of tell from the blurb it's going to be a dark world. It's dystopian, it's going to be gritty. It's not like some happy, fluffy story. That leads us into the TikTok story.

Megan: [00:02:11] So, because Heart of Smoke is a dystopian book, it is aimed at Upper YA. There is some cursing in the book because people are dying, bad things are happening. Sometimes, it's appropriate to say words like [bleep] or [bleep] when, you know, death comes. I posted it in an author group that I'm a part of being like, "Where is the line between, like, cursing and too much cursing?" expecting people to be like, Well, it's situational." Or, you know, "You have to put, like, a disclaimer on the bottom" or something like that.

Megan: [00:02:44] And I did get some of that. I got some people being like, "It's a dystopian. Put in what you want" or "Teens are going to say way worse than you could ever think to write in a book" or "Just look at, you know, About Alaska. As long as you're not doing that, you're doing OK." And I did get mostly that.

Megan: [00:02:59] But there were some people who were so mad that I'd even consider swearing in a YA book, not a middle grade book, not a kids' book, a young adult novel which is aimed at teens, who like...go to high school, most of whom can drive, they're dating, they're watching TV, they have access to the Internet. It's not like I'm stealing someone's innocence here. Like, they've heard worse. They've read worse on the bathroom walls at school. Come on now, people.

Megan: [00:03:37] But there was so much anger about how it was, like, destroying YA books by making them too mature and how dare I? And so I've been on TikTok for a while. I've been starting to, like, be a good author and use it regularly. And so I made a series of videos about the lessons that I learned from getting yelled at by all these authors about daring to put cursing in my novels. And one of the videos gained 15,000-some views.

Megan: [00:04:09] Now, in terms of like "viral," that's not a thing. Like, that is nowhere near viral. That's just, like, an odd number of views on a video, especially when you consider with platforms like Instagram and Facebook, it's really "pay to play" if you're a business account on either of those things, I can only reach, like, maybe a 20th of my audience at the ti--at a time, because they cap you, and they want you to pay for reach. So, if I actually want all of my Facebook followers on Facebook to see something, I have to give Facebook dollars or they won't let me do it. It's the same thing with Instagram. They will cap you.

Megan: [00:04:44] TikTok doesn't do it. So you have organic reach. And if people comment and like your videos, it can go as far as it wants to go, and they don't mind. So 15,000 for zero dollars is like...clutch in the author world. Like, that does not happen on other platforms. You just can't do it because they will stop you from doing it deliberately. Yeah, I know. Not really cool, but that's how it works.

Megan: [00:05:09] So we got like 15,000-some views. Cool. So here is the video/the audio from that TikTok that got some attention.

Megan: [00:05:20] [TikTok Audio] Lesson number four: violence and harassment are way more acceptable than any form of cursing in books. Let's take something like Hunger Games. Now, you can kill other teens. Just don't swear at them. Because swearing is bad. Rip out somebody's eyeballs, tear out their lungs, murder some people. I don't know, shove a girl into a corner, kiss her against her will. Those are all fine. Just don't you dare curse at anyone while you kill them. [End of TikTok Audio]

Megan: [00:05:49] Who'd have thunk? Now, I do stand by my decision to use cursing in Heart of Smoke. There's also, you know, some sex workers involved. Nothing graphic. I will not. That's where I draw the line. I will not put super graphic sexual content in YA novels.

Megan: [00:06:04] I also try to, like, not have entrails, even though you'd be way better off having sex in a book than entrails because most people will have sex at some point in their life. Hopefully, the vast majority of us will never encounter entrails that have been removed from the body. So really, if you're talking about which one's worse, violence is way worse than sex. Because hopefully we can all avoid violence, and the human race would stop if we all avoided sex.

Megan: [00:06:33] So pick your poison

Megan: [00:06:37] Anyway. So that happened. And I was like, well, this is fun. Look at all these notifications I'm getting. Weird. And so I made another set of videos just being me on TikTok, and I was talking about things in fantasy wardrobes that bother me. And there are quite a few things that bother me about fantasy costuming. The...the biggest thing that bothers me about fantasy costuming, my number one pet peeve, is that heroines always have perfect hair. They're at a ball. They have been dancing. It's glorious. They go back to their room. It's romantic. They pull a singular hairpin from their hair, perfect curls fall down their back...and that's it. That's like the whole getting their hair out of ballroom-state. It's one singular pin, and it comes out perfectly. As someone who wears pin-curls for theater on a regular basis, I come out looking like an electrocuted sheep.

Megan: [00:07:34] It's not cute. And granted, pin-curls are, like, way more heavy duty than you would necessarily need to do. But anyone who's ever worn a for serious updo, it's not one pin, and it's not necessarily going to come out cute.

Megan: [00:07:48] There are some people who are really lucky, and it tumbles down in curls, but even they don't just have one hairpin.

Megan: [00:07:52] It takes lots of hairpins to do things like that.

Megan: [00:07:56] It also really bothers me when authors write women in corsets and not like a sensible, like, bodice, but like a real corset. Like we're cinching your waist deliberately. We are pulling it in to give you a specific figure. They write women being strapped into these corsets tight, it's like a plot point that it's tight, and then they have women running away.

Megan: [00:08:22] And not passing out.

