Readers Can’t Get Enough of BookTok. Publishers Are Cashing In.

0:04For Leah Koch, the romance novel is life. She's loved romance since she was a teenager. What is it that draws you so much to this type of writing? Great question. Let's quickly define what a romance novel is. You need two things to be a romance novel. You need a central love story and a happy ending. And the happy ending, sometimes people try to get around for some reason, but you can't. They have to be together and happy at the end. They do not have to be heterosexually married with a baby, but like one of them can't get hit by a bus. Because that's a tragedy, right? Yeah, or a train a la Anna Karenina.

0:44Anna Karenina is not a romance novel. She dies. Got it, got it. Anyway, I read to have fun. Same. And romance novels are fun. Leah loves romance so much that in 2016, she and her sister opened up a bookstore devoted to it. It's called The Ripped Bodice and it's got locations in LA and in Brooklyn. The store is full of passionate experts who can help you find pretty much any kind of romance. So if you ask somebody for cowboy werewolves, number one, they're going to take your request very seriously. And number two, they're going to say, OK, here are the two options that we have. But if you're interested in that, you might also be interested in cowboy mermaids or werewolf doctors.

1:33Romance has always had its audience. But Leah says that over the last few years, she's seen a surge of interest. At first, it was just a few people coming in with surprising requests. They started asking for things that I wasn't expecting. So series that I had read and enjoyed but weren't, like, top of mind. The first person, I was like, totally. By the fifth person, I was like, how do you know about this series? Yeah. And she was like, oh my God, it's all anyone's reading on TikTok.

2:12TikTok, or specifically BookTok, the part of the platform that's all about books, was pulling in new audiences to romance. And it kept happening. Customers would come in and ask for a book because they'd seen it on TikTok. Very notably to me, it was actually translating to sales. And young people were coming into the shop and they were coming with shopping lists of things that they had seen on TikTok. And so we would start clocking, like whatever they were asking for, we're like, okay, we need to order more copies because next week, like, there's going to be a thing that everybody wants. Today, people are still showing up at the Rip Bodice because of TikTok.

2:57But the influence of BookTok has gone way beyond a single independent bookstore. Since 2020, BookTok has driven major sales, especially in the romance and fantasy genres. In one survey, TikTok found that more than a quarter of its users bought a book or started following an author after watching a video on the platform. And some of the largest publishers in the U.S. are finding new talent, rethinking their strategies, and seeing windfalls from old titles because of TikTok. Authors, influencers, agents, and publishers all told us that today, TikTok's fingerprints are all over the book industry.

3:39Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Wednesday, December 18th.

3:52Coming up on the show, TikTok and the book industry, a love story.

4:12Author Penn Cole reads a lot of different books in the romance genre. I'm actually getting into sports romance lately, which is fun. I read my first hockey romance. I love that you can just sort of take the word romance and add a different word, and it's a whole category of books. It's amazing. Exactly. Billionaire romance. Yes. Hockey romance. Mafia romance. It's a whole thing. Penn's own books fall into a genre called romanticy, a combination of romance and fantasy that typically has a few main ingredients. a strong, usually female, main character, a love interest, who often starts out as an enemy, and then some kind of supernatural element, like dragons or sorcerers, or in a lot of cases, fairies.

4:58And the plot is usually peppered with spicy sex scenes. It's the kind of novel Penn had dreamed of writing, but she didn't think she could make any money in it. And so I went into a different career for many years thinking, well, someday I'll write my book. Like, I'll get there someday. And then during the pandemic, as I think many people did, I sort of reassessed what I wanted out of life and whether I was really happy with where I was. And I realized that I really wanted to write that book that I'd always been kind of dreaming about writing. So I took a risk and I wrote my first book. That book is called Spark of the Everflame.

5:42It's the first in a four-part series, The Kindred's Curse Saga. And it's got a feisty heroine, a hot immortal prince, a human rebel faction, and a whole lot of will they, won't they. Penn read me a snippet. I was made of swinging fists and rash words, my edges too jagged and my temper too hot. Nothing about me was delicate. Sometimes I wondered whether Henry's taste had changed or whether he thought he saw something different in me, the nurturing healer who stepped up to care for her family in her mother's absence. But I didn't choose to be a healer, nor did I choose to take my mother's role. And I didn't want gentle or delicate.

6:21I wanted to burn. Ooh! I got little shivers there with that last line. I know.

