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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Editorial

The Guardian view on BookTok: a welcome disruptor of the status quo

BookTok Colleen Hoover Covid-19 TikTok
‘#booktok is a strand on the video-sharing platform TikTok that was started by young book-lovers at the height of the Covid pandemic.’
‘BookTok is a strand on the video-sharing platform TikTok that was started by young book lovers at the height of the Covid pandemic.’ Photograph: Tali Arbel/AP

The bestselling book in the UK last week, and of the year so far, is an American novel that was published in 2016. If that sentence sounds implausible, the odds are you have not yet caught up with the latest social media sensation. It is called BookTok and it is a strand on the video-sharing platform TikTok that was started by young book lovers at the height of the Covid pandemic.

One of its standout successes is Colleen Hoover, a 42-year-old former social worker from Texas, whose young adult romance It Ends With Us has sold an astonishing 427,000 copies in the UK so far in 2022, according to the market analyst Nielsen BookScan. This outnumbers any other book in any format or genre.

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