BoomerSperg1922
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2021
Like Lindsay Ellis, she's learned absolutely nothing.
YABookgate
- Thread starter Puddleduck
- Start date
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
An interesting article on the lolbertarian roots of much of the scifi genre, and the pre-eminent libertarian publisher Tor. Written pre-woke idiocy, now you can write a primer on sci-fi and not even discuss libertarianism and be taken seriously somehow.
- Joined
- Aug 24, 2020
Kinda off-topic but do Tamsyn Muir and Seanan Mcguire actually write good books? They seem to cover interesting ideas.
Two Gorillion Dollars
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 17, 2021
Tamsyn Muir is okay. You just need a very high tolerance for a Tumblr Fandom Fanfiction style of writing. The hype around Gideon and Harrow isn't really consistent with what they are in practice but they're okay.
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2018
I've liked the horror novels McGuire writes under her Mira Grant pen name, but she has a bad habit of grinding her story to a halt so she can have one of her characters do a long inner monologue about their motivations or whatever. The one that sticks most in my memory was from Into The Drowning Deep, where she set up a side character as an unlikable one-dimensional jackass, then gave him a POV chapter where she tried to make him more three-dimensional and sympathetic. It just didn't work and I was kind of annoyed that she'd even tried.
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2021
Muir’s style is not for me but I didn’t mind the first couple of“Mira Grant” books. Neither was terribly highbrow,
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
How TikTok Became a Best Seller Machine / https://archive.ph/apvlH
#BookTok, where enthusiastic readers share reading recommendations, has gone from being a novelty to becoming an anchor in the publishing industry and a dominant driver of fiction sales.
Madeline Miller saw her book, “The Song of Achilles,” a love story between two young men, sell two million copies after taking off on TikTok.Credit...Christopher Leaman for The New York Times
By Elizabeth A. Harris
July 1, 2022
Many of this year’s best selling books have something in common, but it’s not any of the usual factors: a famous or long-established author, a tie-in with a movie or TV show.
It is TikTok.
Early last year, the publishing industry began to notice that the books readers were gushing about on TikTok — the social media platform that traffics in short videos — were showing up on best seller lists. Publishers were surprised, authors were surprised, even the readers making those TikTok videos were surprised.
A year later, the hashtag #BookTok has become a sustained and powerful force in the world of books, helping to create some of the biggest sellers on the market.
Books by the writer Colleen Hoover, for example, became a sensation on TikTok, and Ms. Hoover is now one of the best selling authors in the country. NPD BookScan, which tracks the sale of most printed books in the United States, said that of the ten best selling books so far this year, Ms. Hoover has written four.
TikTok has “made the transition from a novelty to a real anchor for the market,” said Kristen McLean, executive director of business development at NPD Books. “The whole idea of dominating supermarket shelves, dominating airport stores, dominating the front tables at bookstores, it’s just not really where it’s at in the same way.”
Now one of the commanding forces in adult fiction, BookTok has helped authors sell 20 million printed books in 2021, according to BookScan. So far this year, those sales are up another 50 percent. NPD Books said that no other form of social media has ever had this kind of impact on sales.
BookTok is not dominated by the usual power players in the book world such as authors and publishers but by regular readers, many of them young, who share recommendations and videos of themselves talking about the books they love, sometimes weeping or screaming or tossing a copy across the room.
The most popular videos don’t generally offer information about the book’s author, the writing or even the plot, the way a traditional review does. Instead, readers speak plainly about the emotional journey a book will offer.
And that, it turns out, is just what many people are looking for, said Milena Brown, the marketing director at Doubleday.
“‘This is how it makes me feel, and this is how it’s going to make you feel,’” Ms. Brown said, describing the content of many of the videos. “And people are like, ‘I want to feel that. Give it to me!’”
In essence, BookTok supercharges something that’s always been essential to selling a book: word of mouth.
“I think one person can put it on the radar, but it takes the rest of BookTok chiming in and going big with it to really make a book succeed,” said Laynie Rose Rizer, the assistant store manager at East City Bookshop in Washington, D.C., who has 70,000 followers on the platform. “Once the word starts spreading, that’s how a book becomes big.”