6:32When Penn started writing that first book in 2021, she'd already decided that she wanted to self-publish. She'd been to law school and worked as a consultant for small businesses, helping them with branding, social media, and growth. So she was pretty savvy when it came to launching her own career as an author. Why did you choose to self-publish? I was never afraid of the business aspect of being an author. The idea of marketing my book, of handling all of the financial details, the legal details, figuring out what the cover would be, all of that stuff excited me. So I knew pretty early on that I wanted to self-publish because, frankly, if you're going to do all of that work yourself, you want to keep the money.

7:17Because when you traditionally publish, you end up giving away quite a bit of your money. And so I thought, well, if I'm willing to do the work, I might as well, you know, reap the benefits of it. And Penn quickly learned that a lot of that work needed to happen on social media. You have to be where the readers are and find ways for them to see you and to know that you even exist. Because you're not going to have the big promotions that these huge publishing houses get. Your books aren't going to be on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. you're not going to be, you know, listed as a hot book to read in, you know, Vogue magazine or something.

7:58So even before she'd finished writing her books, Penn made an official TikTok account. And it was there that she found a lot of the readers she was looking for. They were on BookTok. BookTok really took off during the pandemic, when many readers were stuck at home. One of the first books that went viral on BookTok is Colleen Hoover's dark romance novel, It Ends With Us. Colleen Hoover was doing something when she wrote, It Ends With Us. Because believe me, when I started this book, my life ended. And it's crazy to think that this one book will probably change my life forever. This book did make me cry.

8:32I think it's an important read, and I can understand why it got so popular on TikTok. Hoover's book had already been considered a commercial success when it came out in 2016. But when users on BookTok picked up on it, the sales went bananas. Hoover's publisher told me that by 2021 weekly sales for It Ends With Us were 100 times more than what they'd been two years before Hoover later published a sequel and earlier this year It Ends With Us was adapted into a movie Other authors have also broken through like Sarah J. Maas with her fairy series A Court of Thorns and Roses which I devoured way too fast There's also Rebecca Yaros and her novel Fourth Wing

9:16and while not everyone makes it as big booktalk has raised up other romance and fantasy authors tiktok says that this year there was a 300 increase in posts with the hashtag romanticy and the romanticy genre has grown into a 471 million dollar category so pen cole was able to ride this wave on BookTok. How did you try and build a following or a community on BookTok? What's the secret sauce there? Well, that is the million-dollar question. If you knew how to answer that easily, you would make a lot of money. Penn didn't have all the answers, but she did have a strategy to win over BookTok readers.

10:00She published the first three books of her four-part series quickly, within a few months, knowing romantic-y fans love a good binge. And she used the self-publishing platform on Amazon so Kindle readers could access the book and physical copies could be printed on demand. Penn also posted about once a day on TikTok and other social media platforms. Was there a specific goal you had in mind? I think in the early days, I really thought you needed to go viral. I thought that I was shooting for that video that got a million views and that that would make or break my career. I have since learned that is not how it works at all.

10:40It is so much more complicated than that. And so what changed your mind and how did you like adjust? At some point, I think I did have a video. It wasn't one of my videos, but it was a video somebody else made about my book. Here's the video. The video was posted just a few months after Penn released her first book. Shout out Penn Cole, this author. She was just exquisite. And I saw a spike and I thought, this is it. Like I've made it. My book's going to be huge. And then two days later, you know, the sales dropped down to what they were before, the views stopped, because that's what virality is.

11:26It's a moment. And I think I learned after that that this is a long-haul thing. So Penn refined her strategy. She made sure every post had details like what hashtags to use and a description of her series. It was a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall and waiting to see what sticks. I had joined a lot of groups on TikTok for authors, and I was, you know, uploading art and making memes out of my characters. I was, you know, doing videos about me as an author. And so it was just every single day trying something new and hoping that something would strike a chord with readers. Girl, how much time did this take?

12:13So much time. So all of the time. Eventually, Penn found her footing on TikTok. Readers who were fans of other romanticcy books started picking up on her series. I just finished the first book in the Kindred Curse Saga, The Spark of the Everflame, and it was absolute perfection. I was so obsessed and binged it so quickly within like a day and a half that I am currently charging my Kindle so that I can read the second part. I can't for the life of me remember which one of my mutuals read and raved about this book. But whoever you are, I love you. I started to see my book growing in sales without a viral moment at a very steady, regular pace.

13:01And it was just by talking to people, replying to comments when people said, oh, I'm interested in that book or asking questions about it. you know, looking at videos that people who had read my book, if they made a video about it, thanking them and talking to them in DMs about what they liked or what their theories were, really engaging with them. The first month I sold maybe a hundred copies. I can't remember exactly. And it was like a thousand dollars. And I was stoked. I was so excited. I thought I had just had the greatest, you know, debut release of all time, making that$1 ,000. Of course, it cost me way more than that to put out the book.

