The Guardian view on BookTok: a welcome disruptor of the status quo
The bestselling book in the UK last week, and of the year so far, is an American novel that was published in 2016. If that sentence sounds implausible, the odds are you have not yet caught up with the latest social media sensation. It is called BookTok and it is a strand on the video-sharing platform TikTok that was started by young book lovers at the height of the Covid pandemic.
One of its standout successes is Colleen Hoover, a 42-year-old former social worker from Texas, whose young adult romance It Ends With Us has sold an astonishing 427,000 copies in the UK so far in 2022, according to the market analyst Nielsen BookScan. This outnumbers any other book in any format or genre.
Ms Hoover started self-publishing her novels in 2012, and continues to do so in tandem with a partnership with Simon & Schuster, which is publishing a sequel to It Ends With Us in October. However, it was not until BookTok came along that her sales went stratospheric. This is not fiction that gets reviewed in old-fashioned literary pages, a lacuna its young fans make up for by filming themselves sobbing and smooching along with its bittersweet storyline.
However banal this might seem as a marker of quality, it is seriously disrupting the market, with publishers falling over themselves to scoop up the latest success story, while booksellers on both sides of the Atlantic stack bookcases with BookTok favourites. Nor is it all about teen romances: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Madeline Miller’s Orange prize-winning The Song of Achilles are among the year’s winners in this unpredictable new literary lottery.
Ever since the birth of social media, fads have come and gone, making reputations along the way. In the early years of the millennium, YouTube gave a
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