‘After lockdown, things exploded’ – how TikTok triggered a books revolution

Have teenagers taken control of publishing? With some authors notching up a billion views, we look at how TikTok is electrifying the world of books - creating bestsellers, reviving classics and rescuing neglected genres

It's four o'clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon and the Krispy Kreme doughnut stall is doing a brisk trade at Lakeside shopping centre, a huge mall in Essex. But a few metres further along, young shoppers are salivating over a different sort of treat. A girl in a silky red dress runs her fingers along the spines of nine novels by bestselling YA author Colleen Hoover, while a couple of twentysomething men in biker jackets pore over shelves of manga comics. They're in a Waterstones that has been laid out like a pick-and-mix stall, with brightly jacketed paperbacks piled on round tables, or grouped seductively in booths, under headings such as Romance" or LGBTQ+". Alice Oseman's Heartstopper - a graphic novel series about a love affair between two schoolboys that's now a Netflix show - has a table to itself.

All this is down to #BookTok, a niche on the platform TikTok that became a social media sensation in the early months of Covid, and has been gathering momentum ever since. We used to rely on millennials," says the store's 30-year-old manager, Peter. But now the majority of our customers are teenagers, who have money and influence and want to find their own stories. A lot of black and Asian authors are coming through. I always wanted to have an LGBTQ section and now it wouldn't make sense not to. It's exciting. You can see publishing changing. It's made it fun to come into work."