There are multiple sides of TikTok. There’s the side that focuses on dancing, a prank-side and then a whole side for books called BookTok. Yes, books.

#BookTok has 88.2 billion views and it’s not a spot for only nerds to read. It’s a place for authors of books to give hints about an upcoming book, or small businesses to promote their products, or fans to cast their ideal actors in a film adaptation of a book.

In 2020 when the world shut down, people started using TikTok like it was an online book club. Flash forward and BookTok has broken records. 

There were 825 million copies of print books purchased in the U.S. in 2021, according to Forbes. It was “the best-selling year for print books, NPD Bookscan says, since it began tracking data in 2004.”

This side of TikTok has brought up a collection of New York best sellers and a whole generation back to reading.

”I would say I didn’t read much at all before BookTok, but what got me back into reading was ‘Last Night at the Telegraph Club’,” junior Savannah Barker said.

Colleen Hoover, a famous BookTok author, holds four of 10 spots on the NY Times Best Seller list. “It Ends With Us” is one of Hoover’s books featured on the list. The novel came out in 2014, BookTok got a hold of it and the sales went wild. 

A major genre on BookTok is romance. Especially queer romance. 

BookTok helped give queer romance a solid place in the industry. According to the NPD Bookscan, the genre saw a 1.3 million units increase in the past year.

It’s the same at DHS were 70.59% of students who responded to a survey replied that romance is their favorite genre.