How Remarkably Bright Creatures Went Viral on BookTok

Part 2 of Beyond the Octopus: A Remarkably Bright Creatures Masterclass

Every debut author dreams of it.

The organic groundswell. The word of mouth that takes on a life of its own. The moment BookTok finds your book and won't let it go.

Remarkably Bright Creatures had that moment. And then some.

But here's what most authors miss when they study this book's trajectory: the viral BookTok moment didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened because a very specific set of conditions were already in place.

Some of those conditions were within Shelby Van Pelt's control. Some weren't.

Understanding which is which might be the most important thing a debut author can do.

→ This is Part 2 of Beyond the Octopus. For full context, start with Part 1: Why Remarkably Bright Creatures Became a Bestselling Debut Novel (It Wasn't the Octopus).

What Actually Happened

Let's establish the timeline, because it matters.

Remarkably Bright Creatures published in May 2022 — the same month it was selected as the Read with Jenna pick.

read with jenna remarkably bright creatures

That selection didn't happen after the book went viral. It happened at the same time the book launched. Right out of the gate, it had one of the most powerful book club endorsements in publishing behind it.

BookTok was also, in 2022, at the peak of its cultural influence on the publishing industry. The algorithm was rewarding emotional, shareable, word-of-mouth content. Readers were actively looking for their next cry-in-public book.

A grief novel about an unlikely friendship, wrapped in a memorable hook — an octopus — was exactly the kind of thing BookTok was primed to amplify.

The producers behind the Netflix adaptation said it plainly: the book had incredibly strong, organic word of mouth, and BookTok played an enormous role in its marketing and momentum.

Organic. But not accidental.

What "Organic" Actually Means

Satisfied Author Writing Ideas in a Notebook

There's a story authors tell themselves about viral books.

That the right book just finds its audience. That if the writing is good enough, the readers will come.

Sometimes that's true. But more often, "organic" is shorthand for a set of invisible conditions that made virality possible.

For Remarkably Bright Creatures, those conditions included:

A book club selection that put it in front of millions of Today Show viewers in its launch month.
A hook — the octopus narrator — that was immediately shareable and visually distinctive on a platform built around visual content.
An emotional core (grief, friendship, hope) that made readers want to press it into each other's hands.
A tone that was cozy enough to feel safe and substantial enough to feel meaningful — exactly what BookTok was rewarding in 2022.
And a cover that looked striking in a thumbnail.

None of that is luck. All of it is craft and strategy working together before a single reader posted their first review.

BookTok didn't make Remarkably Bright Creatures. It found a book that was already ready to be found.

The Platform Question Authors Are Actually Asking

When authors study a BookTok phenomenon like this one, they're usually asking a version of the same question: how do I get that for my book?

It's the wrong question. Not because it's naive — it isn't — but because it's focused on the outcome rather than the conditions.

The right question is: what can I actually control that makes my book ready to be found?

Because here's the hard truth. You cannot manufacture a Read with Jenna selection. You cannot engineer perfect market timing. You cannot guarantee that your launch month will coincide with an algorithm that's primed for exactly your type of book.

What you can control, is whether your book is ready when the moment arrives.

What Authors Can Control

The hook.

Remarkably Bright Creatures had one that worked in a sentence: a widow befriends an octopus who helps her solve the mystery of her missing son.

Could you describe your book in a single sentence that makes someone stop scrolling? If not, that's a craft and positioning problem — and it's solvable.

The emotional core.

BookTok doesn't go viral for cleverness. It goes viral for feeling.

The octopus POV is clever. Tova's grief is feeling.

The grief is what made readers cry on public transport and post about it immediately. Your book's emotional core needs to be immediate and universal — accessible from page one, not buried in chapter five.

The packaging signals.

We’ll dig into this in detail in the cover breakdown post, but the short version: your cover, your comp titles, your positioning — all of it is communicating something to potential readers before they read a word.

What yours signals is within your control, in partnership with your publisher or as a self-published author making your own decisions.

→ Dig into the full breakdown in Remarkably Bright Creatures Cover Design: 5 Packaging Lessons for Debut Authors.(coming soon!)

Your author presence.

Here's where it gets personal. When BookTok finds a book, readers don't just want the book. They want the author. They go looking. They want to know who wrote this, what they're like, whether there's more coming.

An author with no web presence, no coherent brand, and no place to send curious readers is leaving that momentum on the table.

I've watched this happen.

A book gets a moment — a mention, a review, a share — and the author's website is a holding page from 2019, or a generic template with no personality, or worse, nothing at all.

The wave arrives, and there's nowhere for it to land.

What Authors Cannot Control

Focused, frustrated author outlines a story in her notebook in a coffee shop

The algorithm. The cultural moment. Which book club selects your book. Whether your launch month is a slow news cycle or a crowded one. Whether a single influential BookToker happens to read your ARC.

These are real factors in a book's trajectory. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

What matters is that you don't let what you can't control become an excuse to neglect what you can.

Van Pelt couldn't have predicted that 2022 would be BookTok's peak year for literary fiction with emotional hooks. She couldn't have known the Read with Jenna selection was coming when she was deep in revision. She couldn't have manufactured the timing.

But she wrote a book with a grief-stricken emotional core. She crafted a hook that was immediately memorable and shareable. She let the story be both funny and devastating. She built something ready to be amplified — and when the amplification came, it had something worth amplifying.

That's what we're all building toward. Not the viral moment. The book that deserves one.

The Second Wave

One more thing worth noting, because it's happening right now.

The Netflix film adaptation released in May 2026, starring Sally Field.

Musician reader flips through a fiction book

Thanks to the film, Remarkably Bright Creatures is having a second cultural moment — new readers discovering the book, old readers returning to it, a fresh wave of BookTok content. The book that went viral in 2022 is going viral again in 2026.

That's what happens when the book is good enough and the positioning is right. The moment can come more than once.

Let’s build for the long game. Because the wave might come twice.

Not sure if your author presence is ready for the moment?

Most authors don't find out until the wave is already gone. Take the free Author Website Quiz and find out exactly where you stand — before you need to know.

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