Books that take off there are mainly fiction, and are generally a few years old. This is unusual in publishing, where most titles, if they have a burst of sales at all, see it right out of the gate.
Sales were initially concentrated among young adult titles, but BookTok is now even more powerful in adult fiction, according to BookScan. Romance is another major category, followed closely by science fiction and fantasy. But even classics like “Wuthering Heights” and “The Great Gatsby” get some TikTok love.
Another major beneficiary of TikTok enthusiasm is the writer Madeline Miller. A former high school teacher with a master’s degree in classics, Ms. Miller’s most successful book is “The Song of Achilles,” a love story between two young men, Achilles and Patroclus.
It was published in 2012 with an initial print run of 20,000 copies. This month, its publisher, Ecco, announced it had sold two million copies across all formats.
Miriam Parker, Ecco’s associate publisher, said this type of sales record for a book like “The Song of Achilles” is more than remarkable.
“It never happens,” she said. “This is a book about the Iliad!”
Ms. Miller, who has another book, “Circe,” that has also been popular on TikTok, said she is now taken more seriously in the literary world because of her work’s higher profile. The sales also came as a relief during an extremely challenging time.
When the pandemic began, her speaking and touring opportunities dried up and she thought she might need to go back to teaching to earn a living. Since February 2020, she has been struggling with long Covid and was concerned about her ability to work, she said. Having “Song of Achilles” catch fire on TikTok allowed her to take care of herself and her family, and to keep working on her next novel.
“It really has changed my life,” she said. “It has given me the time to write, to continue to be a writer.”
Some of TikTok’s success in selling books can be traced to bookstores, which started paying attention to which books were gaining traction on the platform, Ms. McLean said. Barnes & Noble in particular caught on early; many of its stores put out tables with a selection of trending titles. Those displays spread the word about BookTok to new readers, and the cycle continued.
This week, TikTok and Barnes & Noble announced an official partnership — a summer reading challenge designed to encourage people to post about books they’re reading and to cross-pollinate readers. A BookTok landing page shows users some curated videos, including a selection called “get to know your local B & N booksellers,” and a list of suggested titles, which links to the Barnes & Noble website. Barnes & Noble will have QR codes in its stores that send customers to the BookTok landing page.
Barnes & Noble stores have their own TikTok channels, as do many publishers. Publishers also send TikTok creators free books or pay them to make videos about certain titles. But as powerful as BookTok has become, it’s difficult for publishers to harness it as a sales tool.
“It’s not one video that makes a book explode in sales,” said Ms. Brown from Doubleday. “It’s this grass roots explosion of people creating the videos and then organically, by word of mouth, it grows from there.”
Getting an author on the platform, for example, is also no guarantee of a book’s success. It’s not even a requirement.
“I am still not on TikTok,” Ms. Miller said. “I remain very bad at social media.”
- Give this article
- 26
Madeline Miller saw her book, “The Song of Achilles,” a love story between two young men, sell two million copies after taking off on TikTok.Credit...Christopher Leaman for The New York Times
By Elizabeth A. Harris
July 1, 2022
Many of this year’s best selling books have something in common, but it’s not any of the usual factors: a famous or long-established author, a tie-in with a movie or TV show.
It is TikTok.
Early last year, the publishing industry began to notice that the books readers were gushing about on TikTok — the social media platform that traffics in short videos — were showing up on best seller lists. Publishers were surprised, authors were surprised, even the readers making those TikTok videos were surprised.
A year later, the hashtag #BookTok has become a sustained and powerful force in the world of books, helping to create some of the biggest sellers on the market.
Books by the writer Colleen Hoover, for example, became a sensation on TikTok, and Ms. Hoover is now one of the best selling authors in the country. NPD BookScan, which tracks the sale of most printed books in the United States, said that of the ten best selling books so far this year, Ms. Hoover has written four.
