‘I can’t stress how much BookTok sells’: teen literary influencers swaying publishers

The famous Waterstones in London’s Piccadilly is a modernist/art deco building. It started life as a menswear store and has the feel of that sort of traditional shop that is fast disappearing. But this bookshop, like many others, is enjoying a very modern sales boost from social media.

Groups of teenage girls regularly gather here to buy new books and meet new friends, both discovered on the social media app TikTok. Recommendations by influencers for authors and novels on BookTok – a community of users who are passionate about books and make videos recommending titles – can send sales into the stratosphere.

But while very much an online phenomenon, BookTok is having a material impact on the high street, with TikTok now pushing people to buy their books from bricks-and-mortar booksellers through a partnership with bookshop.org, which allows people to buy online and support independent bookshops at the same time.

Last year, Waterstones Piccadilly hosted a BookTok festival. One sales assistant told the Observer: “I can’t stress how much BookTok sells books. It’s driven huge sales of YA [young adult] and romance books, including titles such as The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and authors such as Colleen Hoover.

“The demographic is almost exclusively teenage girls, but the power it has is huge. We have a ‘BookTok recommended’ table – and you can tell which books are trending by the speed at which they sell.”

Caroline Hardman, a literary agent at the Hardman & Swainson agency, says: “It’s driving the appetite for romance and ‘romantasy’ in a really big way, so it’s having a strong effect on what publishers look for too.”

BookTok was established in 2020 but this year brings new developments to a community which has so far been an organic phenomenon. This month, the winners of the inaugural TikTok book awards will be unveiled.

Users of the platform voted on a shortlist announced in May, with contenders for BookTok Book of the Year including Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola, Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood, Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart and Maame by Jessica George.

Related: ‘After lockdown, things exploded’ – how TikTok triggered a books revolution

There are also awards for BookTok influencers, independent bookshops, books to end a reading slump, and crucially, Best BookTok Revival, which has brought older novels to a new audience. The finalists in the revival category include One Day by David Nicholls, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

James Stafford, a general manager at TikTok UK, calls the shortlist “a true celebration of the variety of literature that resonates with the TikTok community”.

Book awards typically boost authors’ profiles and can lead to higher sales. As BookTok is already providing remarkable publicity, it will be interesting to see how these awards affect the shortlisted authors’ sales.

In April, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, also filed a trademark for a book publisher – 8th Note Press. The company has appointed Katherine Pelz, formerly from Penguin Random House, as acquisitions editor. Her specialist area is romance. Nothing is yet known about plans for 8th Note Press, although some self-published romance writers have said they have been approached about book deals.

According to the New York Times, the new publisher will focus on digital books until TikTok launches an online retail platform – something the company plans to do in the US later this year.

There is concern in the publishing industry that BookTok could become focused on books from ByteDance’s own publishing house. If the company can also sell the books direct to its users, that has repercussions for bookshops as well as publishers.

But could TikTok replicate the magic it has wrought in influencing book sales with its own products? Alice Harandon, who owns the St Ives Bookseller, isn’t sure. Her small but busy shop in the Cornish seaside resort regularly gets shoppers coming in to buy BookTok recommendations. The Secret History by Donna Tartt is a frequent request, as is A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas and Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

“When traditional publishers try to muscle in on the BookTok market, it never seems to work out quite the same way as an organic, viral recommendation,” she says. “It works best when a good book that has already been out in the world for a while – and is genuinely good – finds a natural following rather than trying to write books for the market. It starts to look very commercial, and will turn some people off.”

Rhea Kurien is editorial director at Orion Fiction, one of the biggest traditional publishers in the UK. She’s interested to see if TikTok can become more than a marketing tool for authors. “If the BookTok effect on consumer buying behaviour wears off, what will they be offering their authors that other publishers aren’t?

“What has been interesting for me is looking at the self-published authors who are doing incredibly well because of TikTok. They’ve established demand for their books and, as traditional publishers, we can then get them out to even more readers. This is especially the case for authors whose books are very big in the US but less so in the rest of the world. That’s where UK publishers can help. I’m also just not sure the TikTok generation is one that wants to be steered this much by publishers.”

The reaction of BookTok’s key market will be crucial to success. The most recent Publishers Association research says that BookTok is overwhelmingly a factor in Gen Z reading habits. In a poll of more than 2,000 16- to 25-year-olds, almost 59% said that BookTok had helped them discover a passion for reading.

The report says: “BookTok and book influencers significantly influence what choices this audience make about what they read, with 55% of respondents saying they turn to the platform for book recommendations.”

One in three use it to discover books they wouldn’t otherwise hear about. It encourages diversity, with one in three readers polled saying they discovered books by authors from different cultures, and almost 40% being introduced to new genres by the app.

Bluemoose Books, based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, is an independent publisher that first put out The Gallows Pole by Ben Myers, recently made into a BBC drama. Founder Kevin Duffy thinks that a new publisher entering the market is a positive step, but sounds a note of caution.

“My concern is that a bigger slice of the publishing pie will go to celebrities who already have huge social media profiles, and further reduce the opportunities of talented but under-represented writers to see their work published.”

BookTok has had a major effect on how the traditional publishing model works, and while Kurien acknowledges the fears of the creation of a small, elite group of celebrity TikTok authors, she thinks it’s a challenge the industry needs to rise to. “The disadvantage to TikTok’s influence is simply that it’s taking up so many slots on our bestseller lists, tables in bookshops and spaces in supermarkets,” she says.

“The rise of BookTok titles has meant less visibility for other titles, whether they’re longstanding authors or debuts. But I think it’s good for our industry to be shaken up at times, for us to reconsider what we think our readers want and to make way for these new trends.”

Judging by Waterstones Piccadilly, BookTok has created both online and real-life communities that warm the hearts of the booksellers. Waterstones says: “Girls are meeting up and having bookshop days out. They save up their money and come into the shop in gaggles, getting really excitable about what they want to buy. Their energy is amazing and their friendships are really strong, They’ve bonded over books and the things they love, and that’s awesome.”