#BookTok: How TikTok trending books make it into young hands and our movie watchlists

The Indigo bookstore chain is crediting #BookTok, a subcommunity on the TikTok app, for creating a resurgence of interest in books and boosting its quarterly revenue nearly 20 per cent.

Indigo Books & Music Inc. released its first quarter results last week, reporting revenue jumped to $204.6 million from $172.1 million last year.

"Prior to the pandemic, we started to see some interest in BookTok … and through the pandemic, we saw an exponential growth," said Rania Husseini, senior vice-president of Print Indigo.  

#BookTok is a place for many to get book recommendations and to review books. Indigo's collaboration is manifesting a real-life experience for TikTok users. Every Indigo store, like Penguin Random House Canada and other book retailers, has a BookTok shelf that features books trending on TikTok.

The hashtag itself now has 71 billion views on TikTok.

Peyton Sawatzky follows #BookTok and visited a local Calgary store to buy You've Reached Sam.

"I wasn't a big reader before BookTok. Seeing a lot of recommendations gets you into reading," she said.

These trending books are finding their way to screen adaptations.

To All the Boys I Loved Before, The Summer I turned Pretty and Dune have all found a re-engagement among younger populations, including Azra Çelik, a 12-year-old reader.

"All these books were published many years ago, Dune more than five decades ago, but we are all watching and reading it because of BookTok," she said.

The trend doesn't end there.

"The engagement of Tiktok with a larger audience is causing certain [film] adaptations, like Women Talking," said Husseini. "But also with the virtue of something being adapted — for example, Heartstopper had been in the market for a long time, but the surge in sales happened after the adaptation by Netflix." 

Çelik was browsing through an Indigo BookTok shelf when she picked The Inheritance Games, which is soon to be adapted for the screen. She described the whole story without reading the book or its back cover. She had simply watched a video about the book.

Hannah Fuller walked into Indigo to buy It Ends With Us, a book she found through #BookTok.

"If it is not talking about reading this book, it is talking about the book on a podcast or something," she said.

She expects the book to "definitely" be adapted to screen.

"It's very popular," she said.

"A lot of books emerging on TikTok are backlist books that are not reviewed by newspapers," Husseini said. "People are also finding books that were written decades ago, and now there is a resurgence for the sale of those books."