I spent the better part of last Tuesday evening watching a seventeen-year-old in Oklahoma City explain, with more passion than most literature professors I’ve met, why Donna Tartt’s The Secret History changed her life. She held the book up to her phone camera, spine cracked and pages dog-eared, and talked for four straight minutes about the Greek concept of beauty and terror. The video had 2.3 million views. This is BookTok in 2023, and if you work in publishing, you ignore it at your own peril.

I’m not going to pretend I was early to this. When colleagues first mentioned BookTok to me about two years ago, I nodded politely and assumed it was a passing trend, the kind of thing that would burn bright for six months and then get replaced by whatever the internet decided to care about next. I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. The numbers tell a story that even the most skeptical publishing veteran can’t dismiss: according to the Book Industry Study Group, titles tagged with #BookTok have generated over $2 billion in print sales in the United States alone since the hashtag gained traction. That’s not a cultural footnote. That’s a structural shift in how books find readers.

Let me back up. For anyone not yet familiar, BookTok is the corner of TikTok where people talk about books. That description sounds almost comically simple, and in a way it is. The format is short video, usually between thirty seconds and three minutes, in which someone recommends a book, reacts to a plot twist, shows off their shelves, or records themselves crying over a final chapter. The production values range from professional to someone propped against their pillow at midnight. The authenticity is the point.

What makes BookTok different from every other book recommendation platform is the emotional register. Goodreads gives you star ratings and measured reviews. The New York Times gives you critical assessments. BookTok gives you a person looking directly into a camera and saying, with audible distress, that a fictional character’s death ruined their entire week. That kind of raw, unfiltered response to literature isn’t new, of course. People have always felt that way about books. What’s new is that millions of other people are watching them feel it, in real time, and then going to buy the book themselves.

The demographic skew matters here. BookTok’s core audience is roughly 16 to 30 years old, predominantly female, and disproportionately interested in romance, fantasy, dark academia, and literary fiction with strong emotional hooks. This isn’t the readership that the traditional publishing industry has spent decades courting through newspaper reviews and author tours. These are readers who discovered books through algorithms, who trust peer recommendations over institutional endorsements, and who will pre-order a debut novel from an author they’ve never heard of because a stranger on their phone told them it would wreck them emotionally.

I want to be clear about something: I don’t think this is a bad thing. I think it’s one of the best things to happen to reading in my professional lifetime.

The backlash against BookTok from certain corners of the literary establishment has been predictable and, frankly, tiresome. The criticism usually follows one of a few familiar lines. The books being promoted are too commercial. The recommendations lack critical depth. The audience doesn’t read “serious” literature. These complaints reveal more about the people making them than about the platform itself. Any movement that gets millions of young people excited about reading, that sends them into bookstores and libraries in numbers we haven’t seen in years, deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms.

That said, I do think publishers need to understand what BookTok actually is before they can figure out how to work with it. And this is where things get complicated.

The first thing to understand is that BookTok is not a marketing channel. Or rather, it can function as one, but that’s not what it is at its core. BookTok is a community. The people who make BookTok videos, the “BookTokers” as they’re called, are not influencers in the way that term is usually understood. Most of them don’t have brand deals or media kits. They’re readers who found other readers and built something together. The moment you treat BookTok primarily as a place to push product, you’ve already misunderstood it, and your campaigns will almost certainly fail.

I’ve watched this play out in real time. A major publisher (I won’t name them, but you can probably guess) sent free copies of a highly anticipated release to about fifty BookTok creators last spring, along with a printed card suggesting talking points and preferred hashtags. The response was immediate and brutal. Several creators made videos about the card itself, mocking the corporate language and the assumption that their genuine enthusiasm could be directed like a press release. The book still sold fine, because it was a good book, but the publisher’s reputation within the community took a hit that will take years to repair.

Contrast that with what happens when BookTok picks up a book organically. Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us was published in 2016 and had a solid but unspectacular initial run. In 2021, BookTok discovered it. Within months, it was the bestselling book in America. The publisher didn’t orchestrate that. No marketing department could have. A few creators read it, loved it, made emotional videos about it, and the algorithm did the rest. The book sold over two million additional copies in a single year.

This pattern has repeated itself dozens of times now. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, published in 2012, became a number-one bestseller nearly a decade after release because of BookTok. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo followed a similar trajectory. These aren’t flukes. They represent a fundamental change in how books move through culture, and the implications for publishers, both large and small, are enormous.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve been thinking about this a lot. We’re a small press, which means we don’t have the marketing budgets of the Big Five publishers. We can’t blanket social media with paid promotions or send hundreds of advance copies to creators. But we do have something that, I’ve come to believe, matters more in the BookTok ecosystem: genuine relationships with our authors and an authentic commitment to the books we publish.

Here’s what I’ve learned from watching our own titles interact with the BookTok ecosystem. Readers on the platform have an almost supernatural ability to detect inauthenticity. They can tell the difference between a publisher who cares about a book and one who is simply trying to capitalize on a trend. They respond to specificity, to passion, to the sense that the people behind a book actually read it and loved it themselves. This is where small presses have an inherent advantage. When I talk about The Last Archive or Still Waters, I’m talking about books I personally shepherded through years of editing and revision. That kind of investment shows, and BookTok rewards it.

