BookTok, the corner of TikTok that’s all about books, has shaken up the publishing world. Over the last few years, the platform has pulled in new readers, especially in the romance and fantasy genres. And now some of the largest publishers in the U.S. are finding new talent and rethinking their strategies because of TikTok. We hear from an author, a bookstore owner and a publisher about how TikTok has transformed the book industry. Further Listening: -The Rise of the Tween Shopper -Inside One Publisher’s Fight Against Book Bans -Scholastic's Succession Drama Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What defines a romance novel?
Great question. Let's quickly define what a romance novel is. You need two things to be a romance novel. You need a central love story and a happy ending. And the happy ending, sometimes people try to get around for some reason, but you can't. They have to be together and happy at the end. They do not have to be heterosexually married with a baby, but like one of them can't get hit by a bus.
Because that's a tragedy, right? Yeah, or a train a la Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina is not a romance novel. She dies. Got it, got it. Anyway, I read to have fun. Same. And romance novels are fun.
Leah loves romance so much that in 2016, she and her sister opened up a bookstore devoted to it. It's called The Rip Bodice, and it's got locations in LA and in Brooklyn. The store is full of passionate experts who can help you find pretty much any kind of romance.
So if you ask somebody for cowboy werewolves, number one, they're going to take your request very seriously. And number two, they're going to say, okay, here are the two options that we have. But if you're interested in that, you might also be interested in cowboy mermaids or werewolf doctors.
Romance has always had its audience, but Leah says that over the last few years, she's seen a surge of interest. At first, it was just a few people coming in with surprising requests.
They started asking for things that I wasn't expecting. So, series that I had read and enjoyed but weren't, like, top of mind. The first person, I was like, totally. By the fifth person, I was like, how do you know about this series? Yeah. And she was like, oh my God, it's all anyone's reading on TikTok.
TikTok, or specifically BookTok, the part of the platform that's all about books, was pulling in new audiences to romance. And it kept happening. Customers would come in and ask for a book because they'd seen it on TikTok.
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Chapter 2: How has BookTok changed the book industry?
Very notably to me, it was actually translating to sales. And young people were coming into the shop and they were coming with shopping lists of things that they had seen on TikTok. And so we would start clocking, like whatever they were asking for, we're like, okay, we need to order more copies because next week, like there's going to be a thing that everybody wants.
Today, people are still showing up at the Rip Bodice because of TikTok. But the influence of BookTok has gone way beyond a single independent bookstore. Since 2020, BookTok has driven major sales, especially in the romance and fantasy genres. In one survey, TikTok found that more than a quarter of its users bought a book or started following an author after watching a video on the platform.
And some of the largest publishers in the US are finding new talent, rethinking their strategies, and seeing windfalls from old titles because of TikTok. Authors, influencers, agents, and publishers all told us that today, TikTok's fingerprints are all over the book industry. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Wednesday, December 18th.
Coming up on the show, TikTok and the book industry, a love story.
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Author Penn Cole reads a lot of different books in the romance genre.
I'm actually getting into sports romance lately, which is fun. I read my first hockey romance.
I love that you can just sort of take the word romance and add a different word, and it's a whole category of books. It's amazing. Exactly.
Billionaire romance, hockey romance, mafia romance.
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Chapter 3: What is romantasy and how is it different?
I was never afraid of the business aspect of being an author. The idea of marketing my book, of handling all of the financial details, the legal details, figuring out what the cover would be, all of that stuff excited me. So I knew pretty early on that I wanted to self-publish because, frankly, if you're going to do all of that work yourself...
you want to keep the money because when you traditionally publish, you end up giving away quite a bit of your money. And so I thought, well, if I'm willing to do the work, I might as well, you know, reap the benefits of it.
And Penn quickly learned that a lot of that work needed to happen on social media.
You have to be where the readers are and find ways for them to see you and to know that you even exist because you're not going to have the big promotions that these huge publishing houses get. Your books aren't going to be on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. You're not going to be listed as a hot book to read in Vogue magazine or something.
So even before she'd finished writing her books, Penn made an official TikTok account. And it was there that she found a lot of the readers she was looking for. They were on BookTok. BookTok really took off during the pandemic, when many readers were stuck at home. One of the first books that went viral on BookTok is Colleen Hoover's dark romance novel, It Ends With Us.
Colleen Hoover was doing something when she wrote It Ends With Us. Because believe me, when I started this book, my life ended. It's crazy to think that this one book will probably change my life forever.
This book did make me cry. I think it's an important read and I can understand why it got so popular on TikTok.
Hoover's book had already been considered a commercial success when it came out in 2016. But when users on BookTok picked up on it, the sales went bananas. Hoover's publisher told me that by 2021, weekly sales for It Ends With Us were 100 times more than what they'd been two years before. Hoover later published a sequel. And earlier this year, It Ends With Us was adapted into a movie.
Other authors have also broken through, like Sarah J. Maas with her fairy series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, which I devoured way too fast. There's also Rebecca Yaros and her novel, Fourth Wing, And while not everyone makes it as big, BookTok has raised up other romance and fantasy authors. TikTok says that this year there was a 300% increase in posts with the hashtag Romantasy.
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Chapter 4: Why did Penn Cole choose to self-publish?
I think in the early days, I really thought you needed to go viral. I thought that I was shooting for that video that got a million views and that that would make or break my career. I have since learned that is not how it works at all. It is so much more complicated than that. And so what changed your mind and how did you like adjust? At some point, I think I did have a video.
It wasn't one of my videos, but it was a video somebody else made about my book. Here's the video.
And brilliant, beautiful, epic, thriving, jumps off the page writing, punches you in the face, makes you reread a paragraph with tears in your eyes thinking, oh my God, that is so poignant and beautiful.
