Over the years, TikTok has helped create some of the biggest best-sellers on the book market. Now – according to the NYT – TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is launching its own publishing company, 8th Note Press. ByteDance was already offering royalties and marketing services to self-published romance writers following the success of viral books on TikTok. Videos with the #BookTok hashtag received over 91 billion views in the past year, and sales of books by authors with big BookTok profiles reached $760 million in 2022, up 60 per cent on 2021. Authors catapulted onto the bestseller list with BookTok’s help include Colleen Hover, whose sex and drama-filled stories have sold more than 24 million copies in all and more last year than James Patterson and John Grisham combined. Early word is that 8th Note Press’s advance offers haven’t been generous enough to attract established authors, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be able to pluck new ones from obscurity and use BookTok to turn them into stars. Oprah, eat your heart out.
