business, there are technical bestselling authors who manage to hawk anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of copies in a relatively short sales window. And then there are the bonkers successful writers who actually keep the lights on.
BookTok is the name that has been coined to describe the use of the visual social network TikTok by interested readers and authors. They make short videos, also known as “TikToks” or “BookToks,” boosting and arguing about books. That gave TikTok the in it needed. It has successfully hooked viewers not just in the U.S. but around the globe. TikTok had about 1.5 billion monthly users in 2023. Just over 100 million of those users were from the U.S., and half were from China. The app has been downloaded 4 billion times and counting.
For his part, Barry Pierce has not voted to ban TikTok, but he wouldn’t necessarily be sad to see it go.