13:44So I was still deeply in the red. And then the next month, it like quadrupled. And then the next month, it like added a digit. Wow. And it grew and grew and grew. I think by the end of the first year, I think we'd sold like 300 ,000 copies of the books. Those numbers were just kind of mind-boggling. A lot of this growth came from e-book sales. But Penn felt that if she wanted to get bigger, she needed to actually get her book into bookstores, which is really hard to do without a publisher. There's still a huge segment of the market that doesn't read e-book at all. So I knew that I had the potential to really grow my reader base in a significant way if I could get into those bookstores, but that door was pretty much shut to me other than a handful of bookstores that had stopped my books.

14:41One publisher caught Penn's eye, Atria, which is part of one of the biggest publishing houses, Simon & Schuster. Penn liked how Atria worked with social media. And Atria was into Penn too. The brand was keeping an eye out for self-published authors who'd already built a big audience. In July of this year, they got together. Atria would publish Penn's novels in print and get them in more bookstores. And so far, it's made the difference she hoped it would. I think by the end of the year, we're going to hit a million copies sold in about a year and a half of the books being on the market, which is unheard of.

15:17I mean, even the average traditionally published book is only selling maybe five figures if they're lucky, right? It's just, it's crazy to think about. As publishers take note of success stories like pens, they're also recognizing that TikTok offers really precise information into what readers want. And that new insight is shaking up the publishing industry. That's next.

15:59BookTok has jolted the publishing industry, which is usually pretty stagnant. Serkana BookScan, a publishing tracker, says that in a typical year, overall print sales grow or shrink by about only 1 to 2 percent. And this year was no exception. But for BookTok authors, it's a different story. In the U.S., BookTok authors sold 20 percent more books in print this year than the year before. That's 55.4 million books. And that has piqued the interest of some of the country's biggest book publishers. Hi, I'm Felicity. I'm the director of digital marketing for Penguin Young Readers at Penguin Random House.

16:39Felicity Valance has been in legacy publishing for nearly two decades. And she says BookTok allows her to reach readers in a way that she was never able to before, even on other social platforms. So obviously the algorithm when we talk about TikTok is the more you scroll and engage with certain pieces of content, the more it will feed you that content, whether it's creators that you follow or things that you save. TikTok will then say, oh, this person likes this. We'll give them more of that. And that's different than how algorithms worked with other social media platforms in the past. In the past.

17:12Correct. Yeah. It used to be either chronologically or just like who had the most clicks and engagement, who had the most views. That's what you were being served. That shift from being shown what is generally popular to what you were interested in meant that readers didn't have to look for content about the books they liked. It was just served up to them. In fact, that's what happened to me. BookTok kept feeding me content, and I kept eating it up. There were straight-up book reviews, sure. But people also use memes. They make skits about their favorite plot points. They joke about story tropes.

17:49and they share their opinions on everything from character arcs to book covers. So now, with BookTok, someone like Felicity, from her perch at Penguin Random House, is able to see in real time what readers actually care about, what books were featured in the videos with the most comments, which titles were being recommended the most. And then she can respond accordingly. So I think there's a lot of listening to readers that TikTok has really amplified. We're able to sort of see trends emerge. You know, romanticism isn't a word that we all talked about three years ago. So seeing romanticism come out of places like TikTok, publishers and editors were able to sort of say, right, what could I acquire that suits this?

18:30Our sales team are able to say, what do we have that already exists on our list that could suit this reader's interests? That second look at old titles in particular has led to a slew of re-releases in the BookTok era. because publishers realized if you give its packaging a glow up and put it in the hands of the right influencers, a book years or even decades old can see a fresh uptick in sales. We are aware of books from our backlist that the read itself really speaks to what the reader's interested in, but maybe it doesn't look right amongst what's on the shelves right now. And so is there an opportunity for a reader to rediscover that if it had the new jacket?

19:07But also I think it's more a case of new readers discovering it. We're aware that a book that we know to be existing for a long time, they may have never heard of. I'm still flabbergasted when people sort of bring up old books and be like, I found this new great book. It's called The Fault in Our Stars. And I think, what? How is that not monolithically heard about? But people do. And so we're really aware of it's not an old book repackaged to them. It's just a new book. And BookTok hasn't just changed how publishers are thinking about marketing their catalog. Felicity has also been trying to work with authors and influencers to get her books in front of the right readers.