The second lesson is about cover design. BookTok is a visual medium, which means covers matter more than they ever have before. A book with a beautiful, photogenic cover is exponentially more likely to get picked up, held in front of a camera, and shared. This doesn’t mean every cover needs to follow the same aesthetic trends (though if you’ve noticed that a lot of recent releases feature illustrated covers in similar color palettes, BookTok is a significant reason why). It means that covers need to be designed with the understanding that they will be photographed, filmed, and displayed as thumbnails on phone screens.

We’ve adjusted our cover design process accordingly. Our art director now considers what she calls “the three-second test,” meaning whether a cover communicates something compelling in the time it takes a viewer to scroll past it. This isn’t dumbing down the design. It’s recognizing that design context has changed. A cover that looks stunning on a bookstore shelf but reads as a muddy blur on a phone screen isn’t serving its purpose anymore.

The third lesson, and this is the one I find most interesting, is about backlist. Traditional publishing has always been heavily weighted toward frontlist titles, meaning the new releases that get the marketing push, the review attention, and the bookstore placement. BookTok has upended this completely. On BookTok, a book published ten years ago can suddenly become the most talked-about title of the week. There’s no expiration date on a good recommendation.

This has real financial implications. For publishers with deep backlists, BookTok represents an opportunity to generate significant revenue from titles that had been essentially dormant. But it requires keeping those titles in print, keeping the metadata current, and making sure that when a book suddenly trends, there’s actually stock available to meet demand. I’ve heard multiple stories of publishers caught flat-footed by a BookTok surge, unable to get reprints fast enough because they’d let a title go out of stock assuming its commercial life was over.

The fourth lesson is about genre boundaries, or rather, their increasing irrelevance. BookTok doesn’t organize books the way publishers and bookstores do. Instead of shelving by genre, BookTok organizes by mood, by emotional experience, by “vibe.” A recommendation might be “books that feel like autumn” or “books that will make you ugly cry” or “dark academia reads for when you want to feel intellectual and unhinged.” This kind of cross-genre, emotion-first categorization means that literary fiction, genre fiction, and everything in between can coexist in the same recommendation, in the same creator’s “favorites” list.

I think this is genuinely healthy for the industry. The walls between literary and commercial fiction have always been somewhat arbitrary, maintained more by institutional habit than by reader behavior. BookTok is just making visible what many readers have always known: that the same person who reads Sally Rooney also reads Sarah J. Maas, and there’s nothing contradictory about that.

Now, the concerns. Because there are legitimate ones, and I don’t want to sound like a cheerleader who can’t see the complications.

The concentration of discovery in a single platform is risky. TikTok’s future in the United States remains uncertain due to ongoing regulatory battles. If TikTok were to be banned or significantly restricted, the BookTok ecosystem would need to migrate somewhere else, and there’s no guarantee that the same magic would reassemble on Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. Publishers who have built their entire marketing strategy around BookTok are exposed to platform risk in a way that should make anyone nervous.

There’s also the question of what BookTok’s influence means for the kinds of books that get published. If publishers start commissioning books primarily because they seem “BookTok-friendly,” meaning books with high emotional hooks, specific aesthetic qualities, and built-in viral potential, we might see a narrowing of the kinds of stories that find their way into print. I don’t think we’re there yet, but the pressure is real, and I’ve heard editors at larger houses talk openly about whether a manuscript has “BookTok potential” as a factor in acquisition decisions.

The speed of BookTok cycles also presents challenges. A book can go from unknown to viral to oversaturated in a matter of weeks. The backlash cycle, where a book that was universally praised suddenly becomes the target of critical re-evaluation because “everyone” is talking about it, moves faster on BookTok than anywhere else. This can be disorienting for authors, who might experience the emotional whiplash of going from obscurity to overwhelming praise to skeptical pushback in less time than it takes to write a second draft.

For us at ScrollWorks, the approach has been measured. We’re not trying to “go viral.” We’re not manufacturing moments or gaming algorithms. What we are doing is being present, being authentic, and making sure that when someone does discover one of our books through BookTok or any other platform, the experience of actually reading it lives up to whatever recommendation brought them there. That means investing in the quality of the writing, the editing, the design, and the physical object itself. It means publishing books we believe in fiercely, not books we think will trend.

I keep coming back to that seventeen-year-old in Oklahoma City. She didn’t care about the publishing industry’s internal debates about literary merit versus commercial appeal. She didn’t know or care about marketing strategies or platform risk. She read a book that moved her, and she told people about it. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And if we in the publishing industry can’t figure out how to respect and work with that impulse rather than trying to co-opt or dismiss it, then we deserve whatever irrelevance is coming our way.

The rise of BookTok doesn’t change what makes a book good. It changes how good books find the people who need to read them. From where I’m sitting, at a small press that has always relied on word-of-mouth more than advertising budgets, that feels less like a disruption and more like the world finally catching up to what independent publishing has always known: that the most powerful marketing force in the world is one real person telling another, “You have to read this.”