TikTok is quickly proving to be a platform with exponential potential. The app, once geared toward sharing choreographed dancing clips, has been responsible for making countless old and new songs go viral as TikTok trending sounds, from Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” to Paul Anka’s “Put Your Head On My Shoulder.” But TikTok isn’t just a boon for the music industry — or comedy, or mental health awareness, or sustainability. Books on TikTok are also being propelled to new heights, thanks to a corner of the app appropriately dubbed BookTok.
What started out as mostly teens casually dramatizing their favorite narratives or quotes from books has turned into a phenomenon over the past year. As Barnes & Noble’s director of category management recently told Publishers Weekly, BookTok is even more impactful than Bookstagram; TikTok books skyrocket in popularity and continue to sell for weeks or even months. Case in point: Colleen Hoover’s debut, It Ends With Us, which was published in August of 2016 and sold 21,000 copies after a standard release that included praise from bestselling authors and a nine-city book tour. Sales then petered out, until fall 2020, when TikTokers began posting about the book en masse; by summer 2021, It Ends With Us was selling almost as many copies each week as it did in its entire first year. The book has currently sold almost half a million copies and has been on the New York Times best sellers list for 28 weeks. Back-catalogued books like Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and Adam Silvera’s They Both Die At The End have also shot to popularity thanks to BookToker recommendations.
