Consumerism is Hurting Art

For the brevity of this large topic, I will focus on books and publishing, but this is an issue in every industry.

As an older member of Gen Z, I witnessed the evolution from VHS to DVD to streaming services as well as the evolution from dial up internet to limited hotspots to high speed internet. Immediacy has shortened our attention spans over time and we’re now able to consume more media and literature than ever. As amazing as all of this is, it also comes with drawbacks.

I identify as an introvert and a bookworm so my idea of fun is reading and watching booktube and booktok. I’m easily influenced and am constantly falling into a consumerist hole. I buy books at a faster rate than I can read them. I also compare myself to people who read books for a living. As entertaining as it is to watch, I’m not able to read 7 books in 24 hours or haul $100 worth of books or read over 100 books in a year, but it is the book community and their consumption of books that has changed the publishing industry.

Every November marks National Novel Writing Month in which writers, published and unpublished attempt to write a draft of a novel in just 30 days. Obviously, this is just the first draft of the novel and does not include edits or revisions, but the method has become popularized nonetheless. The craft of writing novels has been simplified and made into a formula as a way to write quickly. In order to stay in touch with consumers the publishing industry watches trends on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Unfortunately, the book influencers that are at the forefront of the community don’t have a very diverse reading palate. Trends from social media are then reflected in bookstores because their sales are dependent on catering to those audiences. Bookstores all over the world now have “BookTok” tables displaying the same most popular books. This is how Colleen Hoover’s books have topped National Bestseller lists.

This is not me saying that people should force themselves to read books that are outside of their preferred genre or that Colleen Hoover’s books don’t deserve to be bestsellers, but it is important to point out that many of the books that are highly recommended on BookTube and BookTok and then put at the front of bookstores, are very similar. There is no reason for an entire store display to feature books by one author. This phenomenon has depreciated the craft of writing. Now publishers want books that sell. Formulaic books that excite the reader enough to finish it in a day are easy to sell.

There are authors that crank out multi-book series in the span of three years following the same formula for each book (the same way that the Marvel cinematic universe has close to 100 movies and TV series and counting). It drives down the demand for stand alone novels with unique premises. Again, I am in no way discrediting the work that these authors are doing in writing these novels, but it makes the industry harder to break into. These books, despite the efforts of lesser known BookTokers trying to diversify what’s seen on BookTok, consistently take precedence over authors who write books with a diverse cast of characters and new ideas. Now the market is, at best, filled with a surplus of books that are just rewrites of other stories.

I’m not writing this to villify platforms like BookTok. I enjoy watching it as well. I love that there is a community for people like me who love to escape reality by getting lost in the pages of a book. But I also believe that art should be diverse. I believe that original ideas should be celebrated and given a display at bookstores instead of the same twenty books by the same 3 authors I see every other day. I don’t want to have to comb the shelves or scroll endlessly through a hashtag to finally see something that I’ve never seen before, but unfortunately, social media, influence, and consumerism go hand in hand and it is to the detriment of art.