TikTok has “made the transition from a novelty to a real anchor for the market,” said Kristen McLean, executive director of business development at NPD Books. “The whole idea of dominating supermarket shelves, dominating airport stores, dominating the front tables at bookstores, it’s just not really where it’s at in the same way.”
Now one of the commanding forces in adult fiction, BookTok has helped authors sell 20 million printed books in 2021, according to BookScan. So far this year, those sales are up another 50 percent. NPD Books said that no other form of social media has ever had this kind of impact on sales.
BookTok is not dominated by the usual power players in the book world such as authors and publishers but by regular readers, many of them young, who share recommendations and videos of themselves talking about the books they love, sometimes weeping or screaming or tossing a copy across the room.
The most popular videos don’t generally offer information about the book’s author, the writing or even the plot, the way a traditional review does. Instead, readers speak plainly about the emotional journey a book will offer.
Editors’ Picks
A Texting Lifeline During a Difficult Time
Need to Find a Bathroom in New York City? Try TikTok.
A Father, and a Childhood, Cloaked in Secrets
And that, it turns out, is just what many people are looking for, said Milena Brown, the marketing director at Doubleday.
“‘This is how it makes me feel, and this is how it’s going to make you feel,’” Ms. Brown said, describing the content of many of the videos. “And people are like, ‘I want to feel that. Give it to me!’”
In essence, BookTok supercharges something that’s always been essential to selling a book: word of mouth.
“I think one person can put it on the radar, but it takes the rest of BookTok chiming in and going big with it to really make a book succeed,” said Laynie Rose Rizer, the assistant store manager at East City Bookshop in Washington, D.C., who has 70,000 followers on the platform. “Once the word starts spreading, that’s how a book becomes big.”
Books that take off there are mainly fiction, and are generally a few years old. This is unusual in publishing, where most titles, if they have a burst of sales at all, see it right out of the gate.
Sales were initially concentrated among young adult titles, but BookTok is now even more powerful in adult fiction, according to BookScan. Romance is another major category, followed closely by science fiction and fantasy. But even classics like “Wuthering Heights” and “The Great Gatsby” get some TikTok love.
Another major beneficiary of TikTok enthusiasm is the writer Madeline Miller. A former high school teacher with a master’s degree in classics, Ms. Miller’s most successful book is “The Song of Achilles,” a love story between two young men, Achilles and Patroclus.
It was published in 2012 with an initial print run of 20,000 copies. This month, its publisher, Ecco, announced it had sold two million copies across all formats.
Miriam Parker, Ecco’s associate publisher, said this type of sales record for a book like “The Song of Achilles” is more than remarkable.
“It never happens,” she said. “This is a book about the Iliad!”
Ms. Miller, who has another book, “Circe,” that has also been popular on TikTok, said she is now taken more seriously in the literary world because of her work’s higher profile. The sales also came as a relief during an extremely challenging time.
When the pandemic began, her speaking and touring opportunities dried up and she thought she might need to go back to teaching to earn a living. Since February 2020, she has been struggling with long Covid and was concerned about her ability to work, she said. Having “Song of Achilles” catch fire on TikTok allowed her to take care of herself and her family, and to keep working on her next novel.
“It really has changed my life,” she said. “It has given me the time to write, to continue to be a writer.”
Some of TikTok’s success in selling books can be traced to bookstores, which started paying attention to which books were gaining traction on the platform, Ms. McLean said. Barnes & Noble in particular caught on early; many of its stores put out tables with a selection of trending titles. Those displays spread the word about BookTok to new readers, and the cycle continued.
This week, TikTok and Barnes & Noble announced an official partnership — a summer reading challenge designed to encourage people to post about books they’re reading and to cross-pollinate readers. A BookTok landing page shows users some curated videos, including a selection called “get to know your local B & N booksellers,” and a list of suggested titles, which links to the Barnes & Noble website. Barnes & Noble will have QR codes in its stores that send customers to the BookTok landing page.
