TikTok
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
TikTok has become one of the strongest engines behind sudden sales spikes and revived backlist, especially in romance, romantasy, much young adult fiction, and many emotionally charged thrillers. Globally, active users are now measured in the high hundreds of millions, and usage studies place average in-app time near an hour and a half per day, with some reports listing figures of just under 56 minutes for U.S. adults and around 95 minutes worldwide. That is more daily attention than users devote to any other major social network, and it sits squarely inside the hours when readers might otherwise turn to television, streaming, or other media. In the United States alone, TikTok reaches well over 100 million people, with the 18- to 34-year-old age group making up roughly two-thirds of that audience. Across Gen Z more broadly, more than eight in ten social media users log into TikTok every day, and Pew’s recent work shows that close to half of U.S. adults aged eighteen to twenty-nine use the app daily, compared with only a tiny fraction of adults over sixty-five. In practical terms, TikTok now functions as a sorting mechanism for attention by age: it is where younger readers are spending discretionary time.
Within that environment, BookTok has carved out a measurable footprint in the trade. Circana BookScan attributes roughly fifty-nine million U.S. print units in a recent year to BookTok activity, up from around twenty million just a few years earlier. That jump means BookTok now influences a high single-digit share of all print books sold in the market each year, within an industry that moved on the order of 760 to 780 million print copies annually in the same period. A large Nielsen survey of book buyers found that roughly a quarter use TikTok and that this group accounts for tens of millions of purchases over a 12-month period. Separate consumer research focused on TikTok users reports that well over half of U.S. TikTok participants have read at least one book because they saw it discussed on the platform, and that those readers report reading dramatically more than they did before engaging with BookTok. In the UK, Gen Z buyers aged thirteen to twenty-four purchased roughly 65 million books, worth well over half a billion pounds, in a recent year, and nearly half of sixteen- to nineteen-year-old book buyers were active TikTok users, tying youth book spending and TikTok behavior together.