Hollywood said yes, and before the book’s initial release in July 2022, Aster announced in another viral TikTok that Universal bought the rights to make Lightlark into a movie. It scored Aster a payout that she described as “more zeros than I’ve seen in my life.”

After “hundreds of rejections” over a decade, Aster positioned the publication of Lightlark as a story of resilience, and shared TikToks about how her first agent dropped her because she wouldn’t give up on the story and how an ex printed a first draft of her book to make fun of it. Now, her posts celebrate her accomplishments, with captions like, “I have the No. 1 book at Barnes & Noble, I’m a full-time author in NYC in my 20s, and today I went to a coffee shop, bought flowers at the farmers market, and went to a famous bookstore to visit my books.”

With every success Aster shared, the people of BookTok began to question if she had been downplaying her privilege in favor of dramatizing her success story, and surmised that she might be an “industry plant.” Eventually, there were so many negative posts about Aster that discourse shifted to whether BookTok has a toxicity problem.