TikTok Is Turning The Publishing World Into Fast Fashion
Before you grab a copy of Rebecca Yarros’ Iron Flame, recognize that its success is being driven by a problematic hype machine.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Whenever you begin reading a book — specifically a fictional one — there’s a high chance that you’re going to sound out at least one of the characters’ names egregiously wrong. But if it’s inside your mind and your mind only, is that really a bad thing? Perhaps not.
What about if you’re a New York Times bestseller and youdon’t know how to pronounce the words in Rebecca Yarros, author of the dragon-filled fantasy found herself in such a situation during a recent interview at New York Comic Con. She mispronounced several of the Scottish Gaelic words from the novel.
But the blunder — or the viral TikTok a native speaker made to express frustration with how the language was carelessly deployed — hasn’t slowed down her success. On Tuesday, when she released the sequel, , it sold out on Amazon.com Inc. within 12 hours.
We’re witnessing in real time how corners of the publishing industry have become akin to fast fashion: pushing out a steady stream of content because they know readers, influenced by social media reviews, will keep buying despite any glaring ethical concerns.
When I attended the midnight premiere of at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square this week, all four floors of the bookstore were buzzing with excited fans, many of them dressed up as dragon riders. And then came the Q&A portion, where Yarros readily admitted: “Guys, I don’t speak Gaelic. I am really sorry, but I did find a tutor. I may butcher these words right now so please have some grace for me ... Next year, I will have some better pronunciations for you, I promise.”
A publisher shouldn’t be comfortable with having an author so openly take inspiration from a subject matter they’re not intimately familiar with. But social media has shifted things. Mentions of Yarros and her books alone have racked up more than a billion views on TikTok, where a subset called BookTok has boosted the popularity of the “romantasy” genre.
Yarros’ publisher Red Tower Books, a new imprint by Entangled Publishing that’s distributed by Macmillan, is a byproduct of that culture. Although Red Tower is only a year old, it’s been at the helm of some of the most buzzworthy fantasy book launches of this decade.
And recently, the publisher managed to sell its most hardcore consumers a book sight unseen. There was no title or cover photo. People bought it purely on hype. This would be fine if the “untitled book,” which sold out at Target, was something new. But it wasn’t: Readers received a special edition of , a book that most of them already owned.
The formula is similar to that of retail “drops,” where brands release limited-edition fashion lines that sell out in an instant. But instead of clothes, readers are snatching up (Perhaps that feels like a relatively guilt-free purchase in comparison.) First, Red Tower makes a hush-hush announcement about a special new project on social. Maybe they’re releasing a collectible edition with sprayed edges. Or it’s an entirely new series. In any event, they won’t publish a ton of copies. Forced scarcity is their friend because it creates a never-ending altar of hype. But the quality of the physical book — and the writing inside it — gets sacrificed as a result.
One of the first lessons of Gaelic is that the adjective comes the noun, not before it, as explained in TikToks — prior to the Comic Con gaffe — about Yarros’ misuse of the language in the book. A translation for the family of blue dragons in the book, “gormfaileas,” breaks down into “gorm” (blue) and “faileas” (shadow). But when combined properly, it should read “faileas gorm,” not the other way around. Imagine if someone were to take a similarly haphazard approach to a more well-known language, like Spanish or Italian. Readers would be up in arms, and rightfully so.
Scottish Gaelic is one of many minoritized languages that fantasy authors — a lot of them White Americans — routinely draw inspiration from. For example, Sarah J. Maas, most known for , has been criticized for relying on the trope.
When done properly, referencing historical events can be educational for readers. Yarros and her publisher should have employed a Gaelic scholar to review her book publishing. And the audiobook, which is currently rife with mispronunciations, should be orated by a native Gaelic speaker, or at least someone who has taken the time to learn it properly. The index could even include a pronunciation guide so that readers could get familiar with the language and its history.
These suggestions should be taken into consideration for future books in the series, as well as its TV adaptation. Just last week, the rights for all five books (three of which don’t exist yet) were secured by Amazon MGM Studios and Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society. It would be a true disservice if Scottish Gaelic terms ended up being mispronounced on screen, too.
Fiction novels may be an escape for some, but they are often rooted in somebody else’s culture or origin story. When publishers and authors fail to handle those stories with care, it’s more than disheartening. It’s a reality check for fantasy land.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
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- Ban TikTok? Yes, But Congress Needs to Explain Why: Julianna Goldman
- Mean Girls TikTok Stunt Is a Red Flag for Writers: Jason Bailey
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jessica Karl is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and author of the Bloomberg Opinion Today newsletter.
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