4 March 2024 Social media helping young people read ‘proper’ books, says Waterstones chief | The Independent website Waterstones managing director James Daunt said social media is reinforcing the reading of "proper" paper books among young people. Mr Daunt, who is also chief executive of Barnes & Noble, said social media trends such as 'BookTok' on TikTok had been "hugely positive", as he was made a CBE for his services to publishing by the Princess Royal.   Extract   At an investiture ceremony on Tuesday at Windsor Castle, he told the PA news agency: "There's been all of this i ..read more

4 March 2024 The Bookseller - Spotlight - Self-published authors teach us a lesson website According to Bookstat's records, last year's e-book sales were influenced by celebrity authors and BookTok hashtags. But alongside the high-impact book club picks and small-screen adaptations, several self-published authors proved that the independent and hybrid publishing model can compete in the digital space. Extract Bookstat has compiled its Top 25 titles for 2023 by tracking the movement of e-books on online retailers' websites and calibrating that information against publisher-supplied data. Bonni ..read more

12 February 2024 The Bookseller - Spotlight - Love is in the air as sales surge website Last year ended #HEA (that's happily ever after) for Romance & Sagas, as sales continued an upward BookTok-boosted momentum to hit £62.4m through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market. That's the category's second-best total ever, only bettered by 2012's Fifty Shades of Grey-fuelled (£68.3m) climax. Extract Like something from a second-chance romance, the category, which has fairly consistently hovered around the £20m mark for the best part of two decades, leaped to £53.2m in 2022 and grew a further ..read more

29 January 2024 TikTok and YouTube fuel a Japanese literature boom in Britain - The Japan Times website In Britain, Japanese novels in English translation are experiencing a boom in popularity among a new generation, with word-of-mouth on social media driving book sales. Extract Trends on social media platforms such as TikTok - where members of the "BookTok" community recommend and theorize about their favorite books, genres and authors - have inspired young Britons to seek out more works translated from other languages. Yet among these, novels reflecting elements of Japanese society and cult ..read more

18 December 2023 How TikTok's BookTok craze is 'making reading cool again' - The Big Issue website Welcome to BookTok. TikTok's book recommendations, reviews and releases have amassed 185 billion views, making it one of the platform's most active communities. According to the Publisher's Association, 59% of 16- 25-year-olds have rekindled their love for reading thanks to the trend. Extract This is true for BookToker Nicole Murphy, who has 42,000 followers on the app. "I stopped reading as I got older. But when I stumbled upon BookTok, it seemed like a positive space and I started reading more ..read more

4 December 2023 The Bookseller - Books - Books on BookTok: looking to the future website In recognition of the one year anniversary of BookTok being announced as Person of the Year at The Bookseller's FutureBook conference 2022, creators reflected on another year on the platform and look ahead to 2024. Extract For Lewis (@achilleanshelves; 18,400 followers), his favourite part of being on BookTok is "the ability it gives me to show readers of all ages that books exist which reflect them". Emily (@emilymiahreads; 70,300 followers) also pointed to the communal element: "This year I've gotten cl ..read more

20 June 2022 Is TikTok the Future of Book Marketing? website Meanwhile, I was working on my column for Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/. The theme: influencing readers-beyond BookTok. I certainly didn't expect to find a point of intersection with these two shows. Did I? Bear with me. Extract BookTok, though just over two years old, is taking the publishing world by storm. Obscure backlist titles are being thrust into the spotlight, generating sales of ..read more

13 February 2023 In the shallow world of BookTok, being ‘a reader’ is more important than actually reading | British GQ website I did my best to stay away from BookTok for as long as I could but, in my defence, I was stranded in the rural Irish tundra for Christmas and I'd already worked through the latest series of Emily in Paris. Of course, I'd heard all about how it has allegedly changed the books industry forever and made some authors millionaires practically overnight.  Read more Extract It became my latest obsession in much the same way that one might become obsessed with sticking ..read more

13 February 2023 The Bookseller - Comment - The DNA of BookTok romance website Social media is opening publishers' eyes to a new demographic of younger and more diverse readers of romance novels. BookTok, a corner of TikTok where readers post content around books such as reviews, recommendations, and reactions, has changed the publishing industry rapidly.  Read more Extract Romantic fiction has always represented a huge part of the market - often overlooked in literary round-ups and coverage, yet representing millions of pounds' worth of sales every year in the UK alone. But the genre ha ..read more

After aggressively promoting its new lifestyle social media platform Lemon8 in the U.S., ByteDance appears to be brewing another content app for its biggest overseas market.  Read more ..read more