For a long time, publishing chugged along a familiar and predictable track. You wrote your manuscript, sent it out to an agent or publisher, crossed your fingers, and waited for an editor to decide whether it worked for them. If you were fortunate, the book then moved through the publishing pipeline, their marketing team took over, and readers discovered it when it hit shelves.
These days, readers aren’t just waiting quietly at the end of the process. They’re part of it from the very beginning. While the traditional gatekeepers haven’t entirely vanished, they’re now sharing space with a whole new set of forces: algorithms, influencers, digital communities, and the bugbear of social media.
Hello, and welcome to AUTHORiTEA where we spill the tea on the publishing industry! I’m E. Prybylski, author, editor and speaker on writing, publishing, and neurodivergence. If you don’t know me, I’m on the Board of Directors for the Editorial Freelancers Association, I’ve been in the industry for seventeen years, and I am the author of How to Write the Damn Book and How to Publish the Damn Book.
Platforms like BookTok and Bookstagram, and their influence publishing, have become impossible to ignore. They used to be considered fringe conversations—fun, relatable, chaotic corners of the internet where readers squealed about their latest favorites. Now they’re driving buying decisions. Social media heavily influences which books publishers push harder, which titles get reprinted with new covers, and which authors suddenly wake up to find six months of sales happening overnight. Influencers have become a new generation of gatekeepers. A fifteen-second video containing nothing more than a tearful reaction, a gasp, or a “you’re not ready for chapter 27” can ignite a wildfire of interest.
Publishers are paying attention. They have teams watching what creators talk about, tracking which tropes spike engagement, and even adjusting their acquisition priorities based on community trends. That the old system no longer looks like it once did. It now runs almost exclusively on emotion, spontaneity, and connection through the use of social media. Readers no longer consume stories in a vacuum. They’re sharing their experience of those stories on social media, and that shift has become a powerful form of marketing.
The Rise of Emotion-Driven Book Discovery
One of the most striking shifts in the modern reader ecosystem is just how much emotional expression shapes book discovery. When someone films themselves in tears over the final chapters of a novel or laughing at a character’s banter, their reaction becomes a reason for others to pick up the book. The emotional impact those single, visceral moments often speaks louder than a carefully crafted marketing campaign. As frustrating as it can be for those of us who have spent so much time on those marketing campaigns. (Sighs in marketer.)
This is why certain story moments travel farther than others. A sharp twist, a heart-wrenching confession—those are the scenes people share on social media to engage with their communities. This isn’t the same as pandering, and it doesn’t mean every book needs to be engineered for virality. I know some authors are actually trying to do that, and please don’t. It’s, as the kids would say, “cringe.” Please don’t write your books just for social media moments. You’ll ruin your narrative.
What it does mean, however, is that readers want connection, and they’re gravitating toward stories that deliver it. In an age where people are so tremendously disconnected from one another due to a whole host of reasons, that emotional connection is one of the reasons why reading has experienced a renaissance after being so “uncool” for so long. Connection to art and to the people who write it helps people feel like that emptiness is at least somewhat lessened. Plus, there’s neuroscience around people reading and experiencing things with the characters, so when the characters in your book experience things, readers piggyback on that experience, themselves, and experience it with them. Grief, joy, connection, love… our brain releases those chemicals when reading. It’s fascinating stuff.
What This Means for Writers
For writers, this shift in the publishing landscape is a whole hell of a lot. On one hand, there are more ways than ever for readers to discover your work. Simultaneously, many of those pathways feel unpredictable, fast-moving, and entirely outside your control. However, what this means for you as a writer is simpler than you’re probably imagining. Readers gravitate toward stories that make them feel something, and that’s territory writers have always lived in. The marketing tools might be new, but the story craft is still, at its heart, about writing a book that creates a lasting emotional impact on the reader. (Hopefully a good one; some books I remember because they were legendarily awful, too, but…)
Understanding that high impact moments in your story are the parts readers tend to share means a different dimension to your marketing but not necessarily your writing. When someone talks about your book to their friends, they’re not usually summarizing the plot. They’re sharing the experience it gave them. Again, this has always been true, but the difference now is the method and scale of the thing. Rather than just being limited to book clubs meeting at local coffee shops, churches, and libraries, we have the entire internet available to talk about these things, and people’s social circles are—for better or worse—expanded far beyond their physical location.
