BookTok: Marketing literature to a new generation of readers

 

BookTok: Marketing literature to a new generation of readers

Vittoria Di Martino

The past few years have seen the influence of social media on the Australian and global publishing industry and the book market grow exponentially. Namely, since the rise of the TikTok-based bookish community known as ‘BookTok’, which first emerged in mid-2020. Although multiple social media platforms have their own literary communities (i.e. Instagram has ‘Bookstagram’, YouTube has ‘BookTube’) (Chameleon 2023), there have been none as impactful upon the publishing industry and book sales as BookTok. The rise of BookTok and other online book communities signifies a fresh new way that social media can market books.

From mid-2020 to the end of 2021, the sales of books experienced the biggest boom of the past twenty years (Coleman 2020). Scribd, a digital library service, reported a 70 per cent increase in reading engagement in this period. The final quarter of 2020 saw a 17 per cent decline in readership, but the first quarter of 2021 saw a 57 per cent increase, which was approximately maintained for the rest of 2021 (Fatmi 2021). The Australian book market currently contributes eight percent of its total sales volume to TikTok’s influence (RMIT University 2024). In 2022, there was a 239 per cent increase in book sales spurred on by TikTok fame. This only continued to rise, with a 29 per cent increase in 2023 (RMIT University 2024).

There has been much research into the impact of BookTok upon the publishing and bookselling industries, but not much focus upon what makes a book successful on BookTok, and how publishers and booksellers could harness BookTok and social media more broadly to market future titles and encourage reading culture.

BookTok signifies a new way in which a collectively driven, social movement of reading culture, beyond any publisher’s intentional marketing influence, has inspired a new generation of readers. A previous example of this comes from 1942, when the New York Times first began publishing their national Best Seller book list, which quickly became an authority over which books people read and continued to trend (Regaudie 2022). A study from 2004 concluded that, for debut authors, inclusion on this list could boost a book’s sale by up to 57 per cent. On average, the list was shown to boost included book sales by 13–14 per cent (Regaudie 2022). From this, came the emergence of book clubs, in which people could discuss these books.

Although book clubs had been a trending concept since the 1940s, a major driver of book sales was the establishment of American talk show host, Oprah Winfrey’s book club (known as Oprah’s Book Club) in 1996 (Regaudie 2022). In the following years, books endorsed by Oprah in her book club saw greater success than those featured on the New York Times Best Seller list (Regaudie 2022). Oprah’s Book Club continued until 2010 (Regaudie 2022); a year that marked the beginning of a decade when social media became the socially engrained source of communications that we know it as today (Raphael 2019).

Predictably, with the rise of social media, a new generation of young readers wanting a forum to discuss, discover, and critique books created the social media equivalent. Namely, spaces such as BookTok (Regaudie 2022). In 2020, a survey by Book Baby showed that 45 per cent of female Gen Z respondents and 27 per cent of male Gen Z respondents claimed to be reading fiction books at least a few times a month (Regaudie 2022). Further, a survey of 2000 sixteen to twenty-five-year-olds in 2022 revealed that 59 per cent of respondents credited BookTok for a newly discovered passion for reading (Brown 2022). Because of high demand for BookTok famed books, most booksellers, in both their online and physical stores, have a BookTok section. From physical stores with a ‘TikTok made me buy it!’ table, to online retailers such as Barnes and Noble having an entire section on their website titled ‘BookTok’ (Barnes and Noble n.d.), booksellers have latched on to this new source of customers. Marketing and loyalty manager of Dymocks, Gail McWhinnie said in 2023 that ‘at least half of our top 10 best sellers each week for the past year have been BookTok related titles’ (Novak 2023).

It is important to note the demographic of these online bookish communities, as well as the kinds of literature they are engaging with and boosting the sales of. As for the demographic, we see from the statistics from the Book Baby survey previously mentioned, more women are regular readers than men. Further, they are more likely to be engaged in bookish communities such as book clubs and BookTok. This has been the same since before the rise of social media. In 2014, a survey found that of women who read at least one book a month, 56 per cent were in a book club, and that of the roughly five million Americans in book clubs, most were women (Regaudie 2022). Book clubs and bookish communities, being female dominated spaces, seemingly haven’t changed, with women being four times more likely than men to be active BookTokers (Townend 2024).

The difference, however, is that BookTok is not only a female-dominated space, but a young female-dominated space. According to a Nielson BookData survey conducted between May 2020 to April 2021, while only 14 per cent of all book buyers in the UK were TikTok users, 37 per cent of customers between the ages of 13 to 24 were TikTok users (Nielson BookData 2021). This number increased even further when looking at customers between the ages of 16–19, almost half of whom were TikTok users. Of all these TikTok-user book buyers, 60 per cent were women (Nielson BookData 2021).

