Common Readers

I’ve passed enough “As Seen on TikTok” tables at otherwise cozily untrendy bookstores that I can no longer picture a solvent mass publishing industry without this app. Roughly one in thirteen U.S.-sold print books in 2024—59 million—“could be tied” to book-specific TikTok videos, which first appeared en masse in 2019. Their creators formed the subcommunity BookTok during the pandemic, when the reading habits of locked-down Americans briefly defibrillated the industry: the U.S. book market grew 21 percent from 2019 to 2023 after growing at rates of just 3 to 4 percent pre-pandemic, according to Vox. Even when the market overall shrank by one percent in the first quarter of 2023, BookTok-viral authors saw “an increase of 43 percent over their 2022 sales figures.” Though BookTok is often celebrated by its users as a reader-driven free market, many large accounts get two thousand dollars for each video, and twice that with publisher usage rights.