TikTok's Impact on Book Sales

TikTok's Impact on Book Sales

This article relates to White Nights

In 2024, Dostoevsky's short story White Nights became popular on BookTok, the corner of TikTok populated by readers. BookTok users post videos of themselves recommending books, discussing books, crying at the endings of books, and showing off their color-coordinated bookshelves, tagging these videos with the hashtag #BookTok. BookTok has been equally praised—young people are reading! And buying books!—and derided as a shallow way of engaging with literature. What is not in doubt, though, is how BookTok has changed the publishing industry in the past few years. Books that have gone viral on TikTok have seen increased—sometimes astronomically so—sales, are featured on TikTok display tables at bookstores, and make the bestseller lists, often years after their original publication. During this period, publishers and their marketing teams have attempted to harness the app's power and use it to chase or predict what's trending.

BookTok exploded in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when TikTok users—mainly women in their teens and 20s—started posting emotional videos about books, often sobbing about a line or throwing a book across the room in anger. Books that left readers bereft, like The Song of Achilles and They Both Die at the End, gained traction. "The most popular videos are about the books that make you cry. If you're crying on camera, your views go up!" one TikToker told the New York Times. These videos went viral and started translating into sales—an organic, grassroots marketing campaign, often for books that had been published years prior. "We haven't seen these types of crazy sales—I mean tens of thousands of copies a month—with other social media formats," the director of books at Barnes & Noble told the New York Times in 2021.

The publishing industry soon caught on. One BookTok creator said that publishers started sending her advanced copies of books so she could post about them; publishers also paid her and other influencers to create videos, with fees ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per post.

Now, #BookTok helps to create some of the biggest sellers on the market, like Colleen Hoover, whose novel It Ends with Us was recently made into a movie starring Blake Lively. Hoover was already a successful self-published novelist with loyal fans—but then TikTok discovered her. In a New York Times article about Hoover's BookTok success, her publisher, Libby McGuire, calls it "the reverse of the Oprah book club." The article goes on to explain, "Whereas Oprah was one woman making a recommendation, and sometimes selling two million books, now it's a hundred people making a recommendation—and selling four million books."

According to NPD BookScan, which tracks the sale of most printed books in the United States, BookTok helped authors sell 20 million books in 2021 and even more in 2022, an unprecedented effect of social media on sales. In the UK, books that used "TikTok" or "BookTok" in their sales keywords collectively sold 2.2 million copies in the first four months of 2022. After the initial COVID-era explosion, sales have softened a bit. While the future of TikTok in the United States is uncertain as of the writing of this article, with the possibility of a permanent ban, it remains an important and widespread platform for discovering new writers.

Penguin Random House imprint Ember created a boxed set of BookTok bestsellers, courtesy of Barnes & Noble

Filed under Books and Authors

This article relates to White Nights. It first ran in the January 29, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.