The social media app, TikTok, has been responsible for a number of things we’ve seen become popular online. From trends and live streams to donations with much-needed causes, and even artists achieving superstardom by promoting songs, the opportunities on this platform are limitless.
But one phenomenon that has caught on fire like never before is BookTok, a subculture that is here to stay and appears to get more popular by the day. This famous hashtag has brought old classics like “Harry Potter,” “Lord Of The Rings,” “The Picture of Dorian Grey” and authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Slyvia Plath, bring them back into the forefront of literature.
Booktok has allowed users to get a glimpse of the reader’s world, in one minute or less, and decide if they want to be a part of it. It has also continued the ascendance of contemporary popular books like “The Hunger Games,” “Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo,” “A Little Life” and “Red, White & Royal Blue,” which touch on more modern topics.
You can also find guilty pleasure reads and very obscure or weird books that you’ve probably never heard of.
It’s also become very easy to promote your newly published book with social media. The BookTok effect goes beyond just the app. If your book trends or becomes viral, there’s a chance it could end up on main bookstore shelves like Target and Barnes and Noble. If you are an aspiring author, BookTok is the missing piece to your story. You can promote your book in three minutes or less, while also providing a complete review of it.
For example, young adult romance author, Colleen Hoover, became a very popular name because of Booktok. She’s been deemed the “queen of BookTok” with her own hashtag (#colleenhoover) and has gained hundreds of thousands of followers. One of her novels even got a movie adaptation this year, “It Ends With Us.” This book was published back in 2016, but gained relevancy around 2022 because of the emerging trend of BookTok.
BookTok has expanded the genre of romance as we know it. It’s no longer the traditional boy and girl story or LGBTQ+ love affairs, it now includes edgier and erotic content. Some of the common tropes that can be found in these romance books are opposites attract, friends to lovers, college romance, murder mystery, enemies to lovers, forbidden love and much more. The whole romance subgenre on TikTok is appropriately known as SpicyBookTok or SpicyTok.
This newer trend (or hashtag) is the place to explore if you’re trying to get out of a reading slump or want to explore something new. BookTok provides an endless array of recommendations, from different genres from around the world and across the literary spectrum. Yet, they all evoke the same sense of escapism that books offer, just through a fresh lens.
