A Q&A With Romance BookTokker Tierney Page
“When I first picked up A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, I completely fell in love with the world she created,” says Tierney Page, an Australian Booktokker with just under 784,000 followers and newly-minted romance author. That sentiment, of being completely enraptured by Maas’ romance-fantasy world, is one shared by millions — how many people in your life have gushed to you that they “honestly never read romance, but ACOTAR is, like, actually really good”? When BookTok flung open the door to a genre long-dismissed as trashy chick-lit, romance fiction was cast in an entirely new light: it wasn’t something you read surreptitiously on the bus anymore, now, it was something you posted on TikTok about.
Which is where Tierney Page found not only a niche, but a massive audience. “One of my girlfriends sent me a few funny BookTok videos. With not much else to do, I downloaded TikTok and decided to start posting too,” she recalls. Barely four years later, Page is one of Australia’s most recognisable BookTokkers, and it’s little wonder. She’s funny, her videos tiptoe on the edge of earnestness and taking the piss, and she makes the romance genre feel completely accessible — even if you still think all romance novels feature Fabio on the cover in an unbuttoned silk blouse.
We tapped Page as a guest judge for Cosmopolitan’s first ever Cheeky Chapters erotic fiction competition (you can see who she and our other judges selected as finalists here) and while we had her, we got her to answer a few pressing questions about her career, her upcoming novel and how budding authors should get started in the romance world.
