Should Book “Influencers” Be Paid For Their Work???

Hi friends! I figured I’d pull out a hotly debated, widely controversial topic today:

whether booktubers, bloggers, bookstagrammers, ect…should be paid for their work.

Let the tea spilling begin!

First of all, I’m pretty sure everyone can agree that there should be no such thing as a paid review. I’ve never heard of a case where this has happened but it’s safe to disclose that before moving on.

Reasons why book influencers should be paid:

1: They work really, really hard.

Ask your favorite booktuber how many hours they spend planning and filming and editing and uploading and responding to comments, then finally getting a chance to sit down to read. Chances are, it amounts to around a part-time job or slightly less. Yet, all that time spent working? It’s completely unpaid. Bloggers have to run their blogs and usually other social media accounts, taking forever. Bookstagrammers spend hours setting up and taking photos and dealing with the unruly habits of the weather*, and many will hardly ever see a single dime.

*i swear the weather hates us all tbh

2: Other influencers get paid.

I’m not even going to start on the beauty community but look at the travel one! Food! Parenting! Many people don’t simply get free products, they get paid to send out a single tweet or Instagram post. Of course, they all work extremely hard too: the social media world is cutthroat. However, they put in just as much time as book influencers and yet they come away with more money in their pockets. Is it fair?

It’s not the same for smaller accounts and larger ones.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that larger accounts necessarily work harder or “deserve more”. But, it can often seem unfair to a person who’s giving hours upon hours working to build up a following over social media, simply to see smaller accounts receive the same book. I’m not saying that that’s bad, just that the lines between bigger and smaller are often so blurred that I’ve seen people get discouraged because they feel that what they do doesn’t matter. And that is the real problem.

So clearly, there are multiple reasons why book influencers should get paid. But here’s the thing: they can’t.

this has nothing to do with anything I just wanted to grace everyone’s eyes with Andy Dwyer

You see, paid reviews are simply immoral. But what other opportunities exist for us, besides ads and affiliate links??? Not many. You could argue that being paid to to tweet on a book’s release date could work, or constantly promoting a certain publisher’s novels. But many will do that for free! There’s not very much that isn’t done by this commuinity out of the goodness of their hearts, simply to support authors.

But is the lack of pay all bad???

Not entirely. This whole community is so loving and honest, partly because it’s not corrupted by money. There’s almost no reason to sugarcoat anything, even if you do get a book for free. I think it adds a unique feel to us, because we do so much out of pure love and honesty. While I do think that sometimes book influencers deserve more, it’s also a mark of this community that they don’t.

So that’s it! Sorry this was so long, I guess I had a lot of thoughts. But tell me yours! What’s your two-cents on the subject???