Megan: [00:08:25] As someone who has done a fairly extensive amount of living history, a lot of which involved wearing a corset that was pulled in to be cinched for a certain period look...if you're actually cinching your waist to be period appropriate, you're not going to run very far. It does, in fact, affect how well you can breathe once you're trying to get that shape. And so if you make a plot point of them cinching the waste and then you have her booking it from an evil villain, she's going to pass out. There is oxygen deprivation involved. You can't fill your lungs all the way to the bottom, you're going down, which is also my problem with heels in fantasy novels.

Megan: [00:09:04] We have women wearing stilettos. Oh, it's in Hollywood, too. They do it in Hollywood, too, where they have women wearing these four-inch heels and then they're like, "Ah! Bad Guy!" And they're running away in the four-inch heels.

Megan: [00:09:16] You're going to break an ankle, you're going to fall, you're going to die. Kick off the shoes, then run for your life. That was one of my favorite things in Black Panther when she took off her shoes before the car chase. Don't worry, that's not a spoiler. There are lots of exciting things, but watch. She takes off her shoes. It's brilliant, because that's what a real woman should do, hopefully. If not, she's probably going to die because running in four-inch heels is not really a thing unless it's your superpower.

Megan: [00:09:45] So all of those things went in videos on TikTok. And then I recorded one more, which is one of my bigger pet peeves, but you run into it less often in YA, which is usually where I'm reading. We don't usually describe bras that often in YA because usually there's like some kind of covering, or we're, like, being discreet about the fact that there's no covering. So we don't really talk like how much bosom coverage there is at all times.

Megan: [00:10:12] But sometimes, sometimes you'll see a woman who is described as having an ample bosom. You'll see her in a little shift with nothing under it and you'll see her running.

Megan: [00:10:25] These things do not logically track. It is just not possible.

Megan: [00:10:29] So this is the video about women's bosoms and running in fantasy that got a lot of views.

Megan: [00:10:38] [TikTok Audio] Book fashion, pet peeve. If you are going to describe the characters having an ample bosom, and then she's going to be in a negligee with nothing underneath, barely anything to cover her...she can't just run away. You can't. You can't run away with no bra on if you have an ample bosom, it doesn't work. Even in fantasy realms. [End of TikTok Audio]

Megan: [00:11:02] Now, the fact that the two videos that have gone strangely big on TikTok for me are one about boobs and one about saying [bleep] seems to say a lot about me as a person and where my niche might be as far as social media. So that's interesting. But it's also been very cool to explore the book and reading community on TikTok. So I have found in, you know, trying to find readers and other book lovers, because I'm also a huge fiction junkie, obviously. Otherwise I couldn't really write books, because why would I do that if I hated it? But anyway... So, in doing those things, there are very different niches on Instagram and on Facebook.

Megan: [00:11:47] And one thing that I will say about TikTok is that they're a lot more likely to laugh, and they're a lot more likely to communicate. Even if the communicating is a like or an emoji in the comments or something like that, they are very eager to reach out to agree to say different things on your videos. So that is very cool. And I'm not a huge, huge TikTok fan as, like, a user. I get sensory overload when I open the app because it starts making noises at me.

Megan: [00:12:17] So I have to, like, turn the volume of my phone way down so that it's not too loud so that I can handle all the sounds. But it...it is a very cool book community, and I would encourage you to explore it because there's a lot of authors. Authors are flocking to TikTok right now. It's kind of crazy. Some authors you can't even get on Twitter are going to TikTok because they've realized they don't cap your growth there. So it's a...it's a big opportunity, but it's also so many readers. And they're not just posting, like, pretty pictures like on Instagram being like, "Here's this book with a pinecone." They're like, "Here's this book. And what it made me feel. Here are these books that make me sob. Here are these books that make me angry." And so it's a lot of people's reaction to fiction, whether that reaction is "Why is this person not saying [bleep] when they're running from something," or "No, breasts don't work like that. If you're above a B Cup, you're not running for your life unless you're holding them up, because that's going to be painful. How are you...no, you need something. You need something there."

Megan: [00:13:22] And so it's...it's very cool to find that community that craves that interaction, that craves that reaction to what they're reading. Not just pretty pictures or nice comments about, like, "Oh, yeah, I loved your book. Great."

Megan: [00:13:36] So I would encourage you to explore it. Even if just to, like, hop on, maybe never post videos, but check out some of your favorite authors. They are on there. It is very fun. It's also entertaining to see what's getting lots and lots of views for random reader...for random reasons. So, if you are a reader and you do like social media and you're not a social media fast for the next few days, then check out TikTok. I will put the link to my TikTok below, as well as the link to Heart of Smoke, because that book release is coming up this week.

Megan: [00:14:09] Yeah, I even put a little note when I was reaching out to reviewers being like, "P.S., this book has adult language." And the first review I got was like, "Great book. Has adult language." So...proof that even reviewers don't read the whole blurb.

Megan: [00:14:24] What are you going to do?

Megan: [00:14:26] Maybe reach out on TikTok and ask some people to read the book and review for me people who are comfortable with me saying things like [bleep] in a book.

Megan: [00:14:35] But yeah. So there you go. You have my fantasy fashion pet peeves. You have a great story about why TikTok is actually really fun for building a book community, and news about a book release coming up this week.

Megan: [00:14:52] Now, if you have strong opinions on cursing in books, please share it in the comments or send me a message on one of my social media sites. If you have strong opinions on fantasy fashion and you have other pet peeves you would like to share, please tell me. I want to know them all. What are your fantasy fashion pet peeves? My favorite fantasy fashion thing is when women actually get pockets that they can put things in. I think that's a great time. And I will see you next week after the Heart of Smoke book release have a great week.