With the demographic of BookTok being mostly young women, and the great influence BookTok has had on the book market in recent years, it is unsurprising to see that certain genres that are favoured by young women have been on an uptick. Both the Australian and global book markets have seen a rise in young adult (YA) fiction titles, and Adult Fiction more broadly. In 2023, the Australian book market saw Adult Fiction book sales increase by five percent from the previous year, making it the biggest growing genre in said market (RMIT University 2024). Of this category, science fiction, fantasy and romance constitute the most popular subgenres. Looking at just a single one of these genres, the sales of romance books were up 37 per cent in 2023 in Australia (Books+Publishing 2023), and up 77 per cent in 2022, from the previous year (Books+Publishing 2022). We see this trend internationally; returning to the Nielson BookData survey in the UK, the data found that YA fiction, fantasy/science fiction and romance were the most popular genres for those aged between 13–24 (Nielson BookData 2021).

Molly Crawford, Editorial Director at Simon & Schuster UK (2022, para. 9), testifies to BookTok’s preference for YA fiction, and how this preference is changing the publishing landscape. ‘My job is to publish books readers want to read so it would be wrong to ignore the global influence BookTok has had. It revealed there was a larger appetite for some genres, particularly romance and sci-fi, than publishing was satisfying’ (Armistead 2022). Booksellers have clearly noticed this trend; looking at the previously mentioned ‘BookTok’ section on Barnes and Noble’s website, the section has subdivided BookTok books into more specific popular categories, namely ‘Teen and YA’, ‘Fiction’, ‘Science Fiction + Fantasy’ and ‘Romance’ (Barnes and Noble n.d.).

While romance has been a consistently popular BookTok genre, Books+Publishing attribute the previously mentioned 77 per cent increase in romance book sales on the Australian market mostly to the sales of Colleen Hoover novels. Colleen Hoover is a popular American writer, famous for writing within the romance genre, and has gained unprecedented success on TikTok (Books+Publishing 2022). As of January 2023, the hashtag #colleenhoover had 3.1 billion views on TikTok alone (Foster 2023). NPD BookScan reported that in the US, of the ten bestselling books by mid-2022, four were written by Colleen Hoover (Harris 2022). By the end of 2022, Hoover’s book It Ends With Us had sold 8.6 million copies, surpassing the Bible (Rozaki 2023). What makes Hoover an interesting case study on the power of BookTok’s ability to propel books and authors to success is that It Ends With Us was not released in 2022. This was merely the year it gained popularity on BookTok. The book saw some initial success upon its release in 2016, selling 21,000 copies in its first month (Rozaki 2023). However, sales numbers fell off soon after. Four years later, between 2020-2021, the book was discovered by users on BookTok and found such popularity that it sold 29,000 copies a week (Rozaki 2023). In 2021 alone, 308,000 copies of It Ends With Us were sold (Rozaki 2023).

Hoover realises that most of her success has spawned from social media, where she presents herself as authentic and relatable, amassing 3.9 million followers across all platforms (Foster 2023). Yet Hoover has declared herself taken aback by her BookTok success, and admits she is unsure of how the TikTok algorithm truly works (Kaplan 2023), with her Twitter bio currently reading ‘I don’t get it either’ (Hoover n.d.). In a 2023 interview, Hoover said ‘people ask me like, “how did you get your books to go viral on TikTok?” And I’m like, “it wasn’t me. It was readers. It was the bloggers, BookTokers.” People trusted what other readers thought’ (Kaplan 2023). This suggests Hoover believes that authenticity and sense of community on BookTok has in part contributed to her success (Kaplan 2023).

What, then, makes a book so successful on BookTok? A major contributing factor to BookTok success seems to be relatability and emotional content within the books. A common trope on BookTok are videos of readers capturing themselves crying to certain books. It Ends With Us, again, is a good example here as it features deeply emotional content such as domestic violence, toxic relationships and death (Foster 2023), and many BookTokers who have opted to make videos of themselves crying to it have gained great success. One of these examples comes from BookToker Eloise Hampson, who goes by the TikTok handle @kazzledazzlesteponme. In March 2021, Hampson posted two videos on TikTok, the first shows her crying reading the final pages of It Ends With Us. The second video shows her looking as though she still has not calmed herself, as a voice-over says ‘it’s been forty minutes and I’m still sobbing over the last line’ (Stewart 2021). Both videos have a combined almost 2.4 million views (Stewart 2021). Hampson says of her BookTok following ‘it just feels like I’m expressing my emotions to my best friends on a small little corner of the internet’ (Merry 2022). Pauline Juan, a BookToker known by the handle @thebooksiveloved, attests to the influence videos that contain emotional reactions to books can have on the popularity of said videos and books—‘the most popular videos are about the books that make you cry. If you’re crying on camera, your views go up!’ (Harris 2021).

