Waihi bookstagrammer Tash Murray specialises in thrillers and serial killers.
Waihi bookstagrammer Tash Murray specialises in thrillers and serial killers.
Joanna Wane looks at the rising influence of bookstagrammers, who are all about how a book makes them feel.
Not everyone wept when the New York Times disappeared behind a paywall in 2011. Good riddance, wrote Anis Shavani, in an excoriating essay on HuffPost. "The section that will be leastmissed is the book review, which presents, week after week, calculated affronts to literary taste."
Shivani, himself a poet, fiction writer and critic, described the newspaper's book reviews as "a subtle system of patronage and servitude". Lord knows what he makes of today's influencers making a buck from sponsored posts.
The term "bookstagrammer" wasn't even coined until a few years ago when people began setting up specialised accounts on Instagram to share their favourite reads. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when most of us were stuck at home, book-related content on the platform increased by 31 per cent. The bookstagram hashtag has 81.9 million posts.
Stepping into the vacuum created by a shrinking mainstream media, citizen book reviewers are responsible for introducing #shelfies (artfully arranged bookshelves) and #bookstacks (artfully arranged stacks of books) to our social media feeds. Two of the most popular bookstagrammers, Romanian law graduate James Trevino and his best friend Elizabeth Sagan, have half a million followers between them.
The pair are also big on TikTok, where fans of Texan writer Colleen Hoover catapulted her into the stratosphere during the pandemic and viral teen videos about Madeline Miller's 2012 novel, The Song of Achilles, sent sales skyrocketing past the two million mark. As a marketing tool, it's become so powerful that US bookseller Barnes & Noble displays QR codes in its stores sending customers straight to the #BookTok landing page.
Here, Instagram is still the platform of choice for most local fan reviews, says Allen & Unwin's marketing manager Courtney Smith. She works with a pool of about 50 bookstagrammers, who can request free copies of new releases that take their fancy.
There's no stipulation that reviews must be positive; Smith reckons people can tell when a post is authentic, and many bookstagrammers are librarians or booksellers themselves. How much influence they have on the domestic retail market is debatable, though. "I think it's more about creating a community than driving sales, although that's very hard for us to measure."
Often the books that do get traction on social media are mass-market titles or obscure genres typically overlooked by mainstream reviewers. However, the shift away from more probing literary criticism does have some in the industry worried. Juliet Blyth, the chief executive of Read NZ Te Pou Muramura (formerly the NZ Book Council) believes the dwindling number of hard-copy pages devoted to books is a "deep shame", particularly the lack of long-form reviews.
Novelist and short-story writer Paula Morris, who teaches the Creative Writing Programme at the University of Auckland, says encouraging people to talk about books and recommend reading to each other is a good thing. "But the social-media conversation isn't always edifying or informed, or even sensible. Most of the #bookreview content I've seen is brief and superficial, more enthusiastic than reflective. It's like GoodReads or TripAdvisor: the quality and reliability vary."
Vicki Jones, a medical academic in Hamilton, was the kind of kid who got into trouble for reading The Hobbit in maths class and now listens to audiobooks in the car to save time. She belongs to a monthly book club and goes to writers' festivals and author events when she can. But for her, the bookstagram community is about instant connection — her account, @antipodeanbookclub, has almost 13,000 followers. "It's a whole little under-culture of bookery," she says.
An ambassador for Featherston Booktown, Jones has eclectic tastes, from forgotten 20th-century classics to middle-grade children's books. "One of the benefits of being a citizen book reviewer is that we're not experts and we're not literary critics. We're talking more about how it made us feel.
"It's quite nice for normal, ordinary people to connect with one another using a shared language. In some regards, that's much more approachable and authentic than someone who might seem a little remote or aloof because they're an expert in the field."
The community is certainly varied, although dominated by women. Yasmin Nouri, a "book-hoarding scientist" @book_tings, is doing a PhD in cancer immunotherapy at the Malaghan Institute in Wellington. Her grandparents owned a book publishing company and she did a BA, majoring in Engish literature, alongside her biomedical science degree.
A #shelfie of one of Murray's themed bookcases - she has three of them.
Tash Murray, a mother of three who lives in Waihi, was selling second-hand goods on Instagram when she picked up a copy of Salman Rushdie's novel Quichotte. "It was beautiful," she says. "My childhood was full of books but I'd lost it somewhere along the road. So that was the spark."
In March, Murray rebranded her Instagram account as @readamongstthecrime — she's a big thriller/horror fan, although her personal collection ranges from Booker Prize winners to a set of Encylopedia Britannica's ninth edition. Now the manager of an SPCA op shop, she squeezes in reading time late at night or early in the morning, and posts several times a week.
"It's definitely not a deep dive. Most bookstagrammers just give their honest opinion about how a book made them feel. The impact it had on you — that's what the majority of readers want to know."
