How crying on TikTok helps to sell books

(NYTIMES) - We Were Liars came out in 2014, so when the book's author, E. Lockhart, saw that it was back on the bestseller list last summer, she was delighted. And confused.

"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 and fashion tips to 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 last month with her sister Elodie, 13, and now has nearly 200,000 followers.

"At school, people don't really acknowledge books, which is really annoying."

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, as no other social media platform seems to move copies the way TikTok does.

Ms Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble, said: "These creators are unafraid to be open and emotional about the books that make them cry and sob, 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.

"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 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.

Their video that highlights We Were Liars has been viewed more than five million times.

Most BookTok videos happen organically, posted by 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, they are starting to catch on, contacting those with big followings to offer free books or payment in exchange for publicising their titles.

Many popular TikTok users have strategies to maximise views. They might use background songs that are already doing well on the app, for example, and 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 is 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 Ms Pauline Juan, a student who, at 25, 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 favourites 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," Ms 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 and yelling". The video, which has been viewed more than 150,000 times, lasts about seven 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 is selling now.

According to NPD BookScan, which tracks print copies of books sold at most US retailers, it is selling about 10,000 copies a week, roughly nine times as much as when it won the Orange Prize. It is third on The New York Times bestseller list for paperback fiction.

Ms 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 could not 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 six million times.

The person behind @moongirlreads_ is Ms Selene Velez, an 18-year-old from Los Angeles who joined TikTok last year while finishing high school on Zoom.

Ms Velez, who has more than 130,000 followers on TikTok, said 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 a post.

Mr John Adamo, 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 advertisements, and if a book becomes a bestseller, that also leads to more sales.

But without TikTok, he said, "we wouldn't be talking about this at all".