“We Were Liars” came out in 2014, so when the book’s author,
E. Lockhart, saw that it was back on the bestseller list last summer, she was
delighted. And confused.
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“I had no idea what the hell was happening,” she said.
Lockhart’s children filled her in: It was because of TikTok.
An app known for serving up short videos on everything from
dance moves to fashion tips, cooking tutorials and funny skits, TikTok is not
an obvious destination for book buzz. But videos made mostly by women in their
teens and 20s have come to dominate a growing niche under the hashtag #BookTok,
where users recommend books, record time lapses of themselves reading, or sob
openly into the camera after an emotionally crushing ending.
These videos are starting to sell a lot of books, and many
of the creators are just as surprised as everyone else.
“I want people to feel what I feel,” said Mireille Lee, 15,
who started @alifeofliterature in February with her sister, Elodie, 13, and now
has nearly 200,000 followers. “At school, people don’t really acknowledge
books, which is really annoying.”
Many Barnes & Noble locations around the United States
have set up BookTok tables displaying titles like “They Both Die at the End,”
“The Cruel Prince,” “A Little Life,” and others that have gone viral. There is
no corresponding Instagram or Twitter table, however, because no other
social-media platform seems to move copies the way TikTok does.
“These creators are unafraid to be open and emotional about
the books that make them cry and sob or scream or become so angry they throw it
across the room, and it becomes this very emotional 45-second video that people
immediately connect with,” said Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes
& Noble. “We haven’t seen these types of crazy sales — I mean tens of
thousands of copies a month — with other social media formats.”
The Lee sisters, who live in Brighton, England, started
making BookTok videos while bored at home during the pandemic. Many of their posts
feel like tiny movie trailers, where pictures flash across the screen to a
moody soundtrack.
For “The Cruel Prince,” you see the book cover, then a woman
riding a horse, a bloody goblet, a castle in a tree — each for a split second
while the Billie Eilish song “you should see me in a crown” plays in the
background. No need for a spoiler alert: The whole thing is over in about 12
seconds, leaving you with the feeling of the book, but little sense of what
happens in it.
The video they created that highlights “We Were Liars” has
been viewed more than 5 million times.
The vast majority of BookTok videos happen organically,
posted by enthusiastic young readers. For publishers it has been an unexpected
jolt: an industry that depends on people getting lost in the printed word is
getting dividends from a digital app built for fleeting attention spans. Now
publishers are starting to catch on, contacting those with big followings to
offer free books or payment in exchange for publicizing their titles. (The Lee
sisters have received books from authors but have yet to be contacted by
publishers or paid for their posts.)
Many popular TikTok users have strategies to maximize views.
They might use background songs that are already doing well on the app, for
example, use TikTok’s analytics to see what time of day their posts do the best
and try to put up videos on a regular schedule. But it’s still tricky to
predict what will take off.
“Ideas that take me 30 seconds to come up with, those do
really well, and the ones I work on for days or hours, those completely tank,”
said Pauline Juan, a student who, at 25, says she feels “a little older” than
many on BookTok. “But the most popular videos are about the books that make you
cry. If you’re crying on camera, your views go up!”
Most of the BookTok favorites are books that sold well when
they were first published, and some are award winners, like “The Song of
Achilles,” which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012, a prestigious
fiction prize. The novel retells the Greek myth of Achilles as a romance
between him and his companion Patroclus. It does not have a happy ending.
“Hey, this is Day 1 of me reading ‘The Song of Achilles,’”
Ayman Chaudhary, a 20-year-old in Chicago, posted on TikTok, holding the book
next to her Burberry pattern hijab and smiling face.
“And this is me finishing it!” she bawls into the camera,
the on-screen captions helpfully describing “dramatic wailing & yelling.”
The video, which has been viewed more than 150,000 times, lasts about seven
seconds.
The #songofachilles hashtag has 19 million views on TikTok.
“I wish I could send them all chocolates!” said Madeline
Miller, the book’s author.
Published in 2012, “The Song of Achilles” sold well, but not
nearly as well as it’s selling now. According to NPD BookScan, which tracks
print copies of books sold at most US retailers, “The Song of Achilles” is
selling about 10,000 copies a week, roughly nine times as much as when it won
the prestigious Orange Prize. It is third on the New York Times bestseller list
for paperback fiction.
Miriam Parker, a vice president and associate publisher at
Ecco, which released “The Song of Achilles,” said the company saw sales spike
on August 9 but couldn’t figure out why. It eventually traced it to a TikTok
video called “books that will make you sob,” published on August 8 by
@moongirlreads_. Today, that video, which also includes “We Were Liars,” has
been viewed nearly 6 million times.
Miller, who described herself as “barely functional on
Twitter,” said she didn’t know about the TikTok videos until her publisher
pointed them out. “I feel speechless in the best way,” she said. “Could there
be anything better for a writer than to see people taking their work to heart?”
The person behind @moongirlreads_ is Selene Velez, an 18-year-old
from the Los Angeles area who joined TikTok last year, while finishing high
school on Zoom. She said she made the “books that will make you sob” video
because a commenter asked her for tear-jerker recommendations.
Velez, who has more than 130,000 followers on TikTok, said
that publishers now send her free books before they hit the market so she can
post about them, and she has started making videos that publishers pay her to
create, as well. She and about two dozen other BookTok creators have an ongoing
chat on Instagram about which publishers have approached them and what they are
charging. The fees range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per post.
John Adamo, the head of marketing for Random House
Children’s Books, said it now works with about 100 TikTok users. Once a title
takes off on TikTok, he said, the machine of publishing can start to get behind
it: Big retailers can discount it, a publisher might start running ads, and if
a book becomes a bestseller, that also leads to more sales. But without TikTok,
he said, “we wouldn’t be talking about this at all.”
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