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 break to the films of the Malawian artist Samson Kambalu, now an Oxford professor whose latest sculpture is about to be unveiled on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square; and MySpace was the launchpad for Arctic Monkeys, the Sheffield band who headlined this year’s Reading and Leeds festivals.
The question is not whether BookTok will last, but what it will produce that is of lasting value. Quite possibly, this has not yet emerged, but may even now be making its way through a network of teenage bedrooms. For years, self-publishing has been the gift that never quite delivered, because nobody had the time or energy to sample the estimated 1.7m volumes that are churned out each year. Many are undoubtedly bad, but some may be good in ways that would be unrecognisable to publishers today. History is not lacking in previous examples. “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell,” Stephen King was told, on presenting one with his debut novel, Carrie.
It may not take long for the whole thing to be swallowed up and metabolised by corporate players, but for the time being, fans of BookTok are not only sampling and marketing a hitherto undiscovered part of the literary outpouring, but offering themselves up as buyers and readers. This should be cherished while it lasts.