Barnes & Noble stores have their own TikTok channels, as do many publishers. Publishers also send TikTok creators free books or pay them to make videos about certain titles. But as powerful as BookTok has become, it’s difficult for publishers to harness it as a sales tool.
“It’s not one video that makes a book explode in sales,” said Ms. Brown from Doubleday. “It’s this grass roots explosion of people creating the videos and then organically, by word of mouth, it grows from there.”
Getting an author on the platform, for example, is also no guarantee of a book’s success. It’s not even a requirement.
“I am still not on TikTok,” Ms. Miller said. “I remain very bad at social media.”
If I ever go to hell, it is probably going to consist of these seven seconds, looping eternally:
(LOUD, headphone warning, etc.)
Seriously, I was in physical pain after watching this. This really sells books?
Rezza
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2020
Some people might hate my opinion, but... that's actually a good way to sell your book to Zoomers. It's not that different with how people sell stuffs like Genshin Impact and Spy x Family to Zoomers in my country, both of which are HUGELY popular for the non-weebs Zoomers
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
Yeah, I guess whatever I hate is likely to be successful at at this point.
Still... 
Another NYT Book-Tok article.
How Crying on TikTok Sells Books / https://archive.ph/0zUZ0
“BookTok” videos are starting to influence publishers and best-seller lists, and the verklempt readers behind them are just as surprised as everyone else.
Mireille Lee, 15, left, and her sister Elodie, 13, started the TikTok account @alifeofliterature in February. One of their videos has been viewed more than five million times.Credit...Peter Flude for The New York Times
By Elizabeth A. Harris
“I had no idea what the hell was happening,” she said.
Lockhart’s children filled her in: It was because of TikTok.
An app known for serving up short videos on everything from dance moves to fashion tips, cooking tutorials and funny skits, TikTok is not an obvious destination for book buzz. But videos made mostly by women in their teens and 20s have come to dominate a growing niche under the hashtag #BookTok, where users recommend books, record time lapses of themselves reading, or sob openly into the camera after an emotionally crushing ending.
These videos are starting to sell a lot of books, and many of the creators are just as surprised as everyone else.
“I want people to feel what I feel,” said Mireille Lee, 15, who started @alifeofliterature in February with her sister, Elodie, 13, and now has nearly 200,000 followers. “At school, people don’t really acknowledge books, which is really annoying.”
Image
“It’s absolutely shocking,” Mireille Lee, right, said of the response to the book-focused TikTok account she started with her sister, Elodie.Credit...Peter Flude for The New York Times
Many Barnes & Noble locations around the United States have set up BookTok tables displaying titles like “They Both Die at the End,” “The Cruel Prince,” “A Little Life” and others that have gone viral. There is no corresponding Instagram or Twitter table, however, because no other social-media platform seems to move copies the way TikTok does.
“These creators are unafraid to be open and emotional about the books that make them cry and sob or scream or become so angry they throw it across the room, and it becomes this very emotional 45-second video that people immediately connect with,” said Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble. “We haven’t seen these types of crazy sales — I mean tens of thousands of copies a month — with other social media formats.”
The Lee sisters, who live in Brighton, England, started making BookTok videos while bored at home during the pandemic. Many of their posts feel like tiny movie trailers, where pictures flash across the screen to a moody soundtrack.
For “The Cruel Prince,” you see the book cover, then a woman riding a horse, a bloody goblet, a castle in a tree — each for a split second while the Billie Eilish song “you should see me in a crown” plays in the background. No need for a spoiler alert: The whole thing is over in about 12 seconds, leaving you with the feeling of the book, but little sense of what happens in it.
The video they created that highlights “We Were Liars” has been viewed more than 5 million times.
The vast majority of BookTok videos happen organically, posted by enthusiastic young readers. For publishers it has been an unexpected jolt: an industry that depends on people getting lost in the printed word is getting dividends from a digital app built for fleeting attention spans. Now publishers are starting to catch on, contacting those with big followings to offer free books or payment in exchange for publicizing their titles. (The Lee sisters have received books from authors but have yet to be contacted by publishers or paid for their posts.)
