Bang for the book

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This article was published 06/12/2024 (586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Don’t be surprised if your favourite young person’s Christmas list includes a few more books this holiday season.

In recent years, teens and young adults have been digging into books, particularly novels, with greater voracity, thanks in large part to the TikTok, the social media platform and app many parents love to hate.

BookTok is a sub-community of TikTok where users can either post their book-related video content or search for existing TikTok posts about books by using the #booktok hashtag.

It’s a phenomenon that took off in part as a response to the COVID-19 lockdowns.

“During the pandemic, people didn’t really have anything else to do. So they were starting to pick up books and post about them,” says Elissa Hall, who handles McNally Robinson Booksellers’ social media for kids’ books and runs the booksellers’ TikTok account.

It wasn’t just new titles that were taking off; popular BookTokers would often post reviews of older books, which would suddenly see a jump in sales and loans at bookstores and libraries.

“The big one for us during that period, and which continues to be big, is (Madeline Miller’s) A Song of Achilles,” says Shamin Alli, senior sales director at HarperCollins Canada.

“That was a backlist title; it was published in 2012, and had fairly consistent sales, but then in that 2020-21 period, it spiked. It’s now gone on to sell over 250,000 units in Canada, across all formats, and still sits in our top title list year over year.”

Alli says HarperCollins — which has a specific publicity contact email for “online reviewers and book bloggers” — also saw sales bumps in titles such as Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, as well as young-adult titles such as Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End and Tahereh Mafi’s Shatter Me.

“Those were titles we were really chasing during that period,” she says. “We were constantly reprinting stock, trying to keep up with the demand. You could see that growth, that excitement online.”

Booksellers also noticed the trend of older titles garnering attention, including Cain’s Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers (a.k.a. Torquemada), a puzzle book originally published in 1934 and quietly re-released in 2019. ​​

”The publisher didn’t have any stock. It was a curiosity that had probably sold next to nothing,” says McNally Robinson’s Matthew Montgomery, who handles the social media for adult titles.

But when it comes to skyrocketing popularity thanks to BookTok, no one can touch Texas author Colleen Hoover, whose 2016 romance novel It Ends With Us became a TikTok sensation.

“All of a sudden we were getting scores of special orders for a book that had been out of print… we were trying to figure out why on earth people were looking for this book,” says Angela Torgerson, general manager at McNally Robinson’s Grant Park location.

“That’s when the younger staff pointed out they’d seen it on TikTok.”

“All of a sudden we were getting scores of special orders for a book that had been out of print.”–Angela Torgerson

Why Hoover in particular enjoyed such a bump isn’t clear.

“I don’t know if there’s a patient zero for this — I don’t know if there was one person that discovered Colleen Hoover,” says Montgomery.

“I think it might have to do with the rise of the reaction video. When you have something that’s so raw, emotion-wise, and somebody has an exaggerated or elevated reaction, it tends to make people curious.

“For Colleen Hoover, I’m betting it was luck — it could have been anybody.”

It Ends With Us topped the New York Times bestseller list in 2022, six years after its publication, selling nearly five million copies over the next two years. A film adaptation was released in August 2024, pushing the book back to the Times’ top spot.

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In addition to modern romance novels, fantasy, science fiction, manga and the fantasy-romance mashup dubbed “romantasy” are among the genres that have seen a significant jump in sales and library lending thanks to BookTok.

“Fiction about inclusion has been popular as well,” says Wilma Bagay, a school library technician in the St. James Assiniboia School Division.

“Some of the books have LGBTTQ+ characters or situations, books that have more of a ‘real’ fiction feel … the same kind of experiences as a high school student.”

A lot of the most popular BookTok titles are relatively easy to spot. Many fantasy titles from wildly popular authors such as Sarah J. Maas, for example, are beefy hardcovers adorned with ornate, Game of Thrones-like scripts and art, and sport fancy coloured, deckled edges.

Today’s romance novels, meanwhile, aren’t the grocery-store bodice-rippers of old; gone are the open-shirted Fabios and buxom babes, replaced by more modern covers featuring relatable couples rendered in stylized illustrations. Popular examples include Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis, Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game and Tessa Bailey’s It Happened One Summer.

“The Love Hypothesis started out as Rey/Kylo Ren fan fiction. I can’t believe I know that,” says Montgomery, laughing, in reference to the Star Wars characters.

