How TikTok Helped Fuel The Best-Selling Year For Print Book
Readers purchased 825 million copies of print books in the U.S. in 2021—the best-selling year for print books, NPD Bookscan says, since it began tracking data in 2004—and analysts believe young people posting about books on social media played a serious role in those big numbers.
A table displays signs with #BookTok, at a Barnes & Noble in Scottsdale, Ariz.,
KEY FACTS
The U.S. print book market was up 9% compared to 2020, according to NPD Bookscan, finishing 67 million copies ahead of 2020, and selling 125 million more copies than in 2019.
Kristen McLean, executive director and industry analyst at NPD Bookscan, said social media—particularly TikTok users who post about books, known collectively as BookTok—has “definitely been a factor” in surging book sales, along with the pandemic in general, with many of the sales gains coming in Q1 and Q2 before the Covid-19 vaccines were widely available.
TikTok’s influence particularly began in 2020, and primarily boosted sales in the Young Adult category, McLean said, noting the trend “started in the teen book space, but it’s not just the teen book space,” before eventually spreading to Adult Fiction and Adult Nonfiction.
Adult Fiction led the growth of sales in 2021, up 25% from the previous year and driving more than half of 2021’s overall market gains, according to NPD Bookscan, and Young Adult had its best year in NPD Bookscan history, with sales quadrupling compared to 2004 data.
The romance novel It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover was the second best-selling Adult Fiction book and sixth best-selling book overall in 2021—selling more than 770,000 copies last year—despite being a backlist title originally published in 2016, and McLean believes that is “almost exclusively there because of BookTok,” where it was championed.
Other books that emerged as popular on TikTok, according to McLean, include They Both Die At The End by Adam Silvera (published in 2017, selling 685,000 copies in 2021) and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (published in 2012 and selling 650,000 copies in 2021—and ranking as the fourth best-selling Adult Fiction book).
BookTok can often be the first stop for popular titles on best-seller lists, according to McLean. Retailers like Barnes & Noble keep track of popular titles on the app, and advertise them as BookTok favorites. “BookTok gets excited about it, the retailers pay attention, merchandise it, other people find it, other retailers start to find it because the numbers start to go up, and it takes off,” McLean said. “It starts with BookTok and then it just ripples out from there.” BookTokers who get enough views are eligible to be a part of TikTok’s Creator Fund—a pool of money distributed based on a creator’s share of the platform’s overall views—or can get sponsorships to discuss companies or products in their videos. Some BookTokers also add link lists to their accounts, where they can include affiliate links for their viewers to purchase books they discuss, discount codes for bookstores and their own Amazon wishlists.
TANGENT
McLean first noticed the TikTok trend during the fall of 2020. We Were Liars, a young adult novel by E. Lockhart which was published in 2014, began rising up the teen bestseller list. McLean looked into it, and found out that Lockhart hadn’t done an event or promotion, so she started investigating on social media. She found a tweet from Lockhart thanking a TikToker for posting a video about her book, and she made the connection (TikToks tagged with #wewereliars now have more than 82 million views). Lockhart told Forbes she first found out about We Were Liars’ renewed success from the teenagers in her life, and discovered a number of videos on the app featuring people’s reaction to the book, which often included a lot of crying. “It wasn’t like they were sharing the plot, or the premise or anything like that, they were just sharing a real gut, vulnerable reaction,” Lockhart said.
CRUCIAL QUOTE
Lockhart’s prequel, Family of Liars, comes out on May 3, and she credits BookTok’s interest in the book, in part, for making her think about the We Were Liars world again. “People have been asking me for a prequel for a long time,” Lockhart said. “But I don’t think I would have kept trying, if there hadn’t been demand for it.”
BIG NUMBER
35.8 billion. That’s how many views TikToks tagged with #booktok have received—and several individual TikToks with the tag have more than 10 million views each.
CONTRA
The demand for book recommendations doesn’t end on TikTok—it’s also crossed over onto YouTube. Jack Edwards, a 23-year-old YouTuber, said interest in his videos about books exploded in 2021—despite initially being hesitant to post content about reading. “It was always the thing I kept out of my videos, because I thought no one would care,” Edwards said. “It was always like the thing that was too niche and was too specific to me and what I was reading—it felt weird to share it.” Edwards has been on YouTube for over four years, but switched to exclusively publishing book content in 2021, posting videos that tie reading to other major interests for Gen Z, like Harry Styles or Taylor Swift, and found a whole new community and audience. “My channel quadrupled in size in the last year since I started doing it,” Edwards said. “It took me five years on YouTube to get to 200,000 subscribers, which I hit at the beginning of 2021. And I just hit 800,000.” Ava Jules, a 21-year-old lifestyle vlogger with 1.5 million YouTube subscribers and 450,000 TikTok followers, also decided to include book content on her YouTube channel in 2021—after some worries about how viewers would react. “I was so nervous because I was like, ‘Ugh, this video is going to flop,’ but whatever,” Jules said. “I posted it and it was one of my best videos of the year.” “Books You NEED to Read in 2022,” one of Jules’ videos, racked up nearly 400,000 views and has thousands of comments—one of her favorite parts of posting book videos on her channel. “I never get more comments than on my book videos,” she said.“I think a lot of people want to get into it now these days—it’s just getting a lot more popular.” Like TikTokers, YouTubers are eligible for YouTube’s Partner Program to earn money for their videos, and can also score sponsorships and include affiliate links in their video descriptions.