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It’s the largest community on TikTok, the video-based social media platform all the rage with Gen Z. And, believe it or not, it’s all about books. Welcome to #BookTok.
BookTok is the social media trend that’s been driving book sales ever since the hashtag first emerged in 2020. It’s kickstarted the careers of hitherto unheralded authors and infected younger generations with the reading bug. BookTok is many things – but it’s first and foremost a digital space where people talk about physical objects: books.
On this blog, we’ve previously recounted the curious rise of reading parties – events where people get together in person to read books and talk about them afterwards. But today we’re examining a phenomenon that’s quite the opposite: literature lovers sharing their passion for books in the digital world of TikTok.
We’ll discover how BookTok was born, how it works and which books it made into bestsellers.
What is BookTok?
Let’s start with the basics, because not every reader will be one of the 1.5 billion TikTok users out there. Technically, BookTok is a hashtag that’s used on TikTok, a social network. A hashtag (a keyword preceded by the hash symbol, “#”) is a way of labelling the content found in the short videos posted on the platform. When you visit the #booktok community, you’ll find all sorts of videos with one thing in common: they’re about books. People recommending books, flicking through books, unboxing books, discussing the themes of books or talking about the covers of books; people crying, laughing or scaring themselves while reading books (these are known as reaction videos). In fact, on BookTok you’ll find everything you can imagine people doing with a book in hand (and even more that you can’t).
BookTok is far more than a hashtag – it’s subculture in its own right. And a popular one at that: the community has racked up over 200 billion views and 35 million posts. Some are even calling it “the last safe place on the Internet”.
BookTok’s success in numbers
The BookTok trend began spontaneously in March 2020, a time when many around the world were experiencing the first Covid-19 lockdowns. And the subcommunity has grown and grown ever since: at first members were just ordinary readers, but authors, bookfluencers and publishers soon joined them.
BookTok’s impact on the publishing world was underlined when, in 2022, the prestigious FutureBook awards, which “recognise digital innovation and excellence across the book trade”, named BookTok as Person of the Year. It raised eyebrows at the time, but two years on, with workshops and other events dedicated to BookTok and bookfluencers now commonplace at book fairs, the award looks well deserved.
When it comes to readers, BookTok has helped many discover or re-discover the joy of reading, especially among younger generations. Recent research from the Publishers Association revealed that 59% of British 16-25 year olds have read more books because of TikTok. And according to a 2023 survey, a significant portion of American TikTok users said that they were reading more thanks to BookTok, with this number reaching 80% in some states: in other words, up to four out of five users would have read less had they not discovered TikTok’s book community.
For publishing houses, BookTok has been a goldmine, helping them sell millions more books: 20 million paper books in 2021 alone, according BookScan. The phenomenon is also driving sales of English-language books in Europe. While there are national BookTok communities, like #booktokitalia, the original #BookTok hashtag has far more posts and lets global audiences discover books that may not yet be available in translation.
Some BookTok bestsellers
So, what books do people actually post about on BookTok? Well, the most popular genres seem to be fantasy, romance, sci-fi and young adult fiction. The last item on this list will not surprise you; what might is that TikTok is no longer the sole preserve of Gen Z: the latest data shows that many millennials – the generation born between the early eighties and the mid-nineties – are now on TikTok too.
Want to know what BookTok says you should read next? These bestsellers are the talk of the town on TikTok.
One book that owes much of its success to TikTok is It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover. If you follow the #booktok hashtag, you’ll soon come across this love story that tackles the issue of domestic violence. Published in 2016, before the “invention” of BookTok, the novel went viral on TikTok during the pandemic. It has sold over 4 million copies to date and brought Hoover fame around the world, especially in Brazil and the Philippines. The book has now been translated into 29 languages and has also been made into a film.
Another genre that’s big on BookTok is the fantasy saga. Particularly popular is Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series, which is set in an elite school for dragon knights. Posts about the first two volumes, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, published in 2023 and 2024 respectively, have garnered over 500 million views, and the saga is being made into a TV series by Amazon.
We touched on reaction videos earlier: posts that show users’ real-time reactions to the books they’re reading. A big trend in reaction videos is “books that make you cry”. Give the hashtag more than a cursory glance and you’re bound to come across A Little Life by American writer Hanya Yanagihara.
This novel is a tale of love, friendship and suffering centred around Jude, a young man struggling to come to terms with harrowing childhood trauma. A hefty 700 pages long, it’s a challenging yet rewarding read.
Another novel with a ton of reaction videos is Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. Published back in 2011, it became a BookTok bestseller almost a decade later in August 2020, when TikToker moongirlreads mentioned the title on a viral post listing “books that will make you sob”. Retelling the tale of Achilles and Patroclus, Miller’s debut has been credited with rekindling younger readers’ interest in Greek mythology.
BookTok may not have revolutionised the way the publishing market works, but it has certainly shaken it up by giving many self-published authors publicity they otherwise wouldn’t have got. A case in point is Olivie Blake, the pen name of Californian author Alexene Farol Follmuth, and her fantasy novel The Atlas Six. Initially self-published, it’s the story of six young magicians competing for a coveted place in a powerful secretive society. Thanks to TikTok, it’s now part of a bestselling trilogy and has secured the author lucrative contracts with some of the world’s largest publishers.
And what about you? Have you ever found a page-turner on BookTok?