“And so the dude on the cover is kind of drawn to look a little like Adam Driver. You couldn’t put Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver on the cover, so you draw them to look like a reasonable facsimile.”

The rise of the romance novel has also seen McNally Robinson venture into new kinds of events.

“We had a rom-com book launch this spring, which was outside of our normal,” says Torgerson. “It was massive. We saw customers from different demographics, customers we don’t usually reach in the same way.

“They’d often buy these books at Shoppers (Drug Mart) or Indigo. It was really exciting.”

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Some books made popular by BookTok may not be quite the right fit for younger TikTok users; the typical trending romance novels, for example, can get a bit explicit, the fantasy novels a bit graphic.

“A lot of teenagers are looking for adult books, because 90 per cent of the books on BookTok are adult books,” Hall says.

“The majority of the time they don’t really know what the book’s about … it’s not often there’s an actual book review on TikTok; it’s usually just a short clip of someone reacting.”

Indeed, some BookTokers seem to plow through more books than seems reasonably possible, keen on pumping out videos to gain/retain followers. More videos and followers equals more review copies from publishers, whether or not the books are actually being read before videos are posted.

The frequency with which some BookTokers post also runs the risk of sapping the joy out of settling in and leisurely enjoying a book.

Regardless, post-lockdown the BookTok trend continues as strongly as ever, with young readers scouring bookstores and libraries for the latest trending titles.

“I still have students, particularly high school students, that will come in and request certain books that I have yet to purchase or have in my collection, books that are popular on BookTok,” notes librarian Bagay.

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As BookTok accounts go, few are as big as the aptly named @bigbooklady.

With more than 275,000 followers and millions of views, likes and comments on each of her BookTok videos, Lauren Hower’s influence has rippled across the TikTok book community.

Like many, Hower started watching and posting BookTok videos around the time the pandemic took hold.

“For the longest time I’d just go to McNally; their new releases section is so well curated that I would often just go there and read book jackets and pick up a couple books,” says the 27-year-old.

“And then during the pandemic, when you couldn’t go to a bookstore, I started watching videos on Tiktok and finding book recommendations there.”

Hower made her first BookTok video as a bit of a joke. “It was titled ‘Books to read on the bus,’ and all the titles were ones that you’d never want people to see you reading on the bus,” she says, laughing.

Having caught the bug, Hower kept posting BookTok videos, connecting with other BookTokers with a similar interest in literary fiction (rather than the more popular romance, fantasy and romantasy genres).

“Most of the people that were also creating similar book content to me, we had full-time jobs … BookTok was just a hobby,” Hower says. “And then I just kept doing it; I was kind of obsessed with it, and wanted to see how far it could go.”

A hairstylist at the time with an art history degree under her belt, Hower would post at least one book-related video a day on TikTok, eventually deciding to hire a social media manager to see about taking things to the next step.

The move paid off — for the last year she has worked full-time for herself as a content creator, posting two to three BookTok videos per week (which she also posts on Instagram as Reels), along with longer, more lifestyle-oriented videos of her day-to-day life on YouTube, where her channel has more than 70,000 subscribers.

“The people who made videos similar to the ones I make, and recommended books similar to books that I recommend, don’t create nearly as much content anymore — that community I forged with those people has tapered off a little bit, and I’ve started moving to other platforms a little bit more,” she says.

“I do still consume a lot of content on BookTok, but not nearly to the same extent that I was.”

Hower earns revenue through ads and sponsored content on both YouTube and TikTok, although when it comes to books, she’s particular about only working with ones that suit her more literary tastes.

“People are surprised that there are videos recommending literary fiction being made,” she says.

“If you search BookTok on TikTok, you’ll mainly see Colleen Hoover-type books, but if you search literary fiction on TikTok, that’s when you start to find this other subculture within the BookTok community.”

Naturally, Hower is reading all the time — either leafing through physical copies of books or listening to audiobooks. And she’s as thankful for the feedback and recommendations she gets from other BookTokers on her posts as she is for the literary discoveries of her own that she’s made on TikTok.

“I wasn’t familiar with Toni Morrison’s writing at all until I saw her recommended on TikTok, and she’s now one of my favorite authors — I’ve read most of her work,” she says.

“She’s such an iconic writer and her books are considered modern classics at this point, but when I started, I had no idea who she even was.”

books@freepress.mb.ca

@bensigurdson