Inside the Sarah J. Maas Fandom and BookTok Community

The world of Sarah J. Maas’s novels is laced with stories of assassins, wolves, turbulent romances, and two-faced, stubborn characters that divide the opinions of thousands of fans. But outside of Maas’s novels, thousands of fans find connection across identities, building community in places like Discord, TikTok, and Facebook, creating a world almost bigger than the ones written by Maas herself.

After selling more than 40 million copies, Maas has emerged as the year’s top-selling fiction author. (It all began with her 2012 debut novel, “Throne of Glass,” which Maas actually started writing when she was just 16.) Maas told Today that she credits the success to BookTok, where many users point to her series as an entrypoint into the fantasy romance (“romantasy”) renaissance. A search of her name on TikTok reveals a customized drop-down menu of topics related to her books, including “ranking,” “tandem read,” and “theories.”

For many Maas readers, however, the conversation is expanding far beyond BookTok.

Long-distance best friends Lauren and Conn — a 30-year-old high school choir teacher and a 30-year-old graphic designer,respectively — pioneered Between Pages & Friends, an online community of more than 300,000 book lovers across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and podcasts. The endeavor began when Lauren and Conn encouraged their respective husbands, Kyle and John, to read Maas’s “A Court of Thorns and Roses” after they had each become deeply enthralled by the larger series. Soon, the husbands were hooked too.

After watching their husbands go semi-viral on TikTok for their videos reacting to the books, Lauren and Conn decided to create a larger platform. “One of us will tend to have a crazy idea and the other will be like, we’re never doing that,” Lauren tells PS. One of those “crazy ideas” was the inception of their book community, which came to life after the two released social media content from a trip they took together to attend a book’s midnight release party. Eventually, this all led to a Patreon, podcast, and longer-form content on YouTube.

For Lauren, Conn, Kyle, and John, the novels not only paved the way for them to create a new platform for discussion and community, but also completely reintroduced them to the very act of reading for pleasure. John says the last time he had read a fiction book, let alone a fantasy one, was in his final years of high school; for Kyle, it was even further back.

“I took a much longer gap in reading. We’re talking like fourth grade was the last time I read a full book,” Kyle says. “My wife, Lauren, would be reading the SJM books and giving me the play-by-play, and although it was hard for me to get back into reading at first, I knew I had to because of how obsessed my wife was with them.”

Zarina Morgan similarly hadn’t read a full-length book since the second grade until she stumbled upon a Maas novel at her local bookstore when she was around 14 years old. Now, the 18-year-old high school senior is the creator of the Sarah J Maas Book Club Facebook group.

Morgan recognized “A Court of Thorns of and Roses” from a few videos she had seen on TikTok, and after convincing her mom to buy the book for her, she was glued to the series for weeks. “There’s a photo I come back to all the time of me in tears, laying on a desk somewhere in school, reading that book,” Morgan says. “I’ll never forget the emotions I felt the first time I ever read Sarah J. Maas.”

In 2021, while Morgan was deep inside the ACOTAR series, she met a few friends on the social media app Amino who were also reading the Maas novels at a similar pace. The small group decided to move their conversations to a Facebook group where they could post memes and share theories, and during the period when the group was set to public, Morgan says she witnessed it grow exponentially in real time. By mid-2021, the group had accumulated over 50,000 members with Morgan at the helm; at the time she was just a high school freshman.

“When we had just under 50,000 people and there were so many people having intense conversations about which characters did what and who’s in the right, I was like, shoot, I need a moderator,” Morgan says.

The group’s first official moderator, Lindsay Labrie Dover, ended up becoming a dear friend to Morgan. “I trust her with my life,” Morgan says. And since then, additional moderators have been brought on. “She and the other moderators are my family. When I lost my best friend recently, Lindsay was there for me. When I was going through financial troubles, a group of the moderators all pitched in and encouraged me to keep moving on.”

To date, the Facebook group has over 257,700 members — all required to answer SJM novel-related questions to gain approval into the group. Morgan estimates that, of those members, approximately 50 percent are women in their 30s and 40s, which she believes accurately reflects the demo of the SJM fandom.

Amid this massive collective, Morgan says it’s been beautiful to witness vastly different kinds of people coalesce around their love for reading and fantasy. “It gives people an escape,” she adds.

Like Morgan, Sarah Mori, a 30-year-old digital community manager living in Austin, oversees an active subset of the SJM fandom. Mori’s group of 6,000 fans, however, find a home for their spirited discussions on Discord, which Mori describes as “Slack meets AOL Messenger.”

Like many SJM readers, Mori was introduced to the novels through TikTok, but while “A Court of Thorns and Roses” is the gateway for most, Mori first read “Throne of Glass.” Although skeptical at first, when Mori arrived at the fourth book in the Throne of Glass series, she says she was hooked. “When I finished the series, the only thought I had was [that] this was the best thing I’ve read in a very long time, and I want other people to experience that,” she adds.

An early adopter of Discord, Mori turned to the app to cultivate a community of SJM fans and participate in conversations she was already having in her own real-life social circles. Her community caught the attention of SJM’s publishing company, Bloomsbury, and Mori had the opportunity to discuss the fandom with them and discover new ways for the publishers to engage with fans on the platforms where they already were.

“This fandom has always been very passionate. They’ve always led with their hearts,” Mori says. “I think what makes SJM so unique is, regardless if people love her or hate her, they have to acknowledge that she is the reason a lot of these indie authors are seeing success right now in the romanticism genre. And so we have to kind of be a champion of that.”

When asked to distinguish what turns casual readers into mega Maas fans, each subject interviewed cited the community aspect; it’s one thing to discover content that resonates with you on a personal level, but it’s a deeper and more meaningful experience to discover a community that shares your interest and celebrates you for how you engage with a piece of art.

“That’s what makes the SJM fandom feel like home,” Morgan says. “We’re all just a bit nerdy and want to talk about something that really, really excites us.”

Shahamat Uddin is a freelance writer largely covering queer and South Asian issues, but also related lifestyle topics and entertainment. His family hails from Sylhet, Bangladesh, but after growing up in Roswell, GA, he now lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Butter. Outside of PS, he also has bylines in Teen Vogue, Vogue, Vogue India, New York Magazine, Them, The Nation, and more.