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Sophia Amoruso
Sophia Amoruso, founder and owner of fashion site NastyGal and author of #Girlboss, at her offices in Los Angeles. Photo: Mario Anzuoni /Reuters Photograph: MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS
Sophia Amoruso, founder and owner of fashion site NastyGal and author of #Girlboss, at her offices in Los Angeles. Photo: Mario Anzuoni /Reuters Photograph: MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS

#Hashtag book titles trend is a gimmick that works – for now

This article is more than 9 years old

From #Girlboss to #Scandal, publishers are discovering a new marketing hook for hard-copy as well as online reading

Can a book “go viral” in the same way a cat video on YouTube can? Unless it’s Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey, probably not. So rather than simply trying to reach mass audiences, some authors and publishers are trying to reach smart subsets of audiences with hashtagged book titles. It's a gimmick that works – for now.

Sophia Amoruso’s #Girlboss hit the shelves in May, featuring the Nasty Gal CEO sporting plenty of cleavage in a black dress, fists defiantly planted on her hips. Another new release, Sarah Ockler’s young adult novel #Scandal, features two people kissing – one is conveniently labeled “Lucy”, the other “Lucy’s best friend’s boyfriend”.

These are attention-grabbing covers regardless of their titles. So why the hashtag? It’s complicated. The hashtag alone won’t bring in new readers, but it’s a marketing hook that bridges the gap between online and offline reading, luring those used to the former towards the latter.

To critics who think it lame to put a # in a book title, my challenge to you: build a $100m biz from nothing. #freemarketingislostonluddites

— SOPHIA AMORUSO (@Sophia_Amoruso) June 4, 2014

Long before I read it, I’d heard intriguing buzz about #Girlboss. The hashtag wasn’t what sold me – I was intrigued by Amoruso's rags to riches story – but it added a savvy twist, because it spoke to the author's place as the owner of an online business. If she had started a chain of boutiques, the hashtag wouldn’t have been as effective. Can you imagine Hillary Clinton using #HardChoices or Donna Tartt putting out #TheGoldfinch? Probably not.

The New York Times Book Review criticized Amoruso's hashtag, declaring “an unclickable hashtag makes about as much sense as a scratch ’n’ sniff radio commercial”. I agree – up to a point. If the hashtag were in an ebook where I could indeed click through and get more information, that would be more fitting, and that is likely something we’ll see more of as smart publishers embed content that could not have a home in a print book.

To my mind, the hashtag is a code which says the author is active online, as opposed to going through the motions of social media because they have been told they “should”. It doesn’t mean the content of the book is any better or worse, per se, but it indicates a mindset about the role of books in the world: they aren’t just for reading passively, but for interacting with in real time.

I’m far more inclined to buy books from an author who, say, follows me on Twitter or responds in other ways, because I know our communication is a two-way street. As Amoruso told me, her title’s purpose “wasn't to target social media users per se, since at this point nearly everyone is on social media. It was to embed sharing into the title of the book – if someone liked it, they had to share it just by mentioning it”.

Amoruso could teach authors across genres a thing or two about marketing. “We started the pre-sale campaign with the hashtag long before the book came out,” she says, “before anyone could review it, before there was anything to buy.”

Of course, a hashtagged title practically begs people to use it for unintended purposes; a quick scroll through more than 38,000 Instagram posts using #girlboss yields everything from peanut butter brownie bites to a woman’s almost naked backside. But if you believe all publicity is good publicity, which I do, then that is still a win for Amoruso.

On the surface, it might seem to make more sense to piggyback off an existing and popular hashtag – as Thought Catalog Books did with #YesAllWomen: A Collection – than create your own. But then you must balance name recognition with getting lost in the shuffle. Even in the realm of ebooks, if the hashtag isn’t being actively used on social media it can look more clunky than anything, as in the case of #Berlin45: The Final Days of the Third Reich. The last tweet using #Berlin45 was posted on 16 April.

Are hashtagged book titles just a gimmick? Even though she is content to rest on her sole contribution to the trend, Amoruso's editor, Kerri Kolen, believes they are here to stay.

“I won’t be surprised if we start to see more books with hashtags in their titles,” she said. “It seems like an obvious concept.

“Publishers won’t have to scroll through their Twitter feeds, saying, ‘If only they had used a hashtag, our book would be trending’ – because the hashtag is baked in.”

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