In the book 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.
Sarah Janet Maas belongs in the latter, brighter category. Her “romantasy” (romance and fantasy) books are packaged together as multivolume doorstoppers and are widely available. They have enjoyed sales of more than 38 million copies “in English,” according to her website.
“Novelist Sarah J Maas gives Bloomsbury the Harry Potter effect,” was the headline accompanying a Times of London story announcing her English language publisher’s record year in 2023. Maas’s books continued topping most of the charts that mattered for the first quarter of 2024 as well. They have also done brisk translation business.
Maas, 38, began writing her books at 16, with the question, “What if Cinderella was an assassin?” firmly in mind. This eventually spawned the eight-volume, 5,600-page “Throne of Glass” series.
“After a year of slavery in the Salt Mines of Endovier, Celaena Sardothien,” the heroine, “was accustomed to being escorted everywhere in shackles and at sword-point,” the first book begins.
How the tok ticked
The story of Maas’s recent success is part of a larger story about the improbably successful and controversial social network TikTok. She had gained some notoriety in the past from publishing versions of her stories on sites such as FictionPress. That notoriety, however, wasn’t what turned sales up to 11.
No, it was really “BookTok” that carried Maas’s book bricks into some of the best real estate at Barnes & Noble and other booksellers by creating a genuine groundswell of support for her work.
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.
TikTok videos tend to be between 15 seconds and three minutes long. The content can be almost anything: pool hall trick shot videos, movie clips, recipes, sexually suggestive numbers, and, yes, BookToks.
The format and a passionate user base have turned TikTok into a ravenous cash cow. It had estimated revenues in 2023 of over $16 billion, mostly from advertising, though direct commerce is a growing concern.
The video social network was launched by Chinese firm ByteDance, initially only in its domestic market. It is known in China not as “TikTok” but as “Douyin.” Many firms in the People’s Republic of China have struggled to build an international brand. TikTok got around that in the United States, initially, through a key acquisition.
“While many Chinese apps have failed to succeed outside of China, most notably Tencent’s WeChat, TikTok managed to push itself into the overseas market through the acquisition of Musical.ly in November 2017 for $1 billion,” according to the Business of Apps website. “This added 80 million users, mostly in the U.S., which TikTok then imported to its own platform.”
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.
Some projections have TikTok use rising to 1.8 billion monthly viewers by the end of this year, though the company is facing competition from other social networks and pushback from Washington, D.C.
TikTok time’s up?
The video social network has many detractors in the U.S., from members of Congress to literary critics.
“TikTok has repeatedly chosen the path for more control, more surveillance, and more manipulation,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a hearing that grilled the company’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, in March 2023.
Lest anyone miss her point, she added, “Your platform should be banned.”
As far as the House is concerned, McMorris Rodgers got her way. In March, about a year after the initial hearings, representatives voted 352 to 65 to pass the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
If enacted, the bill would prohibit “distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok),” which could be waived only when the company has executed a “qualified divestiture as determined by the President,” according to the summary on Congress.gov.
For his part, Barry Pierce has not voted to ban TikTok, but he wouldn’t necessarily be sad to see it go.
Pierce, whose website describes him as “either a book reviewer or a fashion writer or a cultural critic,” penned a much-discussed article on BookTok for GQ. The piece claimed that on TikTok, “being ‘a reader’ is more important than actually reading.”
He called BookTok a “cursed landscape” and said that scrolling through videos was “like entering a parallel universe where reading wasn’t just something that someone did for fun, it was a lifestyle, an aesthetic,” and a particularly ill-chosen aesthetic at that.
Pierce said that BookTokers reminded him of an earlier book-related hype machine on YouTube, known at the time as BookTube.
“Actual reviews became few and far between and many of the smaller, genuine readers on the platform jumped ship,” he wrote of the BookTube implosion in the mid-2010s. “It feels like BookTok has got to the same place, only much faster.”
Not TikTok’s first rodeo
On the cultural front, the numbers don’t currently bear out any kind of a BookTok implosion. Maas’s books are still enjoying robust sales, as are many others pushed by BookTokers. For the most part, bookstores are happily catering to this boon to their sales.
That’s a good thing, poet and novelist Leigh Stein said, and much of the literary world would do well to catch up.
“In a banquet room in South Carolina, I’m giving the keynote speech at a writing conference,” Stein reported in the online journal Literary Hub. “To inspire the audience, I tell the Cinderella story of Colleen Hoover, the bestselling author in America. Three days before my speech, her novel It Starts With Us sold 800,000 copies on release day. There are 120 writers in the room; only one has heard of Hoover.”
She added, from experience, that while those who aren’t familiar with the social network may see BookTok as a “contraction or reduction of books and ideas to what ‘performs’ best in a visual medium engineered by Chinese geniuses to destroy our attention spans,” fans see it differently.
In fact, fans tell her that “being on BookTok has expanded their horizons as readers.”
The U.S. government could shrink those horizons somewhat by passing the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, in theory.
It currently appears to be bottled up in the Senate. The bill faces opposition from many Democrats and some Republicans, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
TikTok doesn’t appear to be sweating it much. The U.S. makes up only 10% of its active user base, and the company has previous experience being scrutinized and banned elsewhere. Both Pakistan and India prohibited the app, for instance, though Pakistan eventually came around.
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The spread of virtual private networks, or VPNs, would also make a country-specific ban less effective by making it extremely difficult to track where individual users are from.
A study reported in late January by Security.org found that “as many as 105 million Americans have VPNs today.” That is roughly the size of the U.S. cohort that regularly uses TikTok today.
