They stage backdrops and match book covers to flowers. But they’re also avid readers. Could they actually be living the lives they promote online?

A pink blanket goes with everything: Jane Austen classics, a queer young-adult romcom, fantasy novel Six of Crows. Jordan Hickey’s version is crocheted, made by her grandmother, and appears in most photos on her Instagram account pagetravels, where it’s paired with various books to evoke a sense of tantalizing coziness. Wouldn’t you like to be here right now, her photos imply, cuddled up with this blanket and this mug of coffee, with nothing else on your to-do list aside from reading the new novel Frankly In Love, out today?

Hickey is a part of “bookstagram”, the corner of Instagram combining a love of books with stylized, eye-catching photos, to the delight of large fanbases. The bookstagram tag has been used on over 35m Instagram posts, and the more popular bookstrammers have upwards of 100,000 followers (for comparison, the Instagram for the New York Times book section has about 69,000 followers.) There are enough people joining bookstagram that a slew of articles have cropped up, advising would-be bookstagrammers on best practice, how to manage Instagram’s “pesky algorithm” and the best budget-friendly props. Some accounts focus on old books, or books by authors of color, many play with elaborate staging.

“I love matching my outfits to books, which sounds so dorky, but it’s just really fun,” Nai’a Perkins, who splits her time between bookstagram and booktube, told me. If she’s posting about a thriller, she’ll reduce exposure levels to make the photo darker, or will wear a black outfit. If it’s a romance, she might wear a dress or red lipstick.

But unlike other Instagram influencers who can make thousands of dollars for sponsored posts, bookstagrammers such as Perkins usually aren’t paid for their content – instead publishers simply send the books to them in exchange for coverage, whether that’s a full review or a mention on release day.

These days, we’re suspicious of anyone promoting something on Instagram. But, could it be true: they’re actually in it for the love of reading? Bookstagrammers are a breed of influencer we’re less familiar with – the kind that are living day-to-day what they are sharing online.

Hikari Loftus of Folded Pages Distillery says there is still some nuance to be found. She breaks it down into two kinds of bookstagrammers: the accounts that treat the book as an aesthetic object; and those who engage with the text, posting in-depth reviews in their captions.

She belongs to both camps. “I have a bunch of crap that people would probably throw in the garbage that I use as props,” Loftus told me. This includes the wrapping paper from a gift from her husband she still uses as backdrop almost daily. (When I talked to Hickey, she was moving into her college dorm, and she said part of her decision-making process when buying home decor was if they could pull double duty as bookstagram props.)

But the hardest part of bookstagramming, Loftus said, is keeping up with the glut of new releases publishers send her, hoping she’ll feature them. She loves reading, but would she be reading quite this much, this fast, if it wasn’t for Instagram? Loftus estimates that she donates 50 books each month by riding her bike around her neighborhood, dropping them off in the various Little Free Libraries.

The free books are the main perk of bookstagram, said Jennifer Lewis of Bluestocking Bookshelf. (There are occasionally partnerships with other entities – companies hawking candles or bookmarks, or PR firms – who will pay the bookstagrammers). This obviously works out well for the publishers, who in recent years have begun to view bookstagram as a vital way to promote their products. A publicist from Berkley cited bookstagram promotion as a key part of making of 2018’s The Kiss Quotient a success and in 2017, the Publishers Advertising and Marketing Association invited a group of bookstagrammers to the Random House offices to discuss how publishers could build relationships with the community. All the interest in their reading habits can change how a bookstarammer reads. Lewis was inspired to challenge herself with the books she features, to make sure she’s not only promoting, “a lot of books by dead white people.”

The cozy world of bookstagram occasionally butts up against the sharp edges of the real world. A few years ago, Divergent author Veronica Roth released Carve the Mark, her highly anticipated fifth novel. Initial reports by booktubers were positive. Then came the criticism: the book was ableist, racist, and the early reviewers were paid shills.

The drama! Should people who reviewed the book also be painted with the book’s criticisms? Was anyone allowed to like the book? Should people condemn books they haven’t read? The debate bled into bookstagram, Loftus said, to the point where any discussion of the book devolved into a mess of angry comments. According to Loftus, the maelstrom (which someone wrote their master’s thesis on) eventually led to more productive discussions: “So it started out, I think, as a pretty scary thing and over the years it has started to evolve into, not perfect, but better conversations.”

Criticism has come from the outside world, too. Last fall, a Vulture writer denounced bookstagrammers using books as props, targeting those who pose atop books for using books as, “just another object, shorn of meaning and sometimes of binding, rearranged to show that their possessors’ lives are prettier, more whimsical, more creative than yours.” In 2017, a Guardian article about Instagram’s influence on book design provoked a slew of comments about the shallowness of readers, like the bookstagrammers quoted in the piece, who would dare judge a book by the Instagram-friendliness of its cover.

Another bookstagrammer responded to the comments on her blog in a post titled ‘Bookstagram, We Have Been Unfairly Attacked And Here’s My Reply To Each And Every One Of The Comments (Reaction Post To The Guardian’s Article On Book Covers & Social Media)‘.

Bookstagrammers know about the eyerolls from people outside their community, the notion that because they’re bookstagrammers, they’re can’t be the “right kind” of reader. (It’s the same brand of disgusted anger that arises when anyone dares to arrange their bookshelves by color.)

“I think books can make people really angry, because we all want to think that we’re the ones that are reading correctly,” Lewis said. “And I’ve realized that in their minds, they think that we’re reducing books to objects instead of experiences. But the entire point of bookstagram is that [books] can be both, they can be visually stunning, but they can also be mentally stimulating. They’re not mutually exclusive.”