It’s four o’clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and Krispy Kreme’s donut stall is doing a quick trade at Lakeside Mall, a large Essex mall. But a few meters away, young shoppers are salivating with a different kind of delight. A girl in a silky red dress runs her fingers over the back of nine novels by the world’s best-selling author Colleen Hoover, while a pair of men in their twenties in biker jackets stare at the shelves of manga comics. They are in a Waterstones that has been set up as a chopping and mixing stop, with bright rustic piles piled on round tables, or seductively grouped in booths, under headings like “Romance” or “LGBTQ +”. Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper, a series of graphic novels about a love story between two schoolchildren that is now a Netflix show, has a table of its own.
All this is due to #BookTok, a niche on the TikTok platform that became a sensation on social media in the early months of Covid, and has been gaining momentum ever since. “We used to trust millennials,” says store manager Peter, 30. “But now most of our clients are teenagers, who have money and influence and want to find their own stories. Many black and Asian authors are going through it. I’ve always wanted to have an LGBTQ section and now it wouldn’t make sense not to. It’s exciting. You can see how the post changes. It made it fun to go to work. “
In general, we’ve found that people with blue hair do it better than people with sensible haircuts
BookTok’s aesthetic is fast-paced and furious, with fans crying over plots or petting their books into homemade music clips. @groovytas, a Toronto BookToker with 109,000 followers, knows all the tricks. “It’s the fact that she knew, no matter what she did, she would still love him,” she recites, shrugging desperately, under the jacket image of a self-published romance called Addicted to You. In some videos, @groovytas mocks the book he talks about upside down. In others, it hosts authors or muses on such crucial reading topics as what it means to visualize a character. If you like their approach, you will be directed to similar creators, who will join a BookTok community.
At the same time as the Lakeside event, Harper Voyager, the specialist in science fiction, horror and fantasy, is hosting a weekend party in the Welsh book city of Hay-on-Wye, with eight creators of BookTok. The aim is to launch two novels and give notice of a new imprint for young people, Magpie Books. The event is presented as the publisher’s first Creator’s House, a physical space where creators and influencers come together to make a splash. It’s a happy affair, with tarot readings by City Hall author Juno Dawson (whose latest novel is Her Majesty’s Royal Coven) and a Saara El-Arifi quiz (debut author of the novel). the fantastic The Final Strife).
Influential … BookToker @emilymiahreads. Composition: TikTok
A hilarious 30-second #BookTok video from @abbysbooks, set with the hit Louis 1964 hit Che La Luna, offers a one-click tour of an idyllic cottage full of personally signed copies and themed book treats. In just a few days, this video has been liked more than 7,000 times. In total, says Harper Voyager, the content generated over the weekend garnered 170,000 views.
For the authors, this is not a bad start. But in terms of BookTok, it’s a drop in the ocean. Its latest Top 10, derived from hashtag views, is headed by Six of Crows by fantasy author Leigh Bardugo, which has garnered more than a billion views. Second place is Hoover’s It Ends With Us, just 800 meters away. In one of BookTok’s most stunning hits, Madeline Miller’s 2011 novel The Song of Achilles, a reimagining of Homer’s Iliad, ranks seventh with 323m views.
Hoover is a 42-year-old former Texas social worker who released her first romantic thriller in 2012 and then sold it to Simon & Schuster, for whom she is currently writing a tenth novel. She is thoughtful, open and unafraid of success. “I came into the book world by chance,” he says. “Some readers shared my first book and from there it grew. It was a combination of good times and good luck. I had no idea that the book was considered a romance; I didn’t write to fit into a genre. It just so happened that the book was the genre that readers were looking for. “
His Simon & Schuster stable partner, Elena Armas of Spain, is a newcomer, a bibliophile who graduated with a degree in chemical engineering from cross-platform book blocks many years ago, but did not start writing novels. To the pandemic. He self-published his romantic comedy debut, The Spanish Love Deception, in 2021. “At first, sales were good, at least for someone who had low expectations,” he says. “It wasn’t until months after publication that the book jumped to the Top 100 of the Kindle Store on Amazon. It was all thanks to a TikTok with my book that it went viral. The concept was simple: a girl He recounted the plot as if it were his own experience, and in the end added: “If you want to know more, you can read The Spanish Love Deception.” agents and editors to contact me ”.
