BookTok Helped Us Sell It: How TikTok Disrupts Publishing and Fuels the #Romantasy Boom

During the COVID-19 pandemic, TikTok quickly became an important source for connection and entertainment, as people made creative videos and participated in TikTok challenges. The app’s affordances contributed to the emergence of sub-communities, including BookTok, which connected readers across a sociotechnical landscape, and launched backlist titles onto best-seller lists. Using interviews with publishers and booksellers in Denmark and the United States, observations of booksellers’ in-store BookTok displays, and analysis of content created by publishers and online influencers on BookTok, this study examines how BookTok disrupts Darnton’s (1982) Communications Circuit and its subsequent revisions. It explores the impact of BookTok on the landscape of book production and dissemination, the creation of new genres like romantasy within, and how publishers and booksellers are leveraging the organic landscape of BookTok to authentically market to readers.