Many popular TikTok users have strategies to maximize views. They might use background songs that are already doing well on the app, for example, use TikTok’s analytics to see what time of day their posts do the best and try to put up videos on a regular schedule. But it’s still tricky to predict what will take off.
“Ideas that take me 30 seconds to come up with, those do really well, and the ones I work on for days or hours, those completely tank,” said Pauline Juan, a student who, at 25, says she feels “a little older” than many on BookTok. “But the most popular videos are about the books that make you cry. If you’re crying on camera, your views go up!”
Most of the BookTok favorites are books that sold well when they were first published, and some are award winners, like “The Song of Achilles,” which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012, a prestigious fiction prize. The novel retells the Greek myth of Achilles as a romance between him and his companion Patroclus. It does not have a happy ending.
“Hey, this is Day 1 of me reading ‘The Song of Achilles,’” Ayman Chaudhary, a 20-year-old in Chicago, posted on TikTok, holding the book next to her Burberry pattern hijab and smiling face.
“And this is me finishing it!” she bawls into the camera, the onscreen captions helpfully describing “dramatic wailing & yelling.” The video, which has been viewed more than 150,000 times, lasts about 7 seconds.
The #songofachilles hashtag has 19 million views on TikTok.
“I wish I could send them all chocolates!” said Madeline Miller, the book’s author.
Published in 2012, “The Song of Achilles” sold well, but not nearly as well as it’s selling now. According to NPD BookScan, which tracks print copies of books sold at most U.S. retailers, “The Song of Achilles” is selling about 10,000 copies a week, roughly nine times as much as when it won the prestigious Orange Prize. It is third on the New York Times best-seller list for paperback fiction.
Miriam Parker, a vice president and associate publisher at Ecco, which released “The Song of Achilles,” said the company saw sales spike on Aug. 9 but couldn’t figure out why. It eventually traced it to a TikTok video called “books that will make you sob,” published on Aug. 8 by @moongirlreads_. Today, that video, which also includes “We Were Liars,” has been viewed nearly 6 million times.
Ms. Miller, who described herself as “barely functional on Twitter,” said she didn’t know about the TikTok videos until her publisher pointed them out. “I feel speechless in the best way,” she said. “Could there be anything better for a writer than to see people taking their work to heart?”
The person behind @moongirlreads_ is Selene Velez, an 18-year-old from the Los Angeles area who joined TikTok last year, while finishing high school on Zoom. She said she made the “books that will make you sob” video because a commenter asked her for tear-jerker recommendations.
“I was like, well, we’ll see how that goes,” Ms. Velez said. “I’m not sure how many people are going to want to hear how much some random girl cried about a book.”
So she posted the video and went and had lunch with her family. When she checked TikTok again a few hours later, she said, the video had 100,000 views.
Image
Selene Velez published a TikTok video, “books that will make you sob,” on Aug. 8. Ecco saw sales of the 2011 novel “The Song of Achilles” spike starting on Aug. 9.Credit...Rozette Rago for The New York Times
Ms. Velez, who has more than 130,000 followers on TikTok, said that publishers now send her free books before they hit the market so she can post about them, and she has started making videos that publishers pay her to create, as well. She and about two dozen other BookTok creators have an ongoing chat on Instagram about which publishers have approached them and what they are charging. The fees range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per post.
John Adamo, the head of marketing for Random House Children’s Books, said it now works with about 100 TikTok users. Once a title takes off on TikTok, he said, the machine of publishing can start to get behind it: Big retailers can discount it, a publisher might start running ads, and if a book becomes a best seller, that also leads to more sales. But without TikTok, he said, “we wouldn’t be talking about this at all.”
Jenna Starkey, a high school student in Minnesota who posts under the name @jennajustreads and has more than 160,000 followers, said she has also been approached by publishers and even an author offering free books. One major house said they would pay her for a post, but the agreement came with a structure and deadlines, and she was concerned about fitting that in around her homework and school schedule.
Right now, “I film two on Saturdays, two on Sundays and two on Wednesdays so I have pre-filmed ones I can post — while I’m in class actually.”