Sign of the times … BookTok muscles in a branch of Barnes and Noble. Photo: Tali Arbel / AP
The UK publisher who works with Hoover and Arms is Molly Crawford, who traces her interest in BookTok to noticing the phrase “TikTok made me buy it” that appeared on Amazon products. “The influence of BookTok on the book industry is one of the most hopeful things I’ve ever seen,” he says. “TikTok should be seen as the modern distillation of the purest way to sell books. I see it as the algorithmic nurturing of what would otherwise be organic growth. My job is to publish books that readers want to read, so it would be wrong to ignore the global influence that BookTok has had.
It’s not just new JA authors who have benefited from the BookTok boom. In Lakeside, Waterstones has a section dedicated to the classic Penguin bound books, because BookTokers love beautiful volumes, especially if they have curled edges. @billreads, a Birmingham BookToker that has grossed 3.9 million likes and just released its first LGBTQ + fantasy novel by William J Wood, valued its flagship book collection at a scale of 1 to 10, with a line of 1111. / 10 for a purple hardcover Dune cover by Frank Herbert with the moon cover image replicated at the edges of the page. “It’s wonderful,” he said.
Then there is the somewhat puzzling phenomenon of previously published books that suddenly come to the prize. James Joyce’s Ulysses has been enjoying a run in the sun in the United States since fans started posting it. A video of the self-confessed nerd in the book @jeninsight, flipping through its pages and declaring it “very strange” to the sound of Bach’s first cello suite, garnered 27,000 likes.
The song Achilles, according to Peter in Waterstones, owes its sudden success to the fashion of anything related to mythology. Bloomsbury Publishing, however, points to a different element: “The new generation of readers connected first and foremost with one of the greatest gay love stories of all time,” he says. “In addition, The Song of Achilles became a cathartic release for readers when many of them, due to the pandemic and the confinements, were losing fundamental and formative experiences. Sharing their emotions about destiny “Achilles and Patroclus allowed them to connect with other readers anywhere in the world. Madeline Miller’s popularity was driven by real readers in her rooms, not through expensive advertising or a multimillion-dollar movie.”
Romantic inspiration … @kateslibrary and @groovytas. Composition: TikTok
Miller recorded a thank you to his fans, but the general wisdom in the post is clear. “Tbh, I don’t really do TikTok,” Dawson says. “I have it, but I don’t really publish it.” His approach is the same as his position on the reader reviewed by the Goodreads community. “It’s not for authors, it’s for readers. If they want to relate to me or my books, that’s great. But I’m very hands-free. “
I’ve been working in book sales for 10 years and it’s the biggest demographic change I’ve seen
Hoover agrees. “Since the beginning of my career, I’ve seen marketing in an app more as a thank you than as a way to find new readers. I try to join reading clubs whenever possible. I organize giveaways and sometimes private events at home. “I do my best to reward readers who have helped make my hobby the job of my dreams, but I’m very bad at marketing with people who don’t read my books yet.”
A recent experiment to push the first volume of a new trilogy by American thriller writer Don Winslow shows the drawbacks of publishers trying to live with children. Although set in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1986, in a nod to The Song of Achilles, it is touted as “a contemporary Iliad.” Its release was accompanied by readings. Irish dance stars Gardiner Brothers posted videos of themselves dancing to the book, which Winslow republished on his own channel. A TikTok fan whom I asked to investigate for me was convicted. “It’s unclear if the video is an advertisement or a sponsorship, as there is no hashtag. Most of the comments are about the dance (ha!) And not about the book. So far, there’s no rumor.”
“One of the best gay love stories” … Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles, thanks her BookTok fans. Photography: TikTok
At an international book sales summit in Venice earlier this year, famed Waterstones general manager James Daunt said: “The only thing that seems obvious is that authenticity matters. And a lot of that is humor. In general, we have found that the …