TikTok and the Publishing Industry

With #BookTok, the subgroup of TikTok featuring book publishers, book clubs, and book lovers both old and new, marketing for new books has been changed forever. And while some of the world’s top publishing houses like HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have already cracked the code to using TikTok to their advantage, smaller independent authors have also been enormously successful at marketing through TikTok.

In August of 2022, seven out of the fifteen books on the New York Times‘ bestseller list grew to such a level of popularity because of TikTok.

Now, in major retailers like Barnes & Noble, readers can find whole tables themed around #BookTok as many are spurred to go into these stories—in many cases, for the first time—to buy books they have seen advertised on social media.

How does it work?

When a creator first puts out a video on TikTok, it’s shown to that creator’s followers and to those pages with algorithms tied to certain hashtags, in this case, #BookTok. When followers engage with the video, the app starts to show it to more and more people who in turn engage, respond, share, and otherwise use TikTok tools that further increase the video’s reach.

In particular, TikTok’s “For You Page” makes it stand out from other social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook. Most people spend the majority of their time on TikTok on their “For You Page” where TikTok loads content it believes users will be interested in based on previous activity. This makes it easier to go viral on TikTok than on other apps, since videos can go viral very quickly even when a creator posts a video with very few initial followers.

Why has it suddenly become so big?

People are driven to buy books in a way that has never really been seen before, and success is no longer directly related to being famous already or to the amount of money an author has to put towards marketing. As such, swarms of smaller and independent authors are seizing this opportunity for instant success for as long as TikTok is around to use.

Marketing in the publishing industry has also gotten harder in recent years, so many publishers and author needed little convincing to jump ship and start creating content on TikTok. Furthermore, with easy-to-recreate trends, older generations of authors and publishers have found it relatively simple to market towards younger generations, something that has been difficult using more traditional methods of book marketing.

How has #BookTok impacted books published before its existence?

Authors of books like We Were Liars, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and They Both Die at the End, have seen sudden spikes in their sales clearly tied to activity on TikTok. Sometimes, a TikToker with more followers will make a video, but more often than not, the constant use of hashtags on TikTok is what propels books back into the spotlight with book-specific hashtags trending alongside the class #BookTok. Even books that have been out for centuries like some of Jane Austen’s novels have experienced resurgences as a result of TikTok’s influence

How does marketing intelligence tie into #BookTok?

TikTok offers not only a strong platform for advertising products and services but also several metrics for analyzing customer preferences. In addition to more obvious metrics like follower counts, likes, comments, shares, and duets, TikTok also allows its creators insight into growth over time, total video play time, relatively detailed information into the kinds of people following accounts and watching videos.

Though this information is not available to every single user of the app, it is available to anyone who has a TikTok Business account—and this account type is completely free, so there really is no barrier to accessing these metrics to improve marketing strategies.

Post Inspiration: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bea/article/89428-u-s-book-show-how-tiktok-is-transforming-book-marketing.html