Poster at a bookstore giving credit to TikTok. (Social media)

Waterstones in Piccadilly, London, is a modernist/art deco structure. It began as a menswear store and has the feel of a traditional shop that is rapidly disappearing. However, this bookstore, like many others, is benefiting from a very modern sales boost courtesy of social media.

Teenage girls gather here on a regular basis to buy new books and make new friends, both of which they discovered on the social media app TikTok. Influencer recommendations for authors and novels on BookTok - a community of users who are passionate about books and make videos recommending titles - can skyrocket sales.

While BookTok is primarily an online phenomenon, it is having a tangible impact on the high street, with TikTok now encouraging people to buy their books from brick-and-mortar bookstores through a partnership with bookshop.org, which allows people to buy online while also supporting independent bookstores.

In the first quarter of 2022, findings showed that worldwide app installations reached nearly 37 billion on the #AppStore and #Google Play, with #TikTok exceeding 3.5 billion all-time downloads.
What app do you spend the most time on? pic.twitter.com/Ye5og09wNF
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) July 17, 2022

Waterstones Piccadilly hosted a BookTok festival last year. "I can't stress how much BookTok sells books," one sales assistant told the Observer. It's boosted sales of YA [young adult] and romance books, including Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles and authors like 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, literary agent at Hardman & Swainson, says, "It's driving the appetite for romance and 'romantic' in a really big way, so it's having a strong effect on what publishers look for too."

BookTok was founded in 2020, but this year brings new developments to a community that has been an organic phenomenon thus far. The winners of the first TikTok book awards will be announced later this month.

BookTok awards

Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola, Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood, Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart, and Maame by Jessica George were among the contenders for BookTok Book of the Year, which was announced in May.

There are also awards for BookTok influencers, independent bookstores, books to help you get out of a reading slump, and, most importantly, Best BookTok Revival, which has brought older novels to a new audience. One Day by David Nicholls, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell are among the finalists in the revival category.

A general manager at TikTok UK, James Stafford, calls the shortlist “a true celebration of the variety of literature that resonates with the TikTok community”.

Book awards typically raise authors' profiles and can result in increased sales. Because BookTok already provides excellent publicity, it will be interesting to see how these awards affect the sales of the shortlisted authors.

Could BookTok encourage readers?

The new publisher will concentrate on digital books until TikTok launches an online retail platform, which the company plans to do later this year in the United States, according to the New York Times.

The reaction of BookTok’s key market will be crucial to success. The most recent Publishers Association research says that BookTok is overwhelmingly a factor in Gen Z's reading habits. In a poll of more than 2,000 16- to 25-year-olds, almost 59% said that BookTok had helped them discover a passion for reading.

The report says: “BookTok and book influencers significantly influence what choices this audience make about what they read, with 55% of respondents saying they turn to the platform for book recommendations.”

One-third use it to learn about books they would not have known about otherwise. It promotes diversity, with one in every three readers polled saying the app introduced them to books by authors from different cultures, and nearly 40% being introduced to new genres.

Judging by Waterstones Piccadilly, BookTok has created both online and real-life communities that warm the hearts of booksellers. Waterstones says: “Girls are meeting up and having bookshop days out. They save up their money and come into the shop in gaggles, getting really excitable about what they want to buy. Their energy is amazing and their friendships are really strong, They’ve bonded over books and the things they love, and that’s awesome.”