19:43So we kind of pivoted our resources a little bit and said, you know what, let's focus on creating content for this platform more for our key core audience. Would you say that TikTok today is more influential than, say, a publisher's weekly review or, you know, a ranking, a top 10 books of the year ranking? It really depends on the book. It totally depends on who the readers are. And I think all of those things still matter in their own way. And the lightning strike of TikTok can be happening one day and then the next day it's not. And if I had the viral button to press, I'd press it every day.

20:20If only. If only. Oh, I'd love it. Despite the powerful impact that BookTok has had on publishing, it also comes with challenges. For one thing, romance and fantasy are often taken less seriously by the broader literary mainstream. If you look up chatter about book talk on other corners of the internet, you'll find a lot of haters. Here's one tweet to give you a taste. Quote, book talk style books are anti-literacy, anti-art, and reading stuff like that is not the same as reading actual literature. I brought this up with Felicity. There's the criticism that book talk books are not that quote unquote good.

20:58How do you respond to that? And have you heard that? I have absolutely heard that. And I will fight people about that. No, that sounds very aggressive. But I think to judge someone's reading tastes like that is really dangerous. Reading is such an enjoyable pastime that we want people to not feel pressured to read the right books. We want them just to be entertained and have fun or be serious or learn. and yeah, I don't like the idea of saying book talk books are bad. I think people have different tastes and also the tastes of someone who reads 20 books a year versus the person who reads two books a year are wildly different.

21:36How does that play into this maybe broader view that genres like romance and fantasy and young adult fiction are not like taken seriously? I mean, I think it's like all entertainment orientated towards women that that tends to be given a side eye and I don't love it because I think that's wrong. This is something book talk authors feel as well. Here's Penn Cole again. It's very real. I actually just had a conversation with my publisher. They, you know, wanted to put viral book talk hit, you know, book talk sensation, Penn Cole, putting it in ads, pretty much everywhere that you need to sort of describe the book because that communicates to booksellers in particular, bookstores and buyers for these big book chains.

22:28That's sort of a code word for this book has a lot of fans. It has a big reader base. But for readers, I think it has a very different connotation. And I had to sit down with my publisher and say, I'm not sure that putting this in reader-facing spaces is necessarily the best idea. Because there is a big group of people that feels as if BookTok books are not any good, it sort of gets painted with a broad brush where people discount my books and assume they're going to be fluff, they're not going to be serious, the writing quality will be bad, they'll be unedited, or they will make all these assumptions about what's inside my book without ever giving me a chance.

23:13And like with all social media, People on TikTok can be mean, and being in it all the time can be rough on authors. I can't even count the number of times I have cried or, you know, had to just go and get offline because someone said something really mean. And of course, they have every right to say that, right? Like, we want people to give honest reviews, but as an author, seeing it can be hard. The worst part for Penn was having to push back the release of the fourth and final book in her series. Because being a book talk author is a lot of work and it leaves less time for, well, writing. Of course, most of my readers were so supportive and so kind about it and said, take all the time you need.

23:59But I mean, to be very honest about it, I had to start going to therapy. I had to seek professional help because it was, I felt so guilty. I really beat myself up over it. I thought I was given this opportunity to have a best-selling book that was doing really well and that I was going to ruin it. It starts to have an effect no matter how mentally strong you are. One thing we should note, looming over all of this is a possible ban on TikTok in the U.S., a ban that's meant to start in January. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear TikTok's challenge to the ban before it goes into effect. Still, there's a real risk that the platform goes away.

24:37But even if that happens, a lot of other social media sites now operate the way TikTok does. So BookTok's legacy is likely to live on. That's especially true for readers. And in particular, those who love cowboy-werewolf romances and sexy fairy love stories. Penn says BookTok has given these readers more agency. Traditionally, you know, for as long as books have existed, it has been a handful of gatekeepers in the biggest publishing houses that have decided what readers are going to read. And now publishers are rushing to keep up with what the readers are saying they like, as opposed to publishers telling readers, this is what you get to choose from.

25:26It sounds like you think TikTok will have elastic effect on the publishing industry. I think TikTok is changing and will continue to change everything about publishing. It's giving readers power that they have never had before. It's allowing authors to hold on to their rights, to make money outside of the publishing machine. I think the publishers who pay attention and who adapt rather than resisting are going to really rise to the top. So I think that has, it's really like a sea change that is in the process of occurring right now. I don't even think we know yet the full effects of how it's going to change publishing.

26:21That's all for today, Wednesday, December 18th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.