A shopper said a display inside a Barnes & Noble left her upset for hours. Janey, who posts on TikTok as @janeyillustration, filmed herself walking through a mall and into the bookstore. She said she had already been shopping for about two hours when she decided to show what had bothered her. The video has gained 1.1 million views, 139,600 likes, and 5,570 comments.
In the video, she stopped at a table with a framed sign titled “Commercial Fiction.” She read the sign aloud. It described the category as “fiction written to entertain a broad audience and achieve high sales, often prioritizing plot, accessibility, and readability over literary experimentation.”
She then pointed to titles on the table, including The Handmaid’s Tale, Lessons in Chemistry, Circe, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and I Who Have Never Known Men. The camera also passed over Pachinko, The Book Club for Troublesome Women, and Speak to Me of Home.
The creator said BookTok attention did not make the novels less literary
Janey said she had not read every book on the table, but she had read a fair number of them. She claimed she saw a pattern. She said most of the books were written by women and centered on female experiences or queer experiences, and she argued that the display was doubling down on a bias.
She said Song of Achilles had been on the table earlier and was gone by the time she came back. She said that gap, during the roughly two hours she was shopping, made her think someone had removed it. She asked viewers whether she was overreacting.
She then said she would put a lot of Sarah J. Maas in the commercial category, and she added that she would not treat that label as an insult. She called the placement of The Handmaid’s Tale under a sign about prioritizing likability over experimentation “wild.” She described I Who Have Never Known Men as experimental fiction, philosophy, and feminism. She also said she felt a man had made the display.
Later in the video, Janey spoke from the driver’s seat of her car. She said the lighting was better there. She argued that the books appeared to have been chosen because they got a lot of traction on BookTok, not because the authors had prioritized likability over literary work. She said many of the novels were introspective and philosophical, and that some experimented with dystopian fiction by imagining the world in different ways.
She said a large readership of women did not mean the books were prioritizing one thing over another, and she argued that it did not make them less literature than other novels. She also said that if the store made a table for the opposite of commercial fiction, most of the authors on it would be men.
She then asked viewers what they would put on the table, what did not belong, and whether the books were all commercial fiction. Janey said the label made it seem as if a popular book, or a book that women like, counted as commercial fiction. She asked viewers to tell her what she was getting mixed up.
In a later comment, she wrote that managers from other Barnes & Noble branches had reached out, said they were also angry, and told her each branch chooses its own displays, so the table was specific to her store. She said she would call on Monday to speak with that branch. Barnes & Noble’s troubles go beyond book displays, as a Florida Black woman says she was watched for 20 minutes while shopping.
In a follow-up TikTok photo post replying to a commenter, Janey shared a reply from the verified barnesandnoble account that read, “This sign is in poor taste and it was up in one store. It’s down now.” Over the screenshot, she wrote, “It turns out, this was just at one store and they removed the sign. I don’t want to dox them and screw over the genuinely nice employees I know work there. I’m just happy it’s down, and hopefully whoever made this learned a lesson.”
According to the London Writers Centre, commercial fiction is generally more plot-driven and read for entertainment, while literary fiction is more focused on character, style, and theme, with story and writing treated as equal concerns. The same explainer says the line between the two has narrowed, and that a publisher’s marketing can also shape which label a novel receives.
Viewers weighed in under the original video. One commenter wrote, “Why is a bookstore lowkey trying to make people feel bad for reading anyway??” Another wrote, “90% of those books were written by women…” A third said, “My Barnes & Noble titled that table ‘feminine rage.'” Another wrote, “the label itself is just weird to me.” For Barnes & Noble, the complaints don’t stop at table labels, as a Florida woman says the store accused her of hiding CDs, then offered to hold them anyway.
One commenter offered a rewrite of the sign: “‘Commercial fiction: books that gave us a comeback from bankruptcy so we could keep our doors open.’ Fixed it.” Another wrote, “Commercial fiction is a real term in publishing but it doesn’t apply to these books which are all literary fiction. Under that sign, this should be a table of Colleen Hoover books.”
Published: Oct 8, 2026 09:50 am