A BookTok primer for lumpy old dads

We're nearly six months into this experiment with Curious Reading Club, and I'm starting think about how to spread the word a little further. It’s not desperate or anything: right now we're hovering around the breakeven mark—and that's fine for a hobby. But while we've gained a solid number of subscribers, we've lost a few too, and I know that you need to bring in more people than you lose or you end up sliding off into oblivion.

And, hey, I do this to share great books with other people! If I just wanted to read by myself I can do that very happily. This whole thing is really about proselytizing.

So how do I spread the word? In the past if I wanted to promote the club and the fantastic books we all read together, I would have hit social media, starting with Twitter or Facebook. But I'm not active on social media any more, aside from a little Linkedin now and then. Twitter's great moral meltdowns drained all the fun out of the place: if I go visit now, it's like a ghost town populated by racists and robots trying to be more racist or robotic than each other. I resisted adopting the Musk-moniker for a long time, but it’s well and truly X now: the plump little creature that was Twitter has been de-boned and turned into a limp, fleshy tube.

As far as alternatives go, I've not seen any need to join Bluesky or Threads or Mastodon or whatever else is out there. I don't know where to begin, or where the right people are.

Actually, I do know where the people are.

If you want to talk about books, you go to TikTok.

I've been doing a project with a publishing client for the last month or two, and I’ve spent a lot of time on BookTok and Bookstagram as a result. I’ve been speaking to a lot of book influencers about their work on TikTok, and seeing how passionate and enthusiastic those communities are. It’s been a crash course in modern life for this lumpy old dad: it’s fascinating, terrifying, and I think I might have to try it.

One part of my brain is fine with this. I don't mind going on stage, or interviewing authors for the club on Zoom... I'm not scared of having opinions out loud. But somehow, the other part of my brain, is crapping itself and telling me that doing the TikTok thing is pretty terrifying.

It makes me think of the experimental video diary I did for the Guardian maybe 20 years ago that was pretty awful (I later discovered it was being pulled apart in a journalism class crit session.) Or the time I was on some weekend business morning TV show as a talking head, and managed to get all of the smart lines I'd thought of twisted inside out. (Struggling with heavy drinking at the time probably didn’t help.)

I don’t mind writing in public, but there's just something very vulnerable when you go beyond just putting your words out there for other people, and start showing your face.

Still, I want to share the reading club with more people. And that's where people are.

So... any suggestions?