We're off for Memorial Day but with summer reading season just beginning, we wanted to share this episode.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. Jessica Mendoza hosts.This episode was first published in December 2024. 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 is BookTok and why is it important?
Hey, it's Jess. We're off on Memorial Day, but with summer reading season coming up, we wanted to bring back an episode we made a few months ago. It's on BookTok, the corner of TikTok that's all about books, and how it's transforming the publishing world. Here it is. For Leah Koch, the romance novel is life. She's loved romance since she was a teenager.
What is it that draws you so much to this type of writing?
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, OK, 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.
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Chapter 2: How has BookTok influenced romance novels?
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? 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.
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.
Coming up on the show, TikTok and the book industry, a love story. 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 the significance of self-publishing in today's market?
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.
And the Romantasy genre has grown into a $471 million category. So Penn Cole was able to ride this wave on BookTok. How did you try and build a following or a community on BookTok? What's the secret sauce there?
Well, that is the million dollar question. If you knew how to answer that easily, you would make a lot of money.
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Chapter 4: How did Penn Cole build her audience on TikTok?
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.
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...
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Chapter 5: What makes Romantasy a growing genre?
Chapter 6: How has TikTok changed book sales dynamics?
So I took a risk and I wrote my first book.
That book is called Spark of the Everflame. It's the first in a four-part series, The Kindred's Cursed Saga. And it's got a feisty heroine, a hot immortal prince, a human rebel faction, and a whole lot of will they, won't they. Penn read me a snippet.
I was made of swinging fists and rash words. My edges too jagged and my temper too hot. Nothing about me was delicate. Sometimes I wondered whether Henry's taste had changed or whether he thought he saw something different in me, the nurturing healer who stepped up to care for her family in her mother's absence. But I didn't choose to be a healer, nor did I choose to take my mother's role.
Ooh!
I know.
When Penn started writing that first book in 2021, she'd already decided that she wanted to self-publish. She'd been to law school and worked as a consultant for small businesses, helping them with branding, social media, and growth. So she was pretty savvy when it came to launching her own career as an author. Why did you choose to self-publish?
I was never afraid of the business aspect of being an author. The idea of marketing my book, of... handling, you know, 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
reap the benefits of it. And Penn quickly learned that a lot of that work needed to happen on social media.
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Chapter 7: What are the challenges of marketing as a self-published author?
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.
Chapter 8: What lessons can authors learn from BookTok success stories?
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.
And that has piqued the interest of some of the country's biggest book publishers.
Hi, I'm Felicity. I'm the Director of Digital Marketing for Penguin Young Readers at Penguin Random House.
Felicity Valance has been in legacy publishing for nearly two decades. And she says BookTok allows her to reach readers in a way that she was never able to before, even on other social platforms.
So obviously the algorithm when we talk about TikTok is the more you scroll and engage with certain pieces of content, the more it will feed you that content, whether it's creators that you follow or things that you save. TikTok will then say, oh, this person likes this. We'll give them more of that.
And that's different than how algorithms worked with other social media platforms in the past.
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