CATEGORY

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Content creators provide an opportunity for affordable marketing and a way for publishing houses to extend their reach online. Doing so, they are influencing what audiences are seeing online and creating hashtags to increase the visibility of their own videos. Online platforms and their algorithms make the formation of micro-communities easier. Content creators and viewers can come together to discuss and bond over their shared interests. This is what happened with #BookTok, an online community on TikTok, where creators, authors, reviewers and viewers create and interact with content about books without much input from the publishing houses’ publicity teams. There is no one perfect way to promote a book, and each campaign is unique. The intersection between book publicity and BookTok represents a relatively new relationship, and each publishing house has its own budget and plan for publicity. This has resulted in a ‘try anything’ attitude, where the success of each promotion is determined by the audience of the creator, the viewers and the algorithm of the platforms.

'Reading in the age of influence: an analysis of the impact of BookTokers on book consumption intentions' (2025), collaboratively written by Tyson Antonio Alves da Silva and colleagues, argues that BookTok does affect reading behaviour. They conducted surveys and explored how reading becomes social, and how influencers impact the book market. It was found that BookTokers have a  strong  influence on users’ intentions to read. However, they surveyed only viewers, and by excluding the voices of influencers and publishers, we can’t entirely be sure if their work had anything to do with the  readers’ responses. A similar area covered in the literature is the connection between online platforms and their effect on young people’s reading habits. The existing research fails to dive deeper into the specific posts influencing the readers and finding out whether they are, in fact, marketing techniques designed by publishers. Online platforms impact the way audiences select and read books, while also shaping how publishing houses advertise their books, leading to the necessary question of how the publishing houses utilise bookish influencers to build and shape communities.

Text Publishing’s social media strategies

can be taught (which may mean that this knowledge is lost when team members move on). [SH1] It requires the publicity teams to be active consumers of bookish influencing crowds themselves. Influencers are not required to post reviews in return for receiving content. It’s not known whether influencers post reviews to maintain rapport, although Text's representative theorised that creators with fewer followers are more likely to post reviews in order to stay on the publisher’s ARC list. With a focus on The Strength of the Few by James Islington, we can see the three major ways that Text Publishing utilised bookish influencers to find audiences and create community.

Text Publishing Company is a small Melbourne-based publishing house that publishes fiction and non-fiction books. It was recently acquired by Penguin Random House but still maintains full creative control over its publishing. We note that, as a smaller publishing house, Text's approach may differ from Australia’s larger publishers and global arms, such as Hachette Australia and HarperCollins Australia. Followers of Text’s Instagram accounts will see that they regularly post promotional content for new book releases, upcoming events and reshares of user content in which they’ve been tagged as the publisher of the book, or books in the image. In comparison, followers of local (Melburnian and wider Australian) bookish influencers may notice that Text seems to utilise these influencers’ accounts more than their own to promote new publications.

Text Publishing’s social media strategies

Advanced Reader Copies

A prominent strategy that Text employs is providing Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) to bookish influencers, in hopes that the influencer will share positive reviews with their own audiences. Text maintains a spreadsheet in which bookish influencers are logged, along with engagement rate, follower count and genres. The process of deciding which influencers should receive ARCs seems to rely more on intuition than on a process that can be taught (which may mean that this knowledge is lost when team members move on). It requires the publicity teams to be active consumers of bookish influencing crowds themselves. Influencers are not required to post reviews in return for receiving content. It’s not known whether influencers post reviews to maintain rapport, although Text's representative theorised that creators with fewer followers are more likely to post reviews in order to stay on the publisher’s ARC list. With a focus on The Strength of the Few by James Islington, we can see the three major ways that Text Publishing utilised bookish influencers to find audiences and create community.

A prominent strategy that Text employs is providing Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) to bookish influencers, in hopes that the influencer will share positive reviews with their own audiences. Text maintains a spreadsheet in which bookish influencers are logged, along with engagement rate, follower count and genres. The process of deciding which influencers should receive ARCs seems to rely more on intuition than on a process that

[The Stella’s] blatant promotion of ideals that speak directly to one of the primary challenges that women writers in Australia face—that is, financial and temporal precarity—is a radical act in the Australian literary prize sector.

Key Points

  • In her essay analysing the relationship between literary prizes and public reception, Alexandra Dane (2020b:151) pinpoints that

  • The problem wasn’t the 2011 shortlist alone, but rather the repetition and reinforcement of a longer trend that had been present in Australia and in its literary landscape since the first literary prize was introduced (Cunningham 2011; Lamond 2011; Dane 2020a).

  • In her essay analysing the relationship between literary prizes and public reception, Alexandra Dane (2020b:151) pinpoints that: