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
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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, 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.
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.
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