BookTok Business

There’s pressure for writers to be on TikTok — but is it for every writer?

Writing Magazine — May 2023

This piece first appeared in the May 2023 issue of Writing Magazine.

In 2022, the Publishers’ Association attributed some of 2021’s five per cent rise in book sales to the social media platform TikTok. They even went as far as saying that sales for four out of every five young adult bestsellers in 2021 were because of the video platform and its #BookTok hashtag.

Understandably, traditional publishers are encouraging their authors to make use of the social media platform, and self-published authors are finding success through it too. What’s exciting many publishers and authors is there’s evidence that TikTok’s BookTok hashtag is breathing new life into an author’s backlist.

In early 2020, the lifetime sales of US author Colleen Hoover’s books stood at 237,000 copies. But this jumped to over 2.3 million in less than eighteen months after several of her books became popular on TikTok. So, should we all be on TikTok? How do we get started on the platform, and how can we make it work for us too?

BookTok Basics

TikTok is a Chinese social media platform that began in 2016 and quickly gained a large user base. By October 2022, users had downloaded the app over…