I'm shocked how the criticism is weirdly muted, at least so far, at least for YA Twitter. No calls for "cancellation" that I'm seeing, just most saying the book is awful and some bemusement that this got a publishing deal at all, never mind with a six figure advance and a pre-publication movie deal. (That last being doubtless borderline meaningless, given the way Hollywood operates. But it is far more than most books get.)
Finally, the media coverage for this is kind of bonkers. Books by debut authors just don't get interviews on Good Morning America, etc.
The whole thing is gross and weird, but not unheard of in marketing circles.
Yes, the calls for cancellation are sub-zero, its just a Bad Book. But given the amount of marketing its getting, it's not getting six-figure marketing but SEVEN figure marketing, and it turns out the author's sister has strong connections to a major marketing firm.
The whole Booktok persona is based on the fairytale of getting a book deal, but the reality is a rich girl with two books published in 2020 and 2021 getting a third book out for a great but not wholly stellar deal. Twilight was a 700K deal 15 years ago, and the base figure is in the million-range now.
The Tik Toks are also promoted (ie: paid for) out of her volumous pockets.
From the screenshots I've read, this is another case of a derelict editor.
Or -- to make things really fucked up -- a responsible one, it looks like she is being published by Abram's Books, which are almost purely kids books in their fiction section.
The author has been telling all her tick tok crowd how Lightlark is "hot n spicy" with the associated tropes - and it most certainly is not. But Abrams can't go crazy selling sexy books, because little kid books and board books make up their bread and butter.
Yeah looks like a too-obvious case of the author's new book being astroturfed. She's got connections somewhere so her publisher splurged on her book and evidently it's a real stinker even by YA standards. Like, objectively bad. Full of Wattpad gibberish and flinging tropes about and not explaining even basic shit to the reader because gotta save that for the next book. In addition to that people have picked up on the author comes from a very wealthy family and she's an Ivy League brat living in a spacious NYC apartment. Which is not only possible evidence of nepotism shit going on, but it flies in the face of the "poor widdle me, I struggled so hard and I finally got here with my talent" image she has been presenting herself on social media.
Additionally she's been bragging that a movie studio bought the film rights to her book which is...actually something super common. I remember Larry Correia speaking about this once and how even he's had his Monster Hunter International rights up on someone's shelf.
It reminds me of the Lindsay Ellis situation, she was similarly famous on YouTube, and with stronger ties to her fans, so her manuscript was bought for six-figures of stupidity by St Martin's a few years ago. Needless to say they bombed out.
There were a lot of brain-dead people who pre-purchased Lightlark for the hype - to be fair there is a certain pleasure of reading a new book and being able to squee about it with thousands of fans like you could do in a GoT episode recap, but the advanced reading reviews have been dismal. It will go to #1 on the NYT, but this will kill the YA-For-Adults trope.
The processes for creating hype in the book community are so glaringly obvious, from the special ARC editions that no reader had access to and to the paid book bloggers, that there's now a deep vein of suspicion against anything being pushed TOO hard.
