Crying while reading is a TikTok bestseller
The Future. Thanks to TikTok, romance novels are flying off the shelves and minting new star authors. Just like musicians, every author may soon be handed a TikTok strategy by their publisher to get on trend. But with the hashtag #BookTok also being an engagement machine for TikTok, the platform could consider building a discovery hub dedicated to new authors or sharing exclusive excerpts from popular writers.
Page-scrollerTikTok has made reading romance novels go viral.
According to Bloomberg, #BookTok — the top trending hashtag on TikTok this year — is on the verge of hitting 100 billion views.
Four of the top five books with the most engagement in videos were romances, thanks to dedicated review and recommendation accounts for “books that made me cry.”
That has boosted sales of print copies of romance novels by 51% to 32.3 million over the past year, according to data from NPD Group (print copy sales are down overall, though).
Shannon DeVito, the director of books for Barnes & Noble (which has taken full advantage of the #BookTok trend), says romance novels have taken off because “you’re going to have a happy ending nine times out of 10.” In these times, that’s all some people want.
For You, For EverybodyProbably the biggest beneficiary of #BookTok is Colleen Hoover.
Her popularity skyrocketed in 2020 when her book It Ends With Us trended on TikTok… four years after it debuted. It has now spent 79 weeks on NYT’s Bestseller list.
When the book’s sequel, It Starts With Us, hit shelves in October, it sold 800,000 copies in its first week.
Overall, she has sold 8 million books this year, with four titles selling over 1 million copies. She also has the five best-selling titles in the entire romance genre. Wow.
With a combined three million followers on TikTok and Instagram, Hoover may be the first literary star of the social media era.
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