How does a book get popular? Ask an adult and you’ll probably get answers along the line of celebrity writers, film adaptations or adverts in a tube station. Ask a teenager and you’ll get one answer: TikTok, or more specifically, BookTok.
BookTok is a subculture of TikTok, one that most users of the app are probably familiar with. What started as a hashtag seems to transcend the idea of a trend, becoming a permanent division on the app. It has become a fully formed community of young readers, passionate about reading and looking for people to discuss it with. BookTok seems to have take on a life of its own and it has impacted not only social media, but the real-word publishing industry.
A study done by the NPD Group found that sales of Young Adult fiction (the genre favoured by the community) had gone up 68% on the previous year in 2021. Since then, BookTok has not given up in its growth of book sales. In 2022, community favourite author Colleen Hoover outsold the Bible, by 3.6 million copies. The space doesn’t only favour new publishing either, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles was originally published in 2009 but found a new boost in sales following its popularity on the app.
The BookTok hashtag became a community of readers, the majority of which young women and girls. It is a place to share recommendations and current favourites, to offer reviews and start discussions on characters and plot. The community is even encouraging non-readers to become self-proclaimed bookworms. In a poll conducted by The Guardian, they found that 59% of 16-25 year olds credited BookTok with the reason for discovering their passion for reading.
The community has (as many online communities do) seemed to develop its own language. Readers will list their TBR (to-be-read) lists, rate books based on their ‘spiciness’ (how sexually explicit they are) and there’s an endless list of trope names and acronyms that people will use in their videos. Readers will react to BookTok popular books, labelling them as over-rated or must-reads. The community has expanded so quickly that it has even developed its own self-awareness. Videos parodying the sometimes cringeworthy nature of romance or adventure novels have gone viral, commonly poking fun at cliches of over-done rom-com tropes or Mary Sue like characters.
While the hashtag started out as a community in which readers shared their current favourites and recommendations, the space has inevitably developed into somewhere for authors and publishers to promote new books. They quickly started to imitate the styles of videos shared by these young girls. Authors were no longer describing the plot of their books in interviews, or creating snappy tag-lines in adverts to gain publicity. Instead they could use the cheaper version of marketing; using viral sounds and trends on TikTok to gain traction.
In contrast to more traditional marketing, Authors have been using the aesthetics and overall vibes to sell a book. In an interview with The Times, the marketing director at publishing company Doubleday described the videos as basically saying “This is how it makes me feel, and this is how it’s going to make you feel”. Through slideshows of Pinterest photos and carefully selected audios, authors tease an image of what the story will look like in their minds with barely any words needed. They can also use the aforementioned tropes that have become so popular. Authors can label their books as ‘enemies-to-lovers’ or ‘found-family’ for example, and have readers lining up to buy them.
But what has the overall effect of BookTok been, and who is the community really for? TikTok users to discuss their thoughts on books and invite a new generation of book-lovers, or writers to push their new releases on young-readers? Surprisingly, for the internet, these two factions seem to (somewhat) peacefully coexist. Young people have found a new and educational passion and writers have been given the new opportunity to interact with their fanbases.
There has been a new found place for diversity in the industry created, with the accessibility to the platform giving minority authors the opportunity to expose their work to the reading public. BookTok has provided somewhat of an online safe space for young women – an opportunity to discuss their passions in a non-judgemental and inclusive environment, something that is not usually common on social media.