Bringing Back Books: How TikTok is Leading the Print Book Revival
Meghan Welker, 22, has been a fan of Star Wars since she was 8 years old, watching A New Hope with her dad on the weekends. Since then, she has become a self-proclaimed fangirl of pretty much every major mainstream fan group out there. From Harry Potter to Hunger Games to both Star Trek and Star Wars, Welker is a lover of it all.
Luckily, she has a multitude of online spaces to be able to share this love. While many associate fandom spaces with older platforms like Tumblr, true fanatics can follow the shift from Tumblr to Twitter, and now all the way over to TikTok. The fandom spaces on TikTok provide short form video ways for audiences to create a new style of content to share their passion with each other. For instance, the tag #starwars alone has over 72 billion views.
Perhaps one of the places where TikTok contributed to one of the biggest resurgences, however, was the platform it gave book fandoms. Harry Potter, one of the most recognizable book fandoms in the world, has over 135 billion views on the tag #HarryPotter alone. The Hunger Games, another popular book fandom that Meghan mentioned, has over 7.9 billion views on the #HungerGames.
But it’s not only existing fandoms that have created a space for themselves on TikTok. Books with previously little to no popularity have seen huge spikes in their sales for going viral on the side of TikTok known as BookTok.
The BookTok Effect
The top selling book to 2022 was Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, selling 2.7 million copies. The part that makes this impressive? The book was released in 2016. Hoover actually managed to place top three on the best sellers list of 2022, with her 2018 novel Verity placing second and her newest release It Starts With Us placing third.
Hoover has made a name for herself for writing contemporary romance novels popular with female young adult audiences. Her books are known for their witty characters, spicy romances, and plot twists, although her style within the romance genre can span from purely romantic to psychological thriller.
Experts believe that this sudden wash of popularity is “almost exclusively there because of BookTok,” and the numbers can back this up. BookTok as a tag began going viral around 2020. Hoover’s books began climbing their way to the tops of the charts in 2021 and made number one by 2022. It Ends With Us specifically has over 2.3 billion views on its TikTok tag, and Colleen Hoover has over 3.8 billion views on the tag of her name.
And it wasn’t only Hoover’s books that saw a spike in popularity. The sale of print books as a whole saw a rise as the BookTok community grew.
Other published books from several years before the rise of BookTok also saw similar results to Hoover, although not to the same extent. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller was published in 2012, but ranked at the fourth best-selling book in 2021, nearly a decade after its original publication. The tag for this book has over 355.9 million views, and Madeline Miller’s tag has over 102 million.
The Song of Achilles retells the story of Greek hero Achilles and his friend and speculated lover Patroclus. Miller’s version makes the romance between the two men explicit, telling their lives as a love story through the Trojan war.
But BookTok doesn’t only bring new bestsellers to light. The space that it provides old book fandoms to create new content has led to social media phenomenon of the Twilight renaissance in 2020. While the original series by Stephanie Meyers may have come out in 2005, there are over 22.4 billion views on the TikTok twilight tag. Many of these videos are edits, spoofs, or parodies of the original series, where new audiences explore the dramatics of the series.
Similar to Twilight, the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is currently seeing a resurgence. With the original audience now old enough to take a more nuanced look at the series, this uptick in conversation around the books has led to borderline-academic videos being made analyzing different aspects of the series. With 7.9 billion views for #HungerGames and 3.1 billion views for #thehungergames, there is a rise in the academic conversations around books alongside the parodies and edits.
The Community of Fandoms
This ever-shifting discourse around the different books that people love, and the space to be able to talk about all of them, are some of the things that make online platforms for fandoms important. Historically, fans were known for creating discourse in online spaces, as well as posting fan art, edits, or stories based on the original series known as fanfiction.
TikTok doesn’t take away from these typical fan behaviors so much as add to them. It is now easier than ever to show off fan content such as cosplaying different characters. Fans are able to act out scenes from books or movies with thematically correct music, or even movie audio, playing in the background for them to act along to. The cosplay tags for several major book fandoms frequently have several million views. For instance, #hungergamescosplay has 6.3 million views, #twilightcosplay has 116.7 million views, and #harrypottercosplay has an impressive 766 million views.
However, it’s not as if cosplay is replacing fan art or fanfiction. Artists can now post videos of themselves creating the art, and frequently people post duets or reaction videos to these art posts. TikTok also has a carousel video style, where the video will scroll through different still images posted in one group, similar to a carousel post on Instagram.
Similarly, fanfiction authors are now creating teaser trailers to their works, or posting snippets of their writing to music that matches the energy of the piece. Fanfiction readers have also been known to post “fic rec” videos, where they recommend fanfiction to other people within the fandom. In fact, the tag #ficrecs has 37.5 million views, full of different people in different fandoms promoting the creative works of other people with similar interests.
Interestingly, the creative freedom that comes with being able to easily promote written, drawn, and acted out works on the same platform has created a sort of meta-level to fandom communities, in which people create fan works or cosplays of characters as they are within specific fanfictions or fan art pieces, as opposed to the original material. For example, the #atyd, a reference to a famous Harry Potter fanfiction, has over 1.6 billion views on TikTok, putting it at more views than the Song of Achilles tag, or any of the major book fandom cosplay tags.
This major drive within fandom spaces to create content and continue conversations about characters and plotlines that have a mutually shared love creates a space of comfort and expression for people who may not feel like they have other places to share their thoughts on different content they enjoy. Online spaces for fandoms gather like-minded people into spaces where their individual interests compile until as a collective, they have enough power to change industries.
