Booktok sponsors Hay Festival

Chinese-owned TikTok video-sharing app platform is the new “digital media partner” of the Hay Festival on the Welsh Borders, which returned with a flourish for its first full “in-person” gathering out of the pandemic since 2019.

The festival had respectful mac-clad enthusiasts, with an eclectic range of events from snatches of Bach to Bad Sex awards and the arrival of BookTok. The BookTok stars brought with them new fashions and refreshing party poses dance-floor splits and impressive power to inspire enthusiasm for books. BookTok videos are typically very short films in which people share their favorite reads- having clocked up 55.9bn views over the past four years, as they were driving sales in Hay, where the BookTok section in the festival bookshop sold out almost daily, where publishers credit the platform with boosting revenues.

BookTok has given a new lease of life to old titles, such as The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller’s 2011 take on The 1liad, fantasy, crime, LGBT literature, and poetry.

BookTok helps you to get there by the power of recommendations.

TikTok claims to offer a different model, one where the impact of a post is less dependent on your number of followers than the number of likes. Some BookTok stars have already landed lucrative book deals. It seems to help publishers understand the elusive question of what makes one book fly while another flops. One TikTok executive says: “ If I knew what makes something go viral, I wouldn’t be sitting here”.

Tiktok may be at odds with the literary world but publishers would ignore them at their peril.