Feb 03, 2022
And you thought TikTok was just a bunch of cat videos, dance trends and make up tutorials? Think again. Welcome to BookTok, a trend where readers congregate on TikTok to post hundreds of thousands of videos about any and everything to do with books.
So What?
"BookTokers capture the “visceral reaction” to a book, which doesn’t come across in a written review’", says Olivia Horrox, marketing manager at Simon & Schuster. “There’s something about the fact that it is under a minute. People who are consuming this content want stuff that’s quicker and snappier all the time – you watch a 32-second video and someone’s like: ‘This book has LGBTQ romance, it’s really heartbreaking, it’s speculative fiction.’ And then the viewers think: ‘Oh, OK, those are all things that I’m interested in. I’ll go buy it.’”
BookTok isn’t just driving increased readership in younger readers (having started with a YA audience). It’s now driving increased sales across the board. Combined with the restrictions of lockdown, book sales were supercharged in 2021, with more than 212m print books sold in the UK - the highest figure of the last decade. Amnesty International UK have taken advantage of the trend with Reading Rebels, a subscription book club for kids, launched in 2020.