r/booktubesnarkreddit

I don’t know if this makes sense but I miss how booktube used to be with less-than-perfect editing, more candid vlogs, fun readathons.. think Chelseadolling reads, my reading is odd, Codie’s book corner, hardback hoarder, Riley Marie, books and lala before it became her full-time job (I love to re-watch her closet unhaul series). I miss the simple readathons like contemporaryathon, witchathon, smutathon lol I don’t know I’m just feeling nostalgic but a lot of my favorites deleted their content ugh. Are there any current creators that are funny, don’t just read what’s popular on booktok, and don’t have a freaking Patreon, that you guys enjoy? Bonus points if they’re in their 30s+

More and more booktubers are making their content pregnancy or marriage focused. I’ve stopped watching multiple people now because I don’t care. Happy for them but I don’t need any content about it. It’s fine to transition to that or have some videos about it. But I feel like it’s talked about 24/7 and in everything. Marriage content can be okay because it kind of gets hyped up for a few months then it’s over. I feel bad being bothered by it but I’m unfollowing YouTubers who I used to like because I don’t care about their content anymore.

i really like dylan and have watched him for a long time. i was really excited when he announced his novel and pre-ordered it pretty much right away……but according to his website it was supposed to come out a few days ago and i’ve heard nothing/received no book lol.

i know he’s had a rough few months (it seems he and his partner split and he moved out?) which could have delayed the release date but i’m confused about the lack of communication. he also hasn’t mentioned the novel anywhere (not youtube and not instagram) for a long time.

anyone know what’s going on?

. . . have I watched an interesting video of yours, gone to your channel, looked at your roundup of the last 50 books you read, only to go away in disappointment upon seeing that 49 of them are by men?

Too many times, is all I can say. Too many times.

I was doing my weekly search on upcoming books and I came across a book written by both Mr. Beast and James Patterson. 'The Most Dangerous Games: From MrBeast and James Patterson. A secret competition. 100 players. $1 billion. ARE YOU THE ONE?' September 1, 2026 is the release date.

Now I'm aware of James Patterson and hus 'collaboration' with different celebrities, i.e. Hillary Clinton, Viola Davis, etc.

But the joining of those two, just but a bad taste in my mouth ....

another sneaky AD?

She has done a few of these paid sponsorships promoting books but in her latest vlog, I don’t think she even acknowledges it’s an AD? I may have missed it so not sure.

Super confused about Hayley Pham, Bry and Ashlynn all traveling to Rhode Island around the same time yet Hayley and Bry do not mention Ashlynn at all but they made the thumbnail of Ashlynn’s video.

I wonder if it was a conscious decision to not include Ashlynn, and not give her platform any clout.

What's your vibe with her? I have a like/dislike relationship with her.

I like that she introduces books that i wasn't aware of. However, it bothers me that each month she's showing the massive book hauls that she receives for reviews. I guess I'm 'envy hating,' 😆 😂 It's like EVERY month you're showing 10 books or more??

back in 2023, Haley put out a video where she read “best books of 2022”, including Babel by RF Kuan. she kept saying the beginning is super slow and the pacing was slow and she gave it a 3/5 for “entertainment value”.

i LOVED the other two books in that video, so I assumed that I would also find Babel to be slow and dense so I put off reading it. I just picked it up recently and and although I’m only two chapters in, WTF is she talking about. this book is neither slow nor dense. id say it’s a rich text, but I’m thoroughly engaged.

meanwhile Haley’s friends praise her book for its writing…oml I can’t w her. if she couldn’t handle Babel I don’t understand the marketing for her writing as supposedly genius (cough ashlynn cough)

A couple years ago he was just another dude I found while watching a DnD series on YouTube, the. Fast forward about a year and my entire home page of YouTube is just videos of him being exposed as a cheating douchebag who got exposed by the woman he slept with. Now after almost a year of letting that die down he’s suddenly obsessed with the aspect of “Space Jesus” in sci-fi fantasy novels bc he decided to listen to the New Testament audiobook while driving across the USA for who only knows why. It doesn’t make it any better that he randomly popped up giving a 7 hour deep dive review of one of my favorite series currently and proceeded to pronounce almost every single name wrong, jumble up key plot points, and skip over actual important information that the reader needs to form actual opinions about certain characters

TLDR - Daniel Green is starting to piss me off with his half hearted clearly fake steps into Christianity and the comparisons to Sci-Fi heros

I'm normally not one to criticize book lovers for overconsumption but if you have over 2k unread books in your house, why are you still accepting a dozen or more books from a publisher every month?? I just saw a smaller content creator with a series where she's trying to get through her huge physical TBR (valid, many of us can relate) but she's also posting regular book mail hauls and has said her netgalley rate is 7%, but she's still getting so many ARCs.This isn't just about her, she does seem nice though I am worried for her. It's some book creators admitting they go into debt to do hauls, others (crookedbooks *cough*) who collect dozens of the same book and fake reviews. I've struggled with shopping addiction in the past so maybe I'm reading too much into it, but some of the book community goes a liiiiittle too hard in the "buying and reading books are separate hobbies" thing for me.

They don't follow eachother anymore on instagram. This is huge in a very surprising way. These women were OBSESSED with eachother. like unhealthily.... codependent, they literally matched their personalities to eachother for YEARS. How was there a falling out? What could it be over? are there any assumptions? any guesses? thoughts? I need a gossip friend.

