BookTok Helped Us Sell It: How TikTok Disrupts Publishing and Fuels the #Romantasy Boom
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, TikTok quickly became an important source for connection and entertainment, as people made creative videos and participated in TikTok challenges. The app’s affordances contributed to the emergence of sub-communities, including BookTok, which connected readers across a sociotechnical landscape, and launched backlist titles onto best-seller lists. Using interviews with publishers and booksellers in Denmark and the United States, observations of booksellers’ in-store BookTok displays, and analysis of content created by publishers and online influencers on BookTok, this study examines how BookTok disrupts Darnton’s (1982) Communications Circuit and its subsequent revisions. It explores the impact of BookTok on the landscape of book production and dissemination, the creation of new genres like romantasy within, and how publishers and booksellers are leveraging the organic landscape of BookTok to authentically market to readers.
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Biographies
Gitte Balling, Ph.D. is associate professor at Copenhagen University, Department for Communication. Her research interests pivot around reading, media and young people with a special interest in digital reading and reading communities. Her research is focused on materialities and the way different reading materials (print vs reading) influence the reading experience.
Marianne Martens, Ph.D. is Professor at Kent State University’s School of Information. Her research examines the interconnected fields of young people’s literacy, youth services librarianship, and publishing for young people – from historical perspectives, to a special focus on digital youth. Here, her research interests converge at the intersection of books and technology in new literary formats and include the impact of digital reading experiences and the multi-literacies required to interpret non-linear, multimodal materials, as well as visible reading audiences, and the information they share.
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Article first published online: November 14, 2024
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