Bruno Donnet, with Solène Delinger
The BookTok hashtag is a hit on the TikTok social network. This trend brings literature up to date with videos in the form of literary reviews. With the growing influence of #BookTok, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest literature fair, has for the first time made TikTok one of its partners.
#BookTok is the name of the new trend which is, as the name suggests, talking about books on TikTok. Concretely, if you type in the TikTok search engine the hashtag #BookTok, you will come across thousands of videos around books and readings. It’s a bit like version 2.0 of literary criticism. These videos are mostly visual. They just work with music, pictures and descriptive text.
376,000 videos carrying the hashtag have been published by French users
This BookTok hashtag is a hit on a global scale since according to TikTok statistics, 13 million videos have been associated with this category. These videos have accumulated 80 billion views. France is no stranger to this trend since no less than 376,000 videos carrying this keyword #BookTok have been published by French users. These videos have still been viewed 1.6 billion times.
TikTok launches its own book club
And this phenomenon has a priori even an impact on sales. On a global scale and no longer in France, works that went under the radar when they were released have experienced an amazing renaissance thanks to TikTok. This is the case, for example, of an English book originally published in 1934 and republished in 2019. This book is called Cain’s Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers. Following a short video that went viral on TikTok, this book saw a 235% increase in sales between October 2019 and June 2022.
Obviously the book world is very attentive to this phenomenon: faced with the influence of the social network on book sales, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest fair devoted to literature, has for the first time made TikTok one of its partners. The TikTok app has even launched its own book club, digital of course.