How TikTok created a Gen Z reading revolution

″Popular on social media” used to mean something different. We laughed at it. Social media trends used to be silly, pointless: parkour, massive eyebrows … a vessel through which to identify exactly what was wrong with youth today, something to resist with a pang of pride. We never fully outgrow our smug contrarian teenager phase, believing anything popular is inherently bad; that public opinion should be approached with a beat of contempt.

So when someone tells me that they’ve found a fantastic book via TikTok, I pause. I’m a smug contrarian teenager again, my memory reeling back to all the popular trash I’ve picked up to sate my curiosity, then thrown down in disappointment, relegated to my neighbours’ street libraries. Part of me resists, wants to save my time and money for something upmarket, bragworthy. But TikTok’s siren song is strong: I want to be in on the joke. I want to know what the kids are up to. I want to be relevant. So I give in, but in secret: I download Book Lovers by Emily Henry, breath held for disappointment and the ever-appealing excuse that it’s nice for some, but my tastes are too refined for this fluff, but it never comes. I love it.

BookToker Lucy Donaldson.

It’s not just one book, it’s all of them. In two days, I’m back on the app, scrolling through its infinite content, trusting the ultra-precise, hyper-agile algorithm to tailor its suggestions to exactly my taste, and it works. I get recommendations for romance novels and literary fiction: someone else gets fed videos about high fantasy stories, queer fiction, historical, crime. No two users are the same, so no two feeds are, either.

“The algorithm tosses you some curveballs sometimes,” says 24-year-old library worker and content creator Lucy Donaldson, who posts under the handle @luckies_universe. “I end up watching someone talk about a book I’ve never heard of, and the next second I’m adding it to my TBR [To Be Read list].”

“[The algorithm] is really good at targeting the niche your videos fill,” says Arabella Rosier. The 25-year-old author of Silver Valley has half a million followers and has had some 30 million likes on her videos. “I write YA [young adult], and there’s a big young audience on BookTok. It has really connected me with the audience my book targets, and that’s ever-growing.”

Four years ago, the BookTok hashtag had fewer than a thousand views; in 2023 it reports more than 107.4 billion views globally. This isn’t just an internet echo chamber. Find me a bookstore that doesn’t have a “TikTok made me buy it!” section these days. You can’t.

Our phones are full of videos made by authors and readers, creators and fans, critics and admirers. Scroll endlessly for reviews, wrap-ups, live reactions, inside jokes, and living memes of your favourite (and least favourite) characters: it’s a 24-hour book club that is growing and changing faster than you can finish the book of the hour. Devouring book after book is no longer something to do when the internet cuts out: it’s a sport. It’s a phenomenon. It’s having real-world impacts.

“The impact of BookTok has been huge,” says Gail McWhinnie, marketing and loyalty manager at Dymocks. “At least half of our top 10 bestsellers each week for the last year have been BookTok-related titles. At one point this year, eight of our top 10 bestsellers were titles that were trending on TikTok.”

Last year, more than a third of the titles on the Dymocks Top 101 list were from BookTok authors such as Taylor Jenkins Reid, Colleen Hoover and Ali Hazelwood.

BookToker Arabella Rosier has half a million followers 30 million likes on her videos

“BookTok is all about trends,” says Dymocks book seller Josh Hortinela, a champion of local voices, and a walking reference guide for up and coming romance and crime stories. “You can see trends pop up on BookTok, and that flows onto people asking about them in store. People used to come in and ask for recommendations for a paranormal romance, but now they’re asking for tropes. They’ll say, I’m looking for an “only one bed” trope, or an enemies-to-lovers book. That’s definitely to do with how books are marketed on TikTok.”

Caitlin Toohey, marketing executive at HarperCollins Australia, says publishers are “paying attention to some of the lighter, romantic titles that maybe haven’t had a lot of airtime for a while, because that’s what people want ... [TikTok] is a new place to reach new readers.”

What this all means is that suddenly, it isn’t enough to be an author: you also have to be a content creator. “Having an online presence as an author is super important,” says Donaldson, who aspires to be an author herself. “It’s like having an audition reel as an actor … If people like you, they’re more likely to engage with your content and buy your product.”

Now at the tail-end of the promotional period for my second novel, it’s something I’m aware of and exhausted by. Promotional work is often at odds with what it means to be an author. Even the most lighthearted fiction can be immensely personal, as authors wrestle with difficult emotions in order to see them from new perspectives: it is both deeply uncomfortable and an occupational requirement. Authors suspend this discomfort for authenticity, creative satisfaction, and, well, the pay cheque, but to set up your ring light and record funny videos about a secret, tender part of yourself that you have bravely (or foolishly) put out into the world in hopes that views turn into sales is weird, and some days, it feels like more work than writing the book in the first place.

It’s not something that bothers Rosier. “It’s not like a job to me, and that’s why I think it’s so successful,” she says. “I try to post every day, and several hours that day go into looking at comments, interacting with people… sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less, but it’s usually around five or so hours every day.”

For some authors, it’s the root of their success entirely. Stacey McEwan, 33, a teacher, fantasy author and BookTokker with more than 340,000 followers and more than 10 million likes to her name, got her start as a content creator, making videos to break up the monotony of lockdown.

Stacey McEwan started uploading videos to BookTok to break up the monotony of lockdown.

