Methodology

This is a mixed methods project that focused on the subcommunity of BookTok on the popular social media app, TikTok. I used Apify, a data compilation program, to pull videos from a specific time where I noticed a heightened influx of comments that used fan fiction to detract from a novel’s popularity and literary value. To make the data as specific as possible, I had Apify pull videos from that time that also used at least one of 3 hashtags – #itendswithus, #booktok, and #colleenhoover – to promote their videos. I chose the summer of 2021 for my video samples since this was a time where Colleen Hoover, an author who is now incredibly well-known and whose books have consistently been on multiple bestseller lists, had one of her novels, It Ends With Us, go viral on BookTok. The novel, originally published in 2016, was being read by anyone who enjoyed reading, and it even garnered the attention of those who had never had a penchant for reading prior to picking up Hoover’s novel. Needless to say, this novel spread like wildfire across the BookTok community, but with its newfound following came comments from those who did not enjoy the novel, trying to somehow revoke its popularity by claiming that it “should have stayed on Wattpad.”

Apify pulled 122 videos from my required parameters, and I then scrolled through the comments of each video to see if there were any comments that used fan fiction in a negative manner to try and denigrate the novel’s popularity and value. Essentially, I looked for anything that implied that Hoover’s novel was inferior because it felt like you were reading fan fiction. Of those 122 videos, I found that 39 videos did not contain any of the comments I was looking for, 56 were not pertinent to the scope of the project, and 27 videos were rife with the people using fan fiction to diminish the novel’s value.

Everything henceforth will be my qualitative interpretation of the quantitative data that I pulled from Apify where I imbue my claims with academic concepts like canonicity, reader-response theory, and ideological state apparatuses with concepts that are closely related to fan studies such as intertextuality, pop culture, glitch feminism, and transmedia storytelling. I recognize that some of these concepts, especially the more academic ones, seem incredibly daunting for those who may have never heard of them before, but I assure you that accessibility – in form, content, and ideas – is at the core of this project. You, the reader, not the academy or media industry, are my priority for this project.