UK publishers take £6.7bn in sales as TikTok crazes fuel purchases

theguardian.com:

UK publishing’s total income reached a new high of £6.7bn in 2021, up 5% from 2020. This growth comes despite – or perhaps because of – the pandemic, with the social media platform TikTok emerging as a surprise driving force not only for new books, but backlist purchases.

While the Covid lockdowns forced bookshops to close and subsequent supply chain issues caused delays and headaches for publishers, the appetite for reading soared, with sales up by 5% year on year for both print and digital books, while audiobooks continued the “stellar” performance of recent years with a 14% rise in sales, according to a report from the Publishers Association.

And TikTok is helping younger readers in particular discover books through what Publishers Association chief executive Stephen Lotinga called “organic interactions” rather than publisher-led promotion.

He said: “A huge amount of what is being driven by TikTok is in print sales, and we are finding a lot of young adults are discovering books they love, sharing them with friends and driving sales and new interest, and that can only be a good thing.”

He added that “BookTokkers” were often eschewing the latest releases and instead rediscovering books that are sometimes decades old. An extreme example was how, just before Christmas, an unexpected hit was Cain’s Jawbone, written as a murder mystery puzzle by Edward Powys Mathers under the pen-name Torquemada in 1934. It became popular when TikTok user Sarah Scannell posted a series of videos charting her quest to solve the puzzle.

A more recent book, We Were Liars by E Lockhart, was published in 2014 but gained a new lease of life when it was rediscovered on the social media app last year, giving it, said Lotinga, “four or five times” the