Some BookTok users say the app has provided more than just a pastime during the pandemic, it’s brought them a community.
“I don’t have a lot of friends in real life who actually read,” Ms. Juan said. But she and Ms. Velez both live in the Los Angeles area, and they’ve talked about maybe, once it’s safe, talking books in person. “I’m always like, when the pandemic is over and both of us get vaccinated,” Ms. Juan said, “I’ll come see you.”
Taylor Lorenz contributed reporting.
Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.
Mireille Lee, 15, left, and her sister Elodie, 13, started the TikTok account @alifeofliterature in February. One of their videos has been viewed more than five million times.Credit...Peter Flude for The New York Times
- Give this article
- 135
By Elizabeth A. Harris
- March 20, 2021
“I had no idea what the hell was happening,” she said.
Lockhart’s children filled her in: It was because of TikTok.
An app known for serving up short videos on everything from dance moves to fashion tips, cooking tutorials and funny skits, TikTok is not an obvious destination for book buzz. But videos made mostly by women in their teens and 20s have come to dominate a growing niche under the hashtag #BookTok, where users recommend books, record time lapses of themselves reading, or sob openly into the camera after an emotionally crushing ending.
These videos are starting to sell a lot of books, and many of the creators are just as surprised as everyone else.
“I want people to feel what I feel,” said Mireille Lee, 15, who started @alifeofliterature in February with her sister, Elodie, 13, and now has nearly 200,000 followers. “At school, people don’t really acknowledge books, which is really annoying.”
Image
“It’s absolutely shocking,” Mireille Lee, right, said of the response to the book-focused TikTok account she started with her sister, Elodie.Credit...Peter Flude for The New York Times
Many Barnes & Noble locations around the United States have set up BookTok tables displaying titles like “They Both Die at the End,” “The Cruel Prince,” “A Little Life” and others that have gone viral. There is no corresponding Instagram or Twitter table, however, because no other social-media platform seems to move copies the way TikTok does.
“These creators are unafraid to be open and emotional about the books that make them cry and sob or scream or become so angry they throw it across the room, and it becomes this very emotional 45-second video that people immediately connect with,” said Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble. “We haven’t seen these types of crazy sales — I mean tens of thousands of copies a month — with other social media formats.”
Editors’ Picks
A ‘Sleeper’ Discovered at Auction Tells a Very Dutch Tale
John Grisham Is Still Battling His Southern Demons
What’s the Perfect Summer Dress?
The Lee sisters, who live in Brighton, England, started making BookTok videos while bored at home during the pandemic. Many of their posts feel like tiny movie trailers, where pictures flash across the screen to a moody soundtrack.
For “The Cruel Prince,” you see the book cover, then a woman riding a horse, a bloody goblet, a castle in a tree — each for a split second while the Billie Eilish song “you should see me in a crown” plays in the background. No need for a spoiler alert: The whole thing is over in about 12 seconds, leaving you with the feeling of the book, but little sense of what happens in it.
The video they created that highlights “We Were Liars” has been viewed more than 5 million times.
The vast majority of BookTok videos happen organically, posted by enthusiastic young readers. For publishers it has been an unexpected jolt: an industry that depends on people getting lost in the printed word is getting dividends from a digital app built for fleeting attention spans. Now publishers are starting to catch on, contacting those with big followings to offer free books or payment in exchange for publicizing their titles. (The Lee sisters have received books from authors but have yet to be contacted by publishers or paid for their posts.)
Many popular TikTok users have strategies to maximize views. They might use background songs that are already doing well on the app, for example, use TikTok’s analytics to see what time of day their posts do the best and try to put up videos on a regular schedule. But it’s still tricky to predict what will take off.
“Ideas that take me 30 seconds to come up with, those do really well, and the ones I work on for days or hours, those completely tank,” said Pauline Juan, a student who, at 25, says she feels “a little older” than many on BookTok. “But the most popular videos are about the books that make you cry. If you’re crying on camera, your views go up!”
