Continuing from last week’s discussion post, let’s dive into the pressures of up-keeping a bookish social media account, specifically a Bookstagram account. I don’t have experience with a BookTok (and I will not be getting one anytime soon) but I will be mentioning booktoks as a part of the pressures of maintaining your brand and account as a bookstagrammer.

Most people start a bookstagram account to make their love and enjoyment of reading a visual thing, whether that be for themselves or to connect with other like-minded readers. It is a very simple way of finding people who read the same things you do and getting recommendations you know you will enjoy because your online friends loved it. But bookstagrams don’t always stay casual, nor do they continue to be solely for the purpose of finding more books to read and support. There is no shame in wanting to have more followers to engage with and share your favourite reads with – I am well aware of the appeal of following trains and promoting your page to get higher numbers to further support your brand and your love for books. I have done a few of these things myself because I wanted to be a reader who could spend their days reading and reviewing books and having part of my life be about books.

The problem comes with the competitive aspects of bookstagram and bookish social media in general. Perhaps competitive isn’t the right word, but hear me out. In order for our pages to get more followers and more engagement, we must assess what others are doing and either replicate it to suit our tastes or trump it in some way to get ahead of them. In order to be the person that gets onto an ARCs list or someone who stands out in some way on a social media platform where everything starts to look at same, there needs to be something aspirational or unobtainable about your page to make people want to see your posts regularly. That may be getting on the most popular subscription box lists or being a rep for a bookish merch shop or a small business with bookish items. It could also be spending every spare cent you have on all the preorders and special editions and all the popular and not as popular books to portray a lifestyle of exclusivity and dedication to being a reader. Not everyone has the financial stability to buy hundreds of books a month, or the outreach to get send hundreds of books a month by publishers, and readers will follow these accounts so they can live vicariously through these readers.

But it’s exhausting. Truly, running a bookstagram is a full-time job most readers don’t get paid for. It’s emotionally taxing, seeing all the hard work gone into attaining the books, staging the photos, editing them and getting the right captions for SEO and For You page hits, etc. all reduced down to a few dozen likes, if that. There are many that can get hundreds of likes per post and maybe they have a system going with helps keep them on the straight and narrow. It doesn’t make it any less tiring and draining, both financially and emotionally.

What started out as a means of sharing a love for literature and fun books gets turned into a factory producing post after post with no clear end in sight. The only way to take a moment to breathe is to step back from the platform and go on hiatus for a bit, and that’s if you have the energy to return to this beast at some point later down the line. I have seen so many creators apologise for leaving the platform, unable to continue trudging through with the sacrifices bookstagram demands, and it makes me so angry and sad because they shouldn’t be apologising for anything. This isn’t even scratching the surface of the pressures faced by being a bookish content creator, for there is the cyber bullying and mob-mentality that pummels creators day in and day out. Some are silenced because their opinions and reviews aren’t following the cultish devotion other readers have for a book. Some are left feeling isolated and empty because the reality of dedicating so much time and effort into a bookstagram restricts their ability to spend time with loved ones and friends.

Burnout is a serious issue in the bookstagram community. Why is that when the idea of making an account was to share reviews and a love for reading? How is it that reading has become the least important part of these bookish social media accounts? Why is it that we feel the need to prove we have so many book related things to talk about and promote and recommend, so much so we use up all our energy everyday getting content out of books without reading them for our own pleasure? I have been pretty much inactive on my bookstagram for nearly a month and I honestly don’t know if there is a want to return to it, at least not in the way I used to post. I feel like I either have to completely change how I post and promote my account or I have to accept the fact that I am the least inspiring reader out there because my content is so amateur compared to the productions going on with other accounts that my posts will never be picked up by the algorithm.

This is all a bit of a running monologue with very loose threads thinking my thoughts together, but I hope the sentiment carries across. Bookstagram is one of the greatest things out there, but it is also one of the worst. I just hope the pendulum swings back toward good soon.