Recently I've had the displeasure of having so many of his "This booktok book is bad!!!" videos come up on my youtube home page each with thousands of views. In them he's alway regurgitating the same surface level thoughts over and over again with the same books that he calls bad that are already known to be "bad". It's just low hanging fruit and tired at this point. I also find it quite hilarious how he will call everything slop with this odd superiority complex, yet his channel itself is basically a slop channel.

Anyways I was wondering if anyone else felt this way or has seen his vids because I haven't seen anyone talk about him.

I have just had this thought that I maybe wanna talk about because I think it may be unpopular or want to discuss and get some different view on them:

-Can we stop pretending that getting an arc or a sponsorship isnt influencing the review at least in the way it is worded? I am not saying the rating is influenced by the fact that it is an arc in general. But I think at least the wording of the Review can be more thought out or in a for the lack of a better word more professional way of writing it. Which isn't per say a negative thing at all! But this insistence that it does not matter at all that a book creator didn't spend their own money on the book for their opinion on it. Idk if that is true at all.

-In the same way that I think the popularity of a books makes peoples tones when talking about a book changes as well. In both directions.

These past few days ive caught wind of this youtuber who has some... unique? takes on piracy, no matter where you stand on this situation, she makes a series of logical leaps on who pirates and for what reasons "I mostly see, young, white women justifying piracy".

well it's safe to say it got to her because she made a second video on the subject where she defends amazon among other things, and you can clearly see she's annoyed at the comments she's been getting.

i wont get too deep into the subject of piracy but just the way she addresses those who disagree with her irks me.

(cw: i'll mention sa and other common problematic dark romance elements)

I'm not a dark romance reader, but yesterday I was watching Rachel Oates' video about Nick Fuentes and in the middle of it she goes in this rant about a youtuber she used to watch who appearently talked shit about her because she makes videos criticizing dark romance books.

Now, I only watch Rachel's videos about fundies or political figures or poetry because I don't agree with her general takes on books. As I mentioned, I'm not a dark romance reader, but it's because I don't like romance in general and don't like to read smut, not because I find it morally wrong to like these things. But I've always thought she was such a surface level feminist.

Now, this post isn't necessarily about Rachel Oates herself though I dislike her general takes on books. But it's about how many surface-level feminists who are in booktube seem to think that shaming other women for liking dark romance novels equals feminism. I see so many issues with this kinds of critiques, and here's why:

1. Obviously the things being done in these books are not good and morally correct. I think everyone reading them (considering it's hopefully only adults with critical thinking skills, and if not, that's not the fault of the writers) knows that. Critiques about them, instead of being about the writing, or the character development or whatever, are usually so focused on pointing out what is morally wrong about these stories. EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT IS MORALLY WRONG ABOUT THEM (most of the times that's the kink!!). This ADDS NOTHING to the conversation
2. Dark romance books are meant to offer a way to explore dark fantasies in a safe space. I do think it's a valid thing to explore why women tend to have such violent and dark fantasies in the first place, but it is unfair to consider them as "abuse enablers" or something like that. This is something I wish more people realized, but essentially ALL ROMANCE NOVELS INCLUDING FLUFFY, CLEAN, NOT DARK ONES are mysoginistic because our society is patriarchal and mysoginistic and the way we understand love and relationships and sex is patriarchal and mysoginistic. Fluffy stories about a romance between a princess and a bodyguard are as patriarchal and mysoginistic as a dark romance novel, yet no one is pointing that out because it is normalized and ingrained in our brains. What I'm trying to say is that all of us women adhere to the patriarchy to an extent because it brings us a sense of safety since we are brainwashed from birth to adhere to it. That's why romance books are appealing. We shouldn't shame women for adhering to the patriarchy because we all do to an extent and that only turns into sex-negative, slut-shamey conservative talking points (see the way seemingly progressive people criticize Sabrina Carpenter, for example).
3. The reasons why people have dark fantasies in the first place is most of the time not related at all to actually wanting these things in real life. Rape is a common romanticized thing in dark romance novels, or just non-consent in general, because women are shamed for expressing their sexual wants, so in these stories the FMC gets to experience pleasure without having to ask for it. It's not that hard to see it. Or teacher x student relationships or similar power dynamics are common because the fantasy of forbidden romance is appealing. Again it's not that hard to understand that these fantasies are not surface level.
4. Dark romance books are not hurting anyone! I'm against the porn industry because of the extreme abuse that perpetuates it, of course, and how mysoginistic sex work in general is. But in these books... Well, these characters aren't real! There are no real people being hurt in this situation!

Even as non dark romance reader, I got so annoyed at her points in that video! Maybe I'm being the friend that's too woke. But I don't think shaming women for their uncommon sexual fantasies is feminist (and honestly as a literature major in my country [just so you know english isn't my first language], I find the literature criticism done by people who make videos about dark romances just so... It's a nothing burger. Saying something is morally wrong is not criticism. Please talk about something else, the writing, the work done to the words! It's much more interesting).

This is how I generally feel about other booktubers whose content is just recounting the plot of a dark romance novel and pointing out how problematic they are. This is so surface level, it's not literary critique! Maybe we should talk about how bad the prose in these books usually is lol, the shallow characterization, the fact that elites benefit from keeping us ignorant so they sell these books to us so we don't develop our critical thinking... There's truly so much to talk about, and yet the criticism is always so surface level!