Now one of the commanding forces in adult fiction, #BookTok has helped authors sell 20 million printed books in 2021, and is not dominated by the usual power players in the book world such as authors and publishers but by regular readers, many of them young, who share recommendations and videos of themselves talking about the books they love, sometimes weeping or screaming or tossing a copy across the room
Madeline Miller, who saw her book, “The Song of Achilles,” a love story between two young men, sell two million copies after taking off on TikTok, in Merion Station, Pa. on June 29, 2022. #BookTok, where enthusiastic readers share reading recommendations, has gone from being a novelty to becoming an anchor in the publishing industry and a dominant driver of fiction sales. Image: Christopher Leaman/The New York Times
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