FFFFEEEEEAAAAttttt rrrrreeee
TikTok has created an exponential growth way of doing that. It’s wonderful and really rewarding for publishers to see that readers are falling in love with our books and sharing it on this platform that can get it to so many people.”
Atria Publishing has experienced the impact of BookTok firsthand, having been the publisher of It Ends With Us, a novel that went viral on Tiktok in November 2020. According to Publishers Weekly, the book sold 21,000 copies in the first month after its release. In the summer of 2021, the book was now selling around 17,000 copies per week on average. It has since sold over a million copies, and the TikTok hashtag #itendswithus now has over 393 million views.
However, BookTok’s impact is not limited to sales numbers. It has helped readers look past the boundaries of traditional publishing, with self-published titles such as The Atlas Six and The Spanish Love Deception, gaining vast amounts of attention on the platform.
BookTok has also helped address the lack of diversity within the industry, with some creators dedicating their accounts to explicitly promoting works by authors of color.
Nwokorie, a 21-year-old student with 97,000 followers and 5 million likes on her TikTok account @kimmybookss, has been striving to raise awareness for books that represent a diverse range of readers.
“Seeing the lack of diversity at the time – all the books that were being promoted were
Kimberly Nwokorie, AKA @kimmmybooks, uses TikTok to recommend a more diverse range of books to her large following in order to promote the BIPOC experience.