“I wrote a skit about characters of a new adult romance novel in an AA-style meeting for their super stereotypical characteristics, and posted it without a worry in my mind, because no one was watching my videos anyway,” she says. “But when I woke up the next morning, it had hundreds of thousands of views. It all kind of snowballed from there.”

A little awed by her growing following, McEwan’s husband encouraged her to use her platform, then approximately 11,000 followers, to promote her writing work.

“Self-publishing always terrified me, but it was a dream of mine to be a published author,” she says. “I figured that this would be the only time I’d have this many people paying attention to me, so I started writing something new.

“I posted about it as I was writing, and all of these people who didn’t know me, who had never read anything I’d written, said they couldn’t wait to buy it.“

‘BookTok has been a delight ... we’re seeing the younger generation embracing reading and making it cool to be in a physical bookstore.’

Gail McWhinnie, marketing and loyalty manager at Dymocks

Her following continued to grow, her usual light-hearted content interspersed with updates about her manuscript. Bolstered by a cohort of generous and communicative indie authors across the app, McEwan was prepared to self-publish her book, and posted a cover reveal, plot summary, and pre-order link. “By the end of that week, I had three emails in my inbox,” she says. “Two were from publishers asking to read my manuscript, and one was from a literary agent asking the same.”

The rest is history. With BookTok fervently supporting her work, she hopes to be able to write full-time by next year, a feat few authors achieve across their careers, much less in just a few years.

When we think about social media, particularly the state in which TikTok seems to hold so many of us captive, we are quick to dismiss it as a waste of time. Pet videos, makeup tutorials, gym routines, recipes, reasons why our weekly notification of screen time data is so consistently alarming and embarrassing, make it easy to forget how much work goes into the creation of the content we’re all too happy to consume.

“There was a point in 2021 and 2022 when I was making five videos a day, and spending pretty much all my free time on content creation,” says 21-year-old writing student and content creator Imogen Corfield, who posts under the handle @literary_cherry. “[But now] I’m super fluid with posting, because I find that I enjoy the spontaneity of content far more than the preplanned stuff.”

For some, it’s less about views and more about community. “I try to create a community for my fans, not just a marketing thing,” says Rosier. “I want them to be part of the journey, I want them to see behind the scenes … It’s very much like I’m working with them. We’re figuring things out together, learning together ... It’s like a little family.”

“I have really enjoyed being able to cultivate my own little corner of the internet,” echoes Corfield, “and I think most creators are the same. Deep down we are all just big nerds talking with other nerds about our interests, and I love that!”

It’s true: some of the people I’ve met through the social media promotion of my own books have become my closest friends and writing group partners, and have played essential roles in any success I’ve had.

For Imogen Corfield, BookTok is about community.

As for the audience numbers, Rosier is realistic about the level of success she might have achieved without the app. “The day that I posted the cover reveal for my debut novel, that went so viral, to the point that it was shocking to me. As a debut author, getting a hundred pre-orders when no one knows your name, no one knows you exist, doing it all by yourself — there’s no way I could have done that [without TikTok]. The exposure that it gave me was baffling. It was the key decider for me being able to release my book. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

BookTok is even reviving entire genres, with Dymocks citing a 180 per cent rise in sales in the past three years. “Now that we know what BookTokers want and what’s trending, we can recommend similar reads from local Australian authors,” says McWhinnie. “BookTok has been a delight to the industry. We’re seeing the younger generation embracing reading and making it cool again to be in a physical bookstore.”

The trick with Gen Z, the perk and the curse, is that they’re excellent at sniffing out inauthenticity, and quick to condemn it. In some ways, BookTok democratises the marketplace, by making success less reliant on marketing spend. Hit the right audience, and all the Facebook ads and bookstore newsletters in the world won’t make the difference that one viral video will. For publishers such as HarperCollins, “it’s too big to ignore,” says Toohey. “It’s a very visible part of the [publishing] industry at the moment. For titles that we think suit the BookTok demographic, it’s definitely something we incorporate [into marketing]. We send out review copies, dabble in content creation, and build campaigns around it.”

Still, it feels something like the tail chasing the dog. How do we make our book go viral? How do we make sure an advance copy lands in the hands of a popular and influential content creator, that they read it, love it, and post about it, and that people engage with their post? You can’t. You shouldn’t even try.

“It’s a joke around TikTok,” says Toohey, “that if you don’t get it, then you shouldn’t be on it. It’s so organic, so wonderful, and people are so excited about it, that trying to target people there feels almost wrong. [Publishers are] trying to be on TikTok and be part of that world, rather than just trying to sell to it.”

Gone are the days when a writer’s life consisted of waking up late in a squalid bedsit and loafing down to a corner cafe to drink wine and people-watch until brilliance struck, scribbling something profound, and dying of VD long before their life’s work becomes the required reading of bored university students everywhere. Gone are the days when readers only found books they loved through chance, word of mouth, or the suggestions of an over-eager bookseller. Gone, too, is the frustration of devouring a story and having no one to obsess about it with.

Suddenly, it’s all content. Writing, reading, sharing: there is a world within our world, tiny sub-communities of people interested in your interests, waiting impatiently to talk about them. BookTok and its billions of views is a wildfire, growing quickly and burning bright, fast and furious, surging towards a phone, eReader, bookshelf near you, ready with exactly the book you need to set your world alight.

Genevieve Novak’s latest novel, Crushing, is published by HarperCollins.

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