Most of the BookTok favorites are books that sold well when they were first published, and some are award winners, like “The Song of Achilles,” which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012, a prestigious fiction prize. The novel retells the Greek myth of Achilles as a romance between him and his companion Patroclus. It does not have a happy ending.
“Hey, this is Day 1 of me reading ‘The Song of Achilles,’” Ayman Chaudhary, a 20-year-old in Chicago, posted on TikTok, holding the book next to her Burberry pattern hijab and smiling face.
“And this is me finishing it!” she bawls into the camera, the onscreen captions helpfully describing “dramatic wailing & yelling.” The video, which has been viewed more than 150,000 times, lasts about 7 seconds.
The #songofachilles hashtag has 19 million views on TikTok.
“I wish I could send them all chocolates!” said Madeline Miller, the book’s author.
Published in 2012, “The Song of Achilles” sold well, but not nearly as well as it’s selling now. According to NPD BookScan, which tracks print copies of books sold at most U.S. retailers, “The Song of Achilles” is selling about 10,000 copies a week, roughly nine times as much as when it won the prestigious Orange Prize. It is third on the New York Times best-seller list for paperback fiction.
Miriam Parker, a vice president and associate publisher at Ecco, which released “The Song of Achilles,” said the company saw sales spike on Aug. 9 but couldn’t figure out why. It eventually traced it to a TikTok video called “books that will make you sob,” published on Aug. 8 by @moongirlreads_. Today, that video, which also includes “We Were Liars,” has been viewed nearly 6 million times.
Ms. Miller, who described herself as “barely functional on Twitter,” said she didn’t know about the TikTok videos until her publisher pointed them out. “I feel speechless in the best way,” she said. “Could there be anything better for a writer than to see people taking their work to heart?”
The person behind @moongirlreads_ is Selene Velez, an 18-year-old from the Los Angeles area who joined TikTok last year, while finishing high school on Zoom. She said she made the “books that will make you sob” video because a commenter asked her for tear-jerker recommendations.
“I was like, well, we’ll see how that goes,” Ms. Velez said. “I’m not sure how many people are going to want to hear how much some random girl cried about a book.”
So she posted the video and went and had lunch with her family. When she checked TikTok again a few hours later, she said, the video had 100,000 views.
Image
Selene Velez published a TikTok video, “books that will make you sob,” on Aug. 8. Ecco saw sales of the 2011 novel “The Song of Achilles” spike starting on Aug. 9.Credit...Rozette Rago for The New York Times
Ms. Velez, who has more than 130,000 followers on TikTok, said that publishers now send her free books before they hit the market so she can post about them, and she has started making videos that publishers pay her to create, as well. She and about two dozen other BookTok creators have an ongoing chat on Instagram about which publishers have approached them and what they are charging. The fees range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per post.
John Adamo, the head of marketing for Random House Children’s Books, said it now works with about 100 TikTok users. Once a title takes off on TikTok, he said, the machine of publishing can start to get behind it: Big retailers can discount it, a publisher might start running ads, and if a book becomes a best seller, that also leads to more sales. But without TikTok, he said, “we wouldn’t be talking about this at all.”
Jenna Starkey, a high school student in Minnesota who posts under the name @jennajustreads and has more than 160,000 followers, said she has also been approached by publishers and even an author offering free books. One major house said they would pay her for a post, but the agreement came with a structure and deadlines, and she was concerned about fitting that in around her homework and school schedule.
Right now, “I film two on Saturdays, two on Sundays and two on Wednesdays so I have pre-filmed ones I can post — while I’m in class actually.”
Some BookTok users say the app has provided more than just a pastime during the pandemic, it’s brought them a community.
“I don’t have a lot of friends in real life who actually read,” Ms. Juan said. But she and Ms. Velez both live in the Los Angeles area, and they’ve talked about maybe, once it’s safe, talking books in person. “I’m always like, when the pandemic is over and both of us get vaccinated,” Ms. Juan said, “I’ll come see you.”
Taylor Lorenz contributed reporting.
Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.
