• The Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest literature fair, has for the first time made TikTok one of its partners.

  • TikTok videos grouped under the hashtag #bookTok generate sales and success for many novelists.

  • The phenomenon is partly explained by the fact that TikTok is a visual platform, allowing people to show what they think of a book.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

The proverb is Chinese and TikTok, the country's digital flagship, has brought it up to date in an unexpected way.

The platform is indeed on the way to becoming one of the most effective prescribers in the field of nature.

Under the hashtag #BookTok, more and more authors are producing images to sell their prose.

From the German Sarah Sprinz to the Swiss Joël Dicker, more and more novelists are surfing the trend.

The usual format on TikTok, a short video with visual effects or music, seems to lend itself quite poorly to traditional literary criticism.

But it allows presentations of “favourites” and boosts the popularity of certain works.



Target young people

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.

This trend “is super important to me,” says Sarah Sprinz, author of the best-selling

Dunbridge Academy

, which takes place at a boarding school in Scotland.

"I think it contributed to my success because I saw a lot of videos recommending my books," she adds, during an interview with AFP at the German city's book fair.

It is a particularly effective channel for attracting a new audience and giving young people a taste for reading, believes the 26-year-old author.

84 billion views

"I really believe that you have to be on all the channels that allow you to read and have others read," said Joël Dicker, Swiss author of bestsellers, including

The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair

, in a video .

According to TikTok, #BookTok has garnered over 84 billion views.

It has become "a place where we recommend books and where we discover them but also where we share reviews and where we exploit the fan culture", explains Tobias Henning, manager for TikTok in Germany and in Central and Eastern Europe.

“It really has an impact on book sales around the world,” he says.

Never more

, the fictional reality book by American Colleen Hoover, saw its sales explode after being praised in the TikTok community.

A typical review shows a woman sobbing as she reads the novel, with music and a voiceover claiming "I've never cried so long after a book."

No contradiction

Sarah Sprinz partly explains the #BookTok phenomenon by the fact that TikTok is a visual platform, allowing people to show what they think of a book.

And with the lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, that likely accelerated the trend, she says.

For her, there is no major contradiction between spending more time on social networks and trying to promote literature: nowadays people read in different ways, on e-books and smartphones and not only on paper works.

But a book cannot be successful only thanks to social networks, she underlines.

“TikTok and #BookTok are kind of multipliers and a good opportunity to recommend books,” she observes.

But “there has to be something more: a book must of course be good”.

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