What happened to books when a video app started recommending them
TikTok started recommending novels a few years ago, through what's become known as BookTok, and the backlist, the quiet shelf of older titles no publisher was actively pushing, was the part of the industry it changed the most visibly.
BookNet Canada measured the effect directly. In a report published September 29, 2022, the organization found that titles originally published between 2014 and 2017, years old by publishing standards, saw sales jump between 812 and 1,698 percent from 2019 to 2022, driven by exposure on TikTok's book community. Those aren't marginal bumps. A book that had quietly stopped being reordered was, in some cases, selling seventeen times what it had been three years earlier, with no new edition and no new marketing campaign behind it.
A peer-reviewed study went looking for the mechanism behind numbers like that. Balling and Martens, publishing in the journal Convergence through SAGE on November 14, 2024, interviewed publishers and booksellers in Denmark and the United States and framed what they found as a disruption of what's known in book history as Robert Darnton's communication circuit, the traditional chain running from author to publisher to bookseller to reader. Recommendation, in their account, had effectively jumped that chain, with readers discovering and championing books to each other faster than the industry's usual channels could react.
The category that has benefited most visibly from this kind of momentum is romance, and within it the romantasy and sports-romance strands. One title in particular shows how far that momentum can carry a single book: Onyx Storm, by Rebecca Yarros, became the best-selling adult novel in a single week in the entire history of BookScan's tracking, according to Circana data reported by Publishing Perspectives on April 22, 2025.
The effect isn't confined to sales figures either. Publishers Weekly documented in 2024 a parallel rise in special physical editions, sprayed page edges, collector boxsets, ribbon markers, driven by the same audience discovering and displaying books as objects worth photographing. The Folio Society reported growth of 55 percent since 2017, and major genre imprints including Orbit, Macmillan, Gollancz and HarperCollins launched new collectible lines in response.
A related category shows the same pattern on a smaller scale, without the numbers yet to match. Cozy fantasy, popularized by Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes in 2022, has been tracked by specialist outlets like K-lytics as a recognizable trend riding the same recommendation currents, though no consolidated Circana figures for the category across 2024 to 2026 appear to exist yet. It's a useful reminder that not every visible shift in what people are reading has caught up with the data that would confirm its size.
Not everyone reads this shift as an unambiguous good for reading itself. Alongside the sales data sits a critique, aired in student publications rather than backed by its own dataset, that recommendation reduces novels to a checklist of tropes, spice level, trope tags, aesthetic, rather than restoring people to reading as a critical or reflective act. That's a real disagreement worth naming plainly. The sales numbers and the peer-reviewed interviews describe a genuinely large new readership and a second life for books that would otherwise have gone quietly out of print. The trope critique describes something closer to how those same books are now being sold and discussed. Both things can be true of the same platform at once, and the two available bodies of evidence, the measured one and the more anecdotal one, simply aren't answering the same question. What isn't in dispute is the scale of what changed for a specific slice of publishing: a backlist title with no marketing budget behind it can now sell better than it ever did on its original release date, purely because enough people, one video at a time, decided to tell each other about it.