What is booktok on TikTok?
TIKTOK is now playing a role in the literary world as it has inspired the BookTok hashtag which encourages users to pick up all books, both new and old.
Through BookTok, literary sales have reached an all-time high since they were first recorded in 2004.
What is booktok?
Booktok is a new page on the TikTok app that brings book suggestions straight to your phone.
The BookTok hashtag has over 77billion views globally, making it one of the most popular since the app was created.
Booktok gained popularity in 2021 and has revolutionized the way books are advertised and recommended.
Book publishers and outlets no longer have to subscribe to a magazine to get their titles featured and can instead promote the books through the app.
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Users are posting endless content of their own short book reviews, sharing the books that made them laugh and cry and share their favorite titles.
It is a place where bibliophiles can share their recent literary discoveries from the aisles of bookstores or the comfort of their homes.
What are the Top 10 booktok recommendations?
The top books on TikTok include:
- Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
- They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera
- We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
- Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
- Circe by Frederic P Miller
- Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi
- Kingdom of the Wicked by Kerri Maniscalco
- The Cruel Prince by Holly Black
- Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard
- A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
- The People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
- Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon
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How are bookstores utilizing TikTok?
The new Booktok hashtag has been attributed to rising book sales, with print book sales increasing by 9 percent in 2021 compared to the previous year.
"The pool of people who are guaranteed to buy young adult books is limited to a few thousand dedicated lovers of the genre, but BookTok is exciting, with its short, entertaining videos bringing a new, powerful opportunity to reach and engage non-readers, to create more book lovers,” Kat McKenna, a marketing and brand consultant told Morning Brew.
McKenna specializes in children’s and young adult books and added that the short visual trailers TikTok users are incorporating are "making books cinematic in a way that publishers have been trying to do with marketing book trailers for a really long time."
She added: "But the way TikTok users are creating imagery inspired by what they are reading is so simple, and so clever.
"It’s that thing of bringing the pages to life, showing what you get from a book beyond words.”
Colleen Hoover's book It Ends With Us was originally published in 2016, but after it rose in popularity on TikTok, its sales skyrocketed making it the sixth bestselling book in 2021.
The new use of BookTok has brought books back to the forefront that hadn't garnered readership upon their release or had been published a decade ago.
One such example is The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller which was published in 2012 and was a New York Times Bestseller.
It rose through the ranks once again after becoming the fourth best-selling Adult Fiction book in 2021, selling 650k copies.
BookToker Vicki Saxton told Morning Brew: “[Book] sales have always been impacted by recommendations, whether it’s from your librarian, your trusted friend, or your book club.
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“So some [BookTokers] do three-minute videos that are really in-depth reviews, and other people [just] follow the trend of adding a popular sound to a seven-second video.
"But if a book starts to gain traction, other people read it and recommend it, and then it spreads.”