The video was posted just a few months after Penn released her first book.
Shout out Penn Cole, this author. She was just exquisite.
And I saw a spike and I thought, this is it. Like I've made it, my book's going to be huge. And then two days later, you know, the sales dropped down to what they were before the view stopped because that's what virality is. It's a moment. Right. And I think I learned after that, that this is a long haul thing.
So Penn refined her strategy. She made sure every post had details like what hashtags to use and a description of her series.
It was a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall and waiting to see what sticks. I had joined a lot of groups on TikTok for authors and I was, you know, uploading art and making memes out of my characters. I was... you know, doing videos about me as an author. And so it was just every single day trying something new and hoping that something would strike a chord with readers.
Girl, how much time did this take? So much time.
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Chapter 5: How did TikTok impact book sales?
So all of the time. Eventually, Penn found her footing on TikTok. Readers who were fans of other Romantasy books started picking up on her series.
I just finished the first book in the Kindred Curse Saga, The Spark of the Everflame, and it was absolute perfection.
I was so obsessed and binged it so quickly within like a day and a half that I am currently charging my Kindle so that I can read the second part.
I can't for the life of me remember which one of my mutuals read and raved about this book, but whoever you are, I love you.
I started to see my book growing in sales without a viral moment at a very steady, regular pace.
And it was just by talking to people, replying to comments when people said, oh, I'm interested in that book, or asking questions about it, looking at videos that people who had read my book, if they made a video about it, thanking them and talking to them in DMs about what they liked or what their theories were, really engaging with them. The first month, I sold maybe 100 copies.
I can't remember exactly. And it was like $1,000, and I was stoked. I was so excited. I thought I had just had the greatest, you know, debut release of all time, making that $1,000. Of course, it cost me way more than that to put out the book, so I was still deeply in the red. And then the next month, it like... quadrupled and then the next month it like added a digit. Wow.
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Chapter 6: What strategies helped Penn Cole succeed on TikTok?
And it grew and grew and grew. I think by the end of the first year, I think we'd sold like 300,000 copies of the books. Those numbers were just kind of mind boggling.
A lot of this growth came from e-book sales. But Penn felt that if she wanted to get bigger, she needed to actually get her book into bookstores, which is really hard to do without a publisher.
There's still a huge segment of the market that doesn't read e-book at all. So I knew that I had the potential to really grow my reader base in a significant way if I could get into those bookstores. But that door was pretty much shut to me, other than a handful of bookstores that had stopped my books.
One publisher caught Penn's eye, Atria, which is part of one of the biggest publishing houses, Simon & Schuster. Penn liked how Atria worked with social media. And Atria was into Penn, too. The brand was keeping an eye out for self-published authors who'd already built a big audience. In July of this year, they got together.
Atria would publish Penn's novels in print and get them in more bookstores. And so far, it's made the difference she hoped it would.
I think by the end of the year, we're going to hit a million copies sold in about a year and a half of the books being on the market, which is unheard of. I mean, even the average traditionally published book is only selling maybe five figures if they're lucky, right? It's just, it's crazy to think about.
As publishers take note of success stories like Penn's, they're also recognizing that TikTok offers really precise information into what readers want. And that new insight is shaking up the publishing industry. That's next. BookTok has jolted the publishing industry, which is usually pretty stagnant.
Sirkana BookScan, a publishing tracker, says that in a typical year, overall print sales grow or shrink by about only 1% to 2%. And this year was no exception. But for BookTok authors, it's a different story. In the U.S., BookTok authors sold 20% more books in print this year than the year before. That's 55.4 million books.
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Chapter 7: What challenges do authors face in gaining visibility?
Chapter 8: How did Colleen Hoover's book go viral?
I can't remember exactly. And it was like $1,000, and I was stoked. I was so excited. I thought I had just had the greatest, you know, debut release of all time, making that $1,000. Of course, it cost me way more than that to put out the book, so I was still deeply in the red. And then the next month, it like... quadrupled and then the next month it like added a digit. Wow.
And it grew and grew and grew. I think by the end of the first year, I think we'd sold like 300,000 copies of the books. Those numbers were just kind of mind boggling.
A lot of this growth came from e-book sales. But Penn felt that if she wanted to get bigger, she needed to actually get her book into bookstores, which is really hard to do without a publisher.
There's still a huge segment of the market that doesn't read e-book at all. So I knew that I had the potential to really grow my reader base in a significant way if I could get into those bookstores. But that door was pretty much shut to me, other than a handful of bookstores that had stopped my books.
One publisher caught Penn's eye, Atria, which is part of one of the biggest publishing houses, Simon & Schuster. Penn liked how Atria worked with social media. And Atria was into Penn, too. The brand was keeping an eye out for self-published authors who'd already built a big audience. In July of this year, they got together.
Atria would publish Penn's novels in print and get them in more bookstores. And so far, it's made the difference she hoped it would.
I think by the end of the year, we're going to hit a million copies sold in about a year and a half of the books being on the market, which is unheard of. I mean, even the average traditionally published book is only selling maybe five figures if they're lucky, right? It's just, it's crazy to think about.
As publishers take note of success stories like Penn's, they're also recognizing that TikTok offers really precise information into what readers want. And that new insight is shaking up the publishing industry. That's next. BookTok has jolted the publishing industry, which is usually pretty stagnant.
Sirkana BookScan, a publishing tracker, says that in a typical year, overall print sales grow or shrink by about only 1% to 2%. And this year was no exception. But for BookTok authors, it's a different story. In the U.S., BookTok authors sold 20% more books in print this year than the year before. That's 55.4 million books.
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