Caitlin Bea says she nearly became a Sims creator instead of a BookTok creator

Somewhere in the multiverse, Caitlin Bea is not recommending Colleen Hoover to new readers. She is yelling at a laptop fan while her Sims family burns dinner, because Bea says she seriously considered becoming a The Sims creator before BookTok became her lane.

I am a die-hard Sims player. Like I love The Sims.

That is the good gossip in Bea’s appearance on Booked, Blonde & Busy, not because it is scandalous, but because it scrambles the neat origin story influencers usually sell after the fact. Most creator biographies get polished into destiny. Bea’s is messier and better. She started on YouTube in 2010 as a beauty kid in Minnesota, kept it secret through high school like she was smuggling state documents, shifted through fashion and lifestyle, then hit the pandemic wall like everyone else with a ring light and nowhere to go.

During the pandemic, I strongly considered becoming a Sims creator.

The fork in the road was not books versus nothing. It was books versus a gaming setup. Bea says she had a dedicated Sims computer because the game was frying her laptop, which is both deeply relatable and spiritually embarrassing in the correct way. The thing that stopped her was not lack of passion. It was logistics. Streaming, she realized, meant equipment, live performance, and a whole new creator machine.

it it was a strong toss-up. Sims, books.

The Plumbob timeline lost to the Kindle

The funniest part is that Bea’s BookTok persona makes more sense once you know it beat out The Sims. She talks about books like someone who understands the dopamine loop of a hobby that becomes a job. Find the obsession. Feed it. Package it. Repeat. That is not an insult. It is basically the creator economy in a cardigan.

Her pandemic reading origin story starts with digging up an old Kindle and trying to stop the endless TV and Sims cycle. Then came Verity, which she says grabbed her from the first line, and suddenly reading was not homework, self-help, or a vegetable she was forcing down for brain health. It was plot. It was shock. It was the sweet little treadmill of one more chapter.

Her Colleen Hoover defense is really a defense of bingeing

I recommend her as the author to get into reading.

Bea’s case for Colleen Hoover is not that Hoover is secretly Edith Wharton with a Notes app. It is simpler and stronger than that. Hoover is useful. For a person trying to remember how to read for pleasure, a short chapter with a hook is not a guilty pleasure, it is the actual mechanism. Bea says new readers are often looking for something to get them off their phones and entertain them. Correct. The phone is not being defeated by moral superiority. It is being defeated by a messier, hornier, twistier rectangle.

This is where Bea’s taste has a coherent worldview. She hates the pretension that says audiobooks are not real reading or that smut is trash by default. She is not pretending every viral book is good, either. That would be too convenient, and frankly too BookTok-table-at-the-front-of-the-store to be trusted.

Hell no. No.

That answer came when Olivia Ponton asked whether BookTok viral means a book will be good. Bea’s own example was Binding 13, a book Ponton loves and Bea emphatically did not. Good. A recommendation culture without taste clashes is just affiliate marketing with fonts.

The Sims confession is the key because it makes Bea’s BookTok success feel contingent, not ordained. A different setup, a different week, a less annoying laptop, and the princess of BookTok might have been building suburban chaos under a green diamond instead. Which is maybe the most honest creator origin story there is: follow the obsession, check the equipment requirements, hope the algorithm likes the hobby you picked.