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The famous Waterstones in London’s Piccadilly is a modernist/art deco building. It started life as a menswear store and has the feel of that sort of traditional shop that is fast disappearing. But this bookshop, like many others, is enjoying a very modern sales boost from social media.
Groups of teenage girls regularly gather here to buy new books and meet new friends, both discovered on the social media app TikTok. Recommendations by influencers for authors and novels on BookTok – a community of users who are passionate about books and make videos recommending titles – can send sales into the stratosphere.
But while very much an online phenomenon, BookTok is having a material impact on the high street, with TikTok now pushing people to buy their books from bricks-and-mortar booksellers through a partnership with bookshop.org, which allows people to buy online and support independent bookshops at the same time.
Last year, Waterstones Piccadilly hosted a BookTok festival. One sales assistant told the Observer : “I can’t stress how much BookTok sells books. It’s driven huge sales of YA [young adult] and romance books, including titles such asThe Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and authors such as Colleen Hoover.
“The demographic is almost exclusively teenage girls, but the power it has is huge. We have a ‘BookTok recommended’ table – and you can tell which books are trending by the speed at which they sell.”
Caroline Hardman, a literary agent at the Hardman & Swainson agency, says: “It’s driving the appetite for romance and ‘romantasy’ in a really big way, so it’s having a strong effect on what publishers look for too.”
BookTok was established in 2020 but this year brings new developments to a community which has so far been an organic phenomenon. This month, the winners of the inaugural TikTok book awards will be unveiled.
Users of the platform voted on a shortlist announced in May, with...