TikTok Craze Fuels Book Purchases

I read that in the UK, publishers are saying the popularity of readers discussing their favorite books on TikTok helped lift sales to record levels in 2021. 

Total book sales rose 5% to £6.7 billion last year, with fiction, children's and young adult all performing well, the Publishers Association said. 

And four of the top five young adult bestsellers in 2021 had been driven by the BookTok trend. They included hit titles like Adam Silvera’s “They Both Die at the End” and E Lockhart's “We Were Liars”. 

[Note: The former which was the top-selling young adult book of 2021, according to Nielsen, was first published in 2017 before enjoying a resurgence. And the latter which was third on the list, originally came out in 2014]. 

Publishers Association chief executive Stephen Lotinga claimed viral videos on platforms like TikTok had been "really significant" in encouraging readers to discover books. 

He said: "Anecdotally, we've had lots of individual booksellers talking about the fact that they're having lots of young people coming into their book stores, talking about books that they have heard about on TikTok and asking for them. 

A huge amount of what is being driven by TikTok is in print sales, and we are finding a lot of young adults are discovering books they love, sharing them with friends and driving sales and new interest, and that can only be a good thing”. 

He added that “BookTokkers” were often eschewing the latest releases and instead rediscovering books that are sometimes decades old. An extreme example was how, just before Christmas, an unexpected hit was Cain’s Jawbone, written as a murder mystery puzzle by Edward Powys Mathers under the pen-name Torquemada in 1934. It became popular when TikTok user Sarah Scannell posted a series of videos charting her quest to solve the puzzle. 

On a related note, I think Myriad Publishers are right to focus on online sales with regard to their book “The Diamond in Your Speech”. It’s really not worth to actively distribute to physical bookstores! 

After all, according to UK’s The Guardian in a David Barnett piece “UK publishers take £6.7bn in sales as TikTok crazes fuel purchases” published April 21, 2022, “two thirds of books bought in physical bookshops are “unplanned purchases” – picked up because they caught the buyer’s eye. Conversely, the same proportion of book sales online are planned – shoppers go to buy precisely what they are looking for, and don’t browse for other things while there”.

“The Diamond in Your Speech” is a book that is a practical guide to public speaking and methinks, people are less likely to buy it on a whim.