This coincides with the limited but telling studies that have been conducted on what kinds of BookTok videos gain popularity. A 2021 study shows us that, of the viral BookTok videos sampled, 40 per cent fell under the category of book recommendations, 24.1 per cent were about the reader experience of reading a particular book, and 14.6 per cent involved an emotional reader response (Merga 2021). There was, of course, often overlap between these and other categories (Merga 2021). The fact that the focus of these videos went beyond simple reviews and recommendations, and focused more on the reader experience and the emotional reactions of readers to particular titles gives a unique insight into what kinds of literature and literary experiences BookTok prefers to engage in. Videos that speak of the ‘reader experience’, speak to an interpersonal relatability of experiences between readers of certain books. For example, they may speak to the aesthetic of reading, how reading has influenced what one seeks in romantic partnerships, how one creates a perfect environment for reading, etc. These kinds of videos create a sense of community around reading which allows the viewer to feel authentic connection and want to read what the BookToker is reading to feel part of the in-group (Merga 2021).

Further, videos that fell under the ‘emotional reader response’ category largely spoke about the kinds of emotions that a reader may feel during the experience of reading, both related and unrelated to specific titles. When related to specific titles, these often came as a recommendation. The recommendation necessarily presented a specific emotional response as the selling point of the title (Merga 2021). Many BookTokers made recommendation videos for readers which compiled a selection of books and drew commonalities between the emotions they evoked, for example, sadness, optimism or arousal, or made claims that certain books will change the readers perspectives or state of minds (Merga 2021).

Something that can be learned from this insight is that books tend to gain popularity on BookTok when their emotional content is emphasised, as well as reader relatability. Publishers and booksellers can only stand to gain from this revelation when marketing or selling future titles. If BookTok is to be utilised or broken into to sell or to market books, the title has a better chance of virality and success if it is seen as emotionally relatable and authentic. For example, libraries and booksellers may essentially copy a BookTok recommendation video format, creating tables in physical locations of books that elicit a certain emotion, for example, ‘sob until you have no tears left’ (Merga 2021). A Finnish study that looked at multiple libraries with a TikTok presence found that recommendations made by libraries were viewed positively by users, but the ones that were seen as emotional gained far better success than ones considered plain and informational, such as merely showing new available titles or seasonal recommendations (Tukia 2022).

Another way that publishers, booksellers and even authors themselves can gain success from BookTok is through using social media influencers to promote new titles and products. BookTok ‘influencers’ (a term colloquially used to mean popular online personalities and content creators) are seen by users as inherently more authentic and trustworthy than big brands and businesses (Tukia 2022). Thus, publishers and booksellers can benefit from utilising influencer marketing by sending free titles to influencers to review and make content with on social media (Tukia 2022). Some publishing houses have already caught on to this tactic, launching book-influencer programs. Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster are a few examples of large publishing houses who have programs in which they provide social media bookish influencers with free copies of new titles in exchange for content creation about said title (McIlroy 2022). In some cases, the influencers may even acquire an Advanced Reader Copy of a title, which is a copy of an unpublished book (Cabag n.d.).

Publishers can benefit from researching specific influencers and their audience when selecting which influencer to engage in the marketing of a title. Although YA is overwhelmingly popular on BookTok, there are niches within the BookTok community. Finding the right influencers that have a pre-established affinity and connection with the genre of book they will market gives the book the best chance of finding its ‘correct’ audience (Stellar Tech n.d.).

What has been shown in this report is that a new generation of readers has emerged, and with them has come a new way of engaging with literature. A distinctive feature of Gen Z is that they have grown up in the age of the internet, and more specifically, the dawn of social media. Predictably, then, the way the latest generation of young readers has engaged with literature and the love of reading has been through online communities. Every generation creates their methods of sharing, recommending and discussing literature, and BookTok and other social media bookish communities are a natural progression from former versions of the same concept, such as in-person book clubs. We have seen that specific genres such as works that fall under the YA umbrella, have become increasingly popular due to BookTok and social media’s influence over young readership. However, books that fall outside of this category can still reasonably be promoted and marketed through such channels, as long as the publisher or bookseller is aware of what makes a book popular on social media. This has been shown to be primarily an emphasis on the reader experience itself, as well as emotional reader response. These aspects can then be utilised to market new titles, both online and in physical retailers and libraries. Publishers can employ BookTok and other bookish influencers to create social media content about a title they wish to market, as influencers are seen as more authentic and genuine than the publishing house itself.

 

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Vittoria Di Martino (she/her) is a Writing and Publishing student at RMIT. She graduated from Deakin University with a Bachelor of Arts in 2022. She is passionate about literature and is self-admittedly ‘chronically online’.

 
 
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