Now, understanding all of this, I want to talk about how we are not, in fact, writing for BookTok or Bookstagram. This means approaching your writing with intention but not that pressure to perform the act of writing in a way that will be “viral.” There’s a lot of noise telling writers to produce constantly, to be everywhere, to grow platforms endlessly. But the reality is that sustainable creativity doesn’t come from overextension. You don’t need to chase trends, either. Chances are that by the time you write something good enough to release, the internet will have moved on, anyway. Trending media sometimes changes hour-by-hour, so focusing too hard on what’s big in the cultural zeitgeist can hamstring your creativity.
Your voice, your pacing, your characters, your emotional beats… Those are the things that build a long-term readership. Algorithms sure do amplify moments, but they don’t create connection or loyalty. Readers and writers do that together by the author sharing something raw and innately human and readers experience it through the lens of their own experience.
Rather than contorting yourself into a shape the market appears to want in the moment, focus on what your heart is telling you to write instead of chasing whatever appears to be trending in the hashtags.
Handling the Pressure
Not every book is going to go viral, and that’s okay. Viral success is intoxicating precisely because it’s unpredictable. That lightning strike feels like winning the lottery, and it really is exactly that much of a gamble. It burns hot and fast, but it typically doesn’t burn long. Conversely, a slow-building, steady career is not only respectable, it’s necessary for long-term success. Authors become profitable by cultivating their craft skills, developing a loyal reader base, and creating a body of work they’re genuinely proud of, not just because they got lucky and won the “go viral” lottery. While algorithms reward spikes, careers reward slow and steady progress that builds cumulatively over time.
Simultaneously, you need stave off the pressure to perform. Your creativity is not a factory that can spit out parts endlessly at the press of a button. As an author, your job is to write good stories at a pace that doesn’t destroy you. Readers can tell when a book was written out of passion and not just trend chasing. No algorithm can manufacture that, and not forcing yourself to write a book a month (or more frequently) means you can pace your writing in a way that won’t burn you out. Not to mention, the books will be higher quality
When it comes time to market, think about how someone might describe your book to their best friend. Also consider the story moments that stick out in your mind. If they matter to you, there’s a good chance they’ll have an impact on someone else. Once your book is published, comb through it. Identify the scenes that will make readers laugh or cry, the lines that will get highlighted or screenshotted. When you have identified those lines, moments, and scenes, use them to build marketing campaigns.
Navigating the Changing Landscape
The publishing world is in a time of massive disruption that’s been rolling since the rise of indie publishing in the early 2000s. It’s messy, unpredictable, and often overwhelming. The minute I think I understand something, it changes. However, it’s also full of possibilities that didn’t exist when I started almost 20 years ago. Stories today have more ways to find their people than at any other time in publishing history.
Honestly? I’m hopeful about many of these changes. The landscape may be shifting, but the center of what we do—telling powerful stories to change hearts and lives—hasn’t changed since we first started doing it. Whether a book takes off because of a viral reaction video or because it slowly builds momentum over years (which is, by far, the more common), the work of the writer remains the same: craft damn good stories, protect and hone your voice, and keep learning. The readers are out there. They always have been. Now they just have more ways to find you.
Thanks for joining me on AUTHORiTEA, where we spill the tea on the publishing industry with heart, humor, and hard-earned insight. If you found today’s episode helpful, share it with a fellow writer, leave a review, or tag me on socials—I’d love to hear what resonated.
Your voice matters, your story counts, and if you’re still wearing pants at this point in the writing process—congratulations, you’re ahead of the curve. I’ll see you next week.