Rezza
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2020
Well, if the method is a success, and the ones you're objecting to are the products, you can just change the product and sell it the same way
One thing I note from these marketing I mentioned is that they left it to the Zoomers to market it it each other, like a word of mouth but on a much large scale with Social Media such as Discord, IG, or Twitter. I found them to like a more grassroot approach, example being the recent Minion movie trend
One thing I note from these marketing I mentioned is that they left it to the Zoomers to market it it each other, like a word of mouth but on a much large scale with Social Media such as Discord, IG, or Twitter. I found them to like a more grassroot approach, example being the recent Minion movie trend
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2019
Booktok is confusingly successful and I guess props to the authors for getting their stuff out there, but it's really REALLY dried up the well of variety in new releases. I look at all the new fiction coming out in my cuntry and I wonder how people can tell them apart. It's all a mixture of YA and YA fantasy with either female leads or gay romances. Whenever someone like Baxter or Corey shows up, I could weep with joy. And it's the same in other places, as I recently travelled through three countries and visiting the bookstores and looking at the new releases (in English) there was like seeing a carbon copy of the ones in my own country. And it's not like there isn't demand for classics or something off-beat, but good God, they don't get their own special tables with signs saying "Booktok made me read it".
And as a small side note, it annoys me how non-fiction is starting to have covers that mimic the modern YA romance look, you know the ones. I have started to mix them up a lot nowadays, especially when the non-fiction doesn't have the usual title + "why x makes us do y".
And as a small side note, it annoys me how non-fiction is starting to have covers that mimic the modern YA romance look, you know the ones. I have started to mix them up a lot nowadays, especially when the non-fiction doesn't have the usual title + "why x makes us do y".
James Hetfield
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 5, 2022
Fortunato Brown
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 11, 2021
I remember hearing somewhere that BookTok has less of a reach than people think or at the very least heavily hyped books on BookTok frequently still fail to sell very well. But that may just be a normal problem that occurs when publishers hype a mediocre book.
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
Yeah but ask boston brand about how important it is to have your own display or even books just marked out
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2020
I believe I said something to the effect of "Show me one page each from several of these fanfic tier cat ladies with bad dye jobs and ask me to tell them apart or you shoot me, and I'd be a dead man."
I stand by that statement. Muir and Maguire are both below average on a good day, and painfully bad on a bad one.
Why choke down a dog turd dipped in glitter and blue hair dye? There's good, primo stuff elsewhere on the shelf.
Hell, Timothy Zahn just launched a new series this week. The Icarus Plot, go grab a copy, and stop giving money for bad products made by people who hate you.
I will openly admit, Booktok completely baffles me. I can't tell if it works, and I'm too old to learn how TikTok works to figure it out.
I will say BookTube on the other hand, can be very useful. As are reviews, and above all, Amazon reviews and word of mouth.
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
What im talking about is having your own table/display like my B&N has a special booktok shelf and i bet you $100 that help drives sales
- Joined
- May 25, 2013
Kat Rosenfield is one of the first journalists and authors who shined a light on just how crazy the YA Twitter-sphere is. I first heard about the University Thugs debacle a few months ago on Blocked & Reported, the podcast hosted by Jesse Singal, who has also written several times about the deranged YA cult. I’ve been meaning to pick it up.
Fortunato Brown
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 11, 2021
Oh yeah I imagine for sure. Since there's only like twelve or so books on those tables, people may actually read the back of every book which is more time than they'd give most.
There was a book I was interested in that released from a smaller publisher and Barnes and Noble just slid it in the ordinary shelves where old releases go. I was thinking how nobody would ever find that book and now it's already got it's sales strangled in the cradle.
Oh also, do the authors have any control over the cover art of books? I'm frequently baffled by them. So many look so samey and generic and probably actively repel sales.
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
No they dont and authors frequently complain about this and i know one author (Eric Flint) who vetoed a cover that he found really bad and got it replaced with a "good" cover his sales were awful for that book so he threw up his hands and now doesnt even look at the things
Last edited: