2021年经济学人 书籍与社交媒体——口碑（在线收听）

Books and Arts

文学与艺术

Books and social media -- Word of mouth

书籍与社交媒体——口碑

A new form of literary criticism is boosting sales of books

一种新的文学批评形式正在促进书籍的销售

A young woman holds up a book and smiles.

一位年轻女子微笑着举起一本书。

"This is day one of me reading 'The Song of Achilles'," she says.

“这是我读《阿喀琉斯之歌》的第一天，”她说。

The video jumps forward.

视频向前快进。

"And this", she moans, her face stained with tears, "is me finishing it."

“而这，”她呜咽着，脸上沾满了泪水，“就是我读完的感受。”

Another clip, entitled "Books that will make you SOB", offers written notes on how assorted stories got readers to cry, such as "I can't think about it without bawling" and "ended up crying so much I had to change my shirt".

另一个名为“让你哭泣的书”的视频片段分享了一些手记，记录各种故事是如何让读者哭泣的，比如“我一想到它就会哭”和“最后我哭得太厉害了，不得不换件衬衫”。

This is BookTok, as the literary wing of the app TikTok is known.

这就是BookTok，它是TikTok应用程序的文学分支。

Imagine the emotional pitch of a Victorian melodrama, add music, and you have the general idea.

想象一下，维多利亚时代的情节剧的情感基调，加上配乐，你就有了大致的概念。

BookTok is passionate.

BookTok是充满激情的。

It is also profitable -- at least for publishers.

它也是有利可图的——至少对出版商来说是这样。

Bloomsbury, a publishing house based in Britain, recently reported record sales and a 220% rise in profits, which Nigel Newton, its boss, put down partly to the "absolute phenomenon" of BookTok.

总部位于英国的布鲁姆斯伯里出版社最近公布了创纪录的销售额和220%的利润增长，其老板奈吉尔·牛顿将其部分归因于BookTok的“十足出色”。

On Amazon, BookTok is so influential that it has leapt into the titles of books themselves.

在亚马逊上，BookTok的影响力如此之大，以至于它已被加入了书籍的标题之中。

The novel "It Ends With Us", for instance, is now listed as "It Ends With Us: TikTok made me buy it!"

例如，小说《It Ends With Us》现在被标为《It Ends With Us: TikTok让我买它！》。

Evidently TikTok did a good job: the romance is riding high in the top 100 in both Britain and America.

显然，TikTok做得很好：这本爱情小说在英国和美国都跻身于Top100排行榜前列。

The medium is not quite as gushy as it might seem.

媒体并不像它看起来那么多情。

Much of the overdone emotion is ironic, and some of the videos are very funny -- particularly those with the hashtag "writtenbymen", which poke fun at the male gaze.

很多过度的煽情都是具有讽刺意味的，其中有些视频非常有趣——尤其是那些带有标签“男人写的”，用以取笑男性凝视的视频。

Nonetheless, many would make mainstream book reviewers tut.

尽管如此，许多视频还是会让主流书评家感到厌烦。

But why should the young women who are BookTok's stars care what fogeyish literary types think of them?

但作为BookTok上的红人，这些年轻女性为什么要在意那些文学界老古董对她们的看法呢？

Until fairly recently, their perspective was marginalised in both fiction and criticism.

直到最近，她们的观点在小说和批评领域都被边缘化了。

White men dominated both -- even though most novel-readers are female.

白人男性在两者中都占据了主导地位——尽管大多数小说读者是女性。

BookTok has helped upend that hierarchy.

BookTok帮助颠覆了这种等级体系。

Selene Velez, a 19-year-old American student, is behind @moongirlreads_ (an account with 185,000 followers).

19岁的美国学生赛琳娜·维莱兹是@moongirlreads_（一个拥有18.5万粉丝的账户）的幕后创作者。

She focuses on authors who aren't typically "taken as seriously" as others.

她关注的是那些通常来说不像其他人那样“受重视”的作家。

"I'm a woman of colour," she says. "I try to promote authors of colour."

“我是一位女性有色人种，”她说。“我尽力推广有色人种作家。”

At the same time, BookTok pushes back against publishing amnesia.

与此同时，BookTok反击了出版失忆症。

Books are imagined to confer immortality on authors -- to be a "monument more lasting than bronze", as the Roman poet Horace wrote -- but the lifespan of most is startlingly short.

书被认为是赋予作者不朽的象征——正如罗马诗人贺拉斯所写，书是“比青铜更持久的纪念碑”——但大多数书的寿命短得惊人。

Dig out a list of bestsellers from 20 years ago: not only are today's readers unlikely to buy them, most won't have heard of them.

找出一份20年前的畅销书清单：今天的读者不仅不太可能会买这些书，而且大多数人都没听说过它们。

Many of the books will have joined the legions of what W.H. Auden called the "undeservedly forgotten".

很多书都将加入了W.H.奥登所说的“不该被遗忘”的大军。

BookTok is resurrecting backlists.

BookTok正在让积压的存书重见天日。

One reason publishers noticed it, says Philip Gwyn Jones of Picador, a British imprint, was that, under its influence, old titles were creeping back into the bestseller charts.

英国皮卡多出版社的菲利普·格温·琼斯说，出版商注意到BookTok的一个原因是，在它的影响下，旧书重新登上了畅销书排行榜。

It offers such books "a second lease on life", and he applauds it.

它赋予了这些书“第二次生命”，他对此表示赞赏。

"Eventually, a great book finds its readers," Mr Gwyn Jones says.

格温·琼斯表示：“一部伟大的著作最终会找到自己的读者。”

"You just have to hope that, unlike Kafka, authors don't have to die before that happens."

“你只需要希望，作者们不必像卡夫卡那样在找到读者之前就死去了。”

Start trending on BookTok, and they won't.

让书在BookTok上流行起来，作者们就不会找不到读者。