Colleen Hoover’s book has skyrocketed in popularity thanks to TikTok, with sales up 661% in 2022.
TikTok has revolutionized every industry, including music, hospitality, and restaurants, but it’s had a particularly big impact on the publishing industry.
A community of enthusiastic readers has grown around the hashtag “#BookTok”, which combines “book” and “TikTok”, and has recorded 110 billion views as of February 17, 2023.
Publishers speaking to Insider cited the BookTok phenomenon as a key factor in making 2021 the industry’s most successful year in nearly two decades.
James Daunt, CEO of bookstore chains Barnes & Noble in the United States and Waterstones in the United Kingdom, told Insider in early 2022, “Everything in my career. It’s a gigantic phenomenon that surpasses the
And now, new data from NPD BookScan, America’s largest tracker of physical book sales, reveals that BookTok will continue to be a boon to the industry in 2022.
Here are four key points.
1. Book sales will drop slightly in 2022, but BookTok continues to improve
2022 will be the second-largest year for US book sales since 2004, when NPD BookScan began collecting data. Sales were down 5.8% from 2021, with 780 million copies sold compared to the previous year’s 828 million.
Adult novels were the fastest-growing category, with sales up 14.8%.
Kristen McLean, NPD’s publishing industry analyst, said it was difficult to get sales to the same level as in 2021.
“The 2022 dip will be like after climbing Mount Everest,” she said.
“We had no choice but to go down. We’re down from the peak, but still above 2019. To use the Everest analogy, we’re back at our first base camp, not down into the valley. No.”
NPD says sales of books written by “authors featured on BookTok” have increased 66% compared to 2021. NPD’s BookTok author list includes more than 100 authors “who were featured extensively on TikTok’s BookTok channel.”
These two charts show how much BookTok has grown over the years, and which authors will have more sales in 2022.
2. Colleen Huber embodies this phenomenon
Publishing’s biggest star in 2022 is author Colleen Hoover, whose novel It Ends With Us topped the fiction section of the New York Times bestseller list for 86 weeks.
Hoover’s novels will sell 1.88 million copies in 2021, and will sell 14.3 million copies in 2022, a whopping 661% increase.
“This was definitely because of BookTok’s big boost, plus bookstore promotions that brought in a completely different readership that wasn’t from BookTok. That helped her become one of the best-selling authors. It has leapt to the level of name recognition that will rank in the top ranks.” (Mr. McLean)
Other “BookTok authors” include Jenny Han, author of The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy (which was made into a drama on Amazon Prime Video), The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and Daisy Jones. and the Six” known as Taylor Jenkins Reid.
3. BookTok drives sales of existing books, not new ones
Sales of already published books (books that have been published for more than a year) have been growing steadily since 20 years ago.
Of the books sold in 2022, only 30% were new and 70% were previously published. That’s up from 68% in 2021.
“The growth in published book sales is also due to the fact that many of the books featured on BookTok, a powerful catalyst for adult novels, were previously published,” McLean said.
McLean cites Hoover’s “It Ends With Us” as the most prominent example of a published book driving growth in the field.
4. BookTok’s power extends beyond novels
Fiction writers like Hoover and Jenkins Reed aren’t the only ones finding success with BookTok.
McLean cites the example of UK-based publisher Welbeck. Welbeck is best known for his Little Book series of non-fiction on subjects ranging from music to fashion. TikToker was thrilled with Welbeck’s book, filmed a video about it, and saw sales grow 96% in December 2022 compared to the same month last year.
Despite declining sales of nonfiction in general, nonfiction categories such as business and economics, as well as psychology and mental health, are also growing.
“Words cannot describe what’s happening with BookTok,” McLean said.
[original text]
(Edited by Toshihiko Inoue)
Source: BusinessInsider
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