--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Host (Jessica Mendoza): Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: We're off on Memorial Day, but with summer reading season coming up, we wanted to bring back an episode we made a few months ago. It's on BookTok, the corner of TikTok that's all about books, and how it's transforming the publishing world.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Here it is. For Leah Koch, the romance novel is life. She's loved romance since she was a teenager. What is it that draws you so much to this type of writing?
--:-- Leah Koch: Great question. Let's quickly define what a romance novel is. You need two things to be a romance novel. You need a central love story and a happy ending. And the happy ending, sometimes people try to get around for some reason, but you can't. They have to be together and happy at the end.
--:-- Leah Koch: They do not have to be heterosexually married with a baby, but one of them can't get hit by a bus. Because that's a tragedy, right?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Yeah, or a train a la Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina is not a romance novel. She dies.
--:-- Leah Koch: Got it. Got it. Anyway, I read to have fun. Same. And romance novels are fun.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Leah loves romance so much that in 2016, she and her sister opened up a bookstore devoted to it. It's called The Ripped Bodice, and it's got locations in L.A. and in Brooklyn.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The store is full of passionate experts who can help you find pretty much any kind of romance. So if you ask somebody for cowboy werewolves, number one, they're going to take your request very seriously. And number two, they're going to say, OK, here are the two options that we have.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But if you're interested in that, you might also be interested in cowboy mermaids or werewolf doctors. Romance has always had its audience. But Leah says that over the last few years, she's seen a surge of interest.
--:-- Leah Koch: At first, it was just