The Surefire Way to Sell Books
I’m no tough guy, but I’m definitely not typically a crier when it comes to reading. Recently, I had that experience — privilege — for the first time in a long time of crying while reading and it made me think about one of my favorite pieces of publishing wisdom: “If they cry, they buy”. A pithy, old-school saying that becomes much more relatable when you experience it. To cry over imaginary people, their stories, feels at once ridiculous and immensely powerful.
Crying has always reliably helped books accumulate readers. The latest iteration of this is on BookTok where crying over books is can’t-look-away content. Google “crying and booktok” and you’ll see multiple searches with tens and even hundreds of millions of posts. It seems a lot of the BookTok sad books are of the romance and the YA variety. TikTok of course just brings data and awareness to something we’ve known for a long time. John Green’s tearjerker The Fault in Our Stars published far before TikTok came on the scene in 2012, but followed the same playbook— it’s a love story and I am assuming without having ever read the novel, just due to the cultural feedback loop, that one of them dies in the end. Recommending an emotionally wrenching book, as you can see from the tenor of the TikTok videos, is something like theme park goers getting off a ride and telling others they have to experience the big drop themselves.
One TikTok exception to the normal YA fare is Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a very successful, prize-winning book that has had a second little (sorry) life due to the social media platform. This is a 700-page, Booker prize winner. Not a weepy, but a by all accounts brutal, tragic literary novel. A Little Life has had its fair share of criticism, none more considered than that of Daniel Mendelsohn for The New York Review of Books, for essentially being geared around this gut-wrenching effect. Although, criticism aside, it is hard to argue with the book’s effectiveness. Such that, spurred by TikTok in May of this year, it reappeared on the bestseller list eight (!) years after first publishing.
The resurgence of A Little Life on TikTok involves a melodramatization of what made the book popular in the first place. Around the time A Little Life came out it wasn’t uncommon to hear it was someone’s favorite book with a fervor that comes only from a reader that has been emotionally moved. The underlying reason behind Mendelsohn’s criticism then played out in a distorted form as well in 2024 with a review in Paste Magazine this February responding to the trend: “How Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life Blew Up BookTok (And Why That’s Not a Good Thing)”. The related criticism — making essentially the same argument as Mendelsohn that A Little Life is a very stylish version of trauma porn — is, like the TikTok crying performances not nearly as considered and, frankly, a bit much. The disqualifying remark for thoughtful criticism of this TikTok trend is when the author says that Taylor Jenkins Reid, Sally Rooney, and Hanya Yanagihara “remind me of the same kind of stories I used to read at age 12 or 13 on Wattpad. (Wattpad is a self-publishing platform mainly used for fanfiction, and largely known for its clumsily written stories that once engaged teenagers’ attention spans…)”. Like them or hate them, these are three of the most skilled novelists working today, and confusing the ideas that their novels put forward with their quality of writing tells you exactly what you need to know about the level of literary discourse inspired by 15-20 second TikTok videos. What’s fascinating is that—eight years later and with a whole different audience in TikTokers—the two sides of the camps on A Little Life remain the same: genuinely moved and certifiably disgusted.
Why does crying translate to buying?
An art teacher of mine once told me that good art is defined by its effectiveness in eliciting emotion. But not every emotion is equal or as desirable from a sales perspective— curiosity and thrills are generally more appealing than scares for instance, and genuine disgust may be the strongest feeling of all, but not one that sells. Crying, more than other reactions, acts as a sort of religious conversion — whereas you might be satisfied, laugh, or enjoy other books, to be moved to tears by words on a page has unique quality of making you need to tell someone else about the experience. There’s a reason that dramatic movies win prizes, and it is because sadness is the emotion we most often relate with importance. One might more accurately say “if they cry, they recommend”, but it’s easy to see why that hasn’t quite caught on.
There are many reasons for the power making readers cry has, but one is that it is incredibly difficult to do. “If they cry, they buy” is a timeless publishing staple, but it is also fool’s gold. There’s not a reliable genre of books that will emotionally punch you in the gut—probably why it makes for such great content on TikTok when they do come around. Not only is it difficult, but the balance is so fine between merely upsetting the reader and moving them to rave about the book like a lunatic. In a case like A Little Life, our old saying lets us know where the majority of readers fall, having sold nearly 2 million copies in the US alone, it’s safe to say that readers of Yanagihara are doing a lot of crying, too.
P.S. The book that made me cry most recently has yet to be published, but the other two books (see I told you they are rare!) that come to mind are Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.