Book sales have steadily increased since the pandemic and while there are many factors likely involved in this, one that publishers and booksellers have been delighted about is #BookTok. BookTok is a subcommunity on TikTok dedicated to making content and sharing recommendations around all things bookish. These videos include book hauls, bookshelf tours, and recommendations based on “aesthetics” as well as a multitude of other prompts.
This is a vibrating, thriving community and the #BookTok hashtag has over 143 billion views. According to the New York Times, most BookTok creators are young people and women., who tend to cover young adult (YA) fiction and romance novels. Romance novels with sex scenes, or sexual tension, are known as “spicy books” on the app and the hashtag for #SpicyBooks has 4 billion views.
BookTok is so prominent in young people choosing to read, in fact, that according to survey data from an online entertainment site which researched the reading habits of 10,000 TikTok users in the UK, 44% of TikTok users would read a book following a recommendation on TikTok, 25% read more because of TikTok/BookTok and there’s been an average 50% increase in the time spent reading since before discovering BookTok.
BookTok Famous Author Now Has Movie Deals
Emily Henry, author of Beach Read, Happy Place, and Book Lovers – three hugely popular books on the platform have soared so much in book sales that she now has movie deals for all three of the TikTok famous books.
Speaking to HuffPost UK she said, “BookTok has been huge for my books and my career. I’m lucky to have had an incredible team behind me with my publisher, but the special thing about BookTok is how reader-driven it is. It’s a grassroots, word-of-mouth way of spreading the news about a book that I don’t think can be replicated on the publisher or author’s side. When you see someone genuinely excited about a book, of course you want to try that book and see if you feel the same way.”
She added, “I think BookTok has been an especially powerful force in the world of romance novels. The unabashed love for and emotion about love stories is contagious.”
Bookstores Even Promote BookTok
We also spoke to Hannah Jay, author of romance books Same Paige and Olive Branch who works as a bookseller in England about this social media phenomenon. She said that BookTok favourites are a huge part of their biggest sellers every month and while until recently, you could always expect book charts to be solely made up of new releases, BookTok can make old favourites climb the charts once more.
She added, “Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us continues to be a bestseller for us month after month, even seven years after its release. Most recently, This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, has seen an uptick in sales as it has gone viral on Booktok.”
Who knows what the world of BookTok will bring in the coming years but the book industry and authors alike seem to be excited.