Reading is back on the rise thanks to social media, particularly TikTok, with #BookTok amassing over 60 million views after taking off during the pandemic.
“The rise of BookTok really coincided with the pandemic, and I think it was this wonderful way for other book lovers to sort of find each other,” RMIT lecturer of writing and publishing, Angela Meyer, tells Azzet.
According to NPD BookScan, print book sales increased by 9% from 757.9 million in 2020 to 825 million in 2021, the highest jump since they started tracking in 2004. NPD BookScan largely attributed this to “BookTok” and said no other social media platform had impacted sales like this before.
A key findings report of 2,001 16 to 25-year-olds in the UK found that the phenomenon that is BookTok has also encouraged more young people to read.
Almost two-thirds of respondents said book influencers have helped them discover a passion for reading, 55% rely on BookTok for recommendations, and nearly half of the respondents said they had visited a physical book shop to buy a book they had seen on BookTok.
What books are popular on TikTok?
Meyer says backlist titles are often capturing the attention of BookTok users as opposed to newly published books.
Backlist titles are typically books that have been out for a year but are still in circulation and available to buy.
“That’s publishers are never going to be able to really do themselves, because they can't necessarily predict the backlist titles that are that people are going to be discovered and that are going to take,” Meyer says.
An early example of a backlist title becoming popular on TikTok is The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. The 2011 novel catapulted to popularity in 2021, growing from an initial 20,000 copy run to selling 2 million copies across all formats.
“It was already a nine-year-old when it hit the best seller list because of the promotion of it on BookTok,” Meyer says.
“That was definitely just driven by the users recommending it to each other.”
Another novel that rose to success due to word of mouth on TikTok Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us, which catapulted the polarising author to popularity and was recently adapted into a movie with drama both on and off screen.
It Ends With Us was initially published in 2016 and sold 1,600 copies per week in December 2020. In November 2021, this number soared to 21,000 copies per week.
As well as boosting specific books, BookTok trends have also given rise to specific genres, including young adult, romance and fantasy.
In May 2021, young adult novel sales soared by 70% in the U.S..
Meanwhile, in Australia, the young adult genre grew by 5% to represent 24% of the market in 2023.
Nielsen BookScan Australian figures show that romance book sales more than doubled in 2024 compared to pre-pandemic, with the genre having an average annual growth of 49% since 2019.
Sales also more than doubled in the romance genre from 2020 to 2023 in both the U.S. and U.K.
“Around 2022 we really started to see the romantic phenomenon,” Meyer says.
Impacts on the publishing industry
BookTok has had a global impact on the publishing industry with the U.K. export market growing in 2022.
“In 2022 the UK export market grew 8% and the big publishers cited book talk as an influence on the demand for English language titles in the rest of Europe,” Meyer says.
This brings the U.K. publishing industry exports market to £4.1 billion, with Germany being the country’s biggest buyer with £130.1 million, a 27% increase on 2021.
The U.S. was also a large export market for the U.K., with exports growing 41% from 2021 to 2023. In 2022, 27% of exports from the U.K. went to the U.S., representing a total value of £423 million.
With the U.K. publishing industry currently contributing £11 billion to the country’s total economy, these numbers only stand to grow with international demand for U.K. publishing projected to grow by 20% by 2033.
While smaller than the U.K. and U.S. markets, the publishing industry in Australia brings in around A$2 billion to the economy annually.
While Meyer said that the hype around books isn’t created by publishers and instead organically through creators, publishers have also jumped onto trends.
This includes hashtags and genres popularised by BookTok.
“Another thing that's probably a combination of social media like BookTok, but also realms like fan fiction, is people not only searching via genre but via trope,” she says.
“Publishers are really taking note of this, and then they start publishing not just into particular genres like romance, but really targeting the specific tropes that people are looking for within those genres.”
It has also influenced what authors and publishers are working with as they pick up book influencers for book deals.
“It's still yet people who are both BookTokers and also writers themselves,” Meyer says.
“If they’re very popular, publishers are sort of jumping on and giving them book deals.”
Two recent Australian examples include book influencer Stacey McEwan and former NRL star turned BookToker, Luke Bateman, who acquired their own book deals after posting reviews online.
