Technology AI, Science and New Things
The owner of TikTok will start publishing hardcopy books, capitalising on the site’s role as an incubator of bestsellers. When it fires up the printers next year, ByteDance will be able to draw on a huge database of book lovers and book writers from TikTok. More than 38 million posts on the social media platform have the #BookTok hashtag and nearly 60 per cent of young readers credit BookTok with helping them discover a love of reading. This engagement shifts books: US print sales for authors with large audiences on BookTok increased by 23 per cent in the last year (up to 41 million units), while the total adult fiction market has grown by just 6 per cent. The biggest beneficiary is the author Colleen Hoover, a former social worker whose eponymous hashtag has more than 2.4 billion views on TikTok. Hoover has sold 30 million books and her novel It End With Us is now a Hollywood film. In 2022, her books outsold the Bible.
Authors talented and/or lucky enough to have been enriched by the TikTok algorithm include Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles) and Rebecca Yarros (A Court of Thorns and Roses).
They’re not always plucked from obscurity. Hoover’s It Ends With Us was published before TikTok existed. But the novel was given a second life (and film deal) after going viral, and now it haunts bestseller lists with a stubbornness the Telegraph compared to Japanese knotweed.
ByteDance will aim to bring this kind of success in-house through its imprint.
It won’t be easy. 8th Note Press, which already publishes digital books, will be competing with traditional publishers who have long-standing relationships with reviewers and booksellers. But 8th Note will be able to lean on its collaborator Zando, an independent publisher that has imprints with celebrities (e.g. Sarah Jessica Parker) and media brands (e.g. Crooked Media).
And if the ByteDance imprint is able to leverage TikTok to boost its authors, it will have a marketing tool that is arguably as formidable as anything ever seen in the publishing industry.
What’s still unclear is if this will be a net good for writers – or for the quality of the written word.
Eleanor Stern, an author who runs a literary TikTok account with 90,000 followers, fears 8th Note will publish books “derivative of the ones that have already gone viral”.
But the imprint could have a democratising force in an industry where gatekeeping remains an issue. “If they want to give me a bunch of money,” Stern said, “they know where to find me.”
