What is BookTok? & Its Impacts on Reading and Book Sells

BookTok is a community on TikTok where book lovers share their love for books and the excitement around new releases with those who enjoy similar things. It started around in 2019 and has grown to over 1.6 Billion views, many of whom are young adults and teens.

BookTok is allowing users to share their love of books with other people. By giving recommendations, you can find new books to read and recommend. At a glance, BookTok features as an easy way to share your book collection with family members or friends. Also, it's a great tool for discovering new books!

BookTok is often a way to share the love of reading, but it tends to go beyond that. It's also become an avenue for readers who want to show off their recent purchases, as well as find out about new titles and authors.

BookTok often goes beyond reading, including other aspects of book culture, such as "book hauls" and similar material exploration. Book hauls are one example of this kind of behavior, usually involving someone posting photos or videos showing off the books they have recently bought. They're easy to do: most platforms allow you to take photos or record videos with your phone and share them on social media.

Books that were once dusty and rare in the world of literature are now on bestseller lists why ? Because of BookTok. Reader discussing plot points and character developments, as well as calling out authors for misrepresenting minorities in dystopian franchises, romance novels, and period adventure series, are among the video trends.

This kind of activity has been happening since the dawn of social media sites like Tumblr and Twitter, but BookTok has given it a new boost through its platform features its ability for users to recommend and tag other works so there's more context around what others are posting when they do book hauls themselves.

Some people make book-related content to help build their library by exchanging books with other users. The idea is that if you have a lot of books, you can trade them for new ones. You get the benefit of reading more books, and others get the benefit of having all those old books!

A recent report from the New York Times reported that young adult fiction sales were up 31 percent in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the same period last year. These gains are solo due to the popular hashtag #BookTok.

Bookstores are also reporting more interest in new authors and titles that are being pushed as a result of this trend.

Authors who have been publishing books for years are now selling tens of thousands of copies per week. Authors such as Taylor Jenkins Reid, Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End), Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us), and Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles) to name a few have gained a lot of attraction by this unpredicted waves of interest brought by BookTok.

The BookTok hashtag offers a fresh opportunity to explore the nuances of this shift. For new authors, it can make it easier than ever to reach readers who might enjoy their writing. For readers, BookTok is a great resource for discovering something new, whether they're following one of their favorite authors or checking out a new title they haven't heard of before.

BookTok may be a trend, but if it is, it looks like one that's here to stay. So if you're looking for some reading material that's outside of the norm, give BookTok a try. The worse thing than can happen is you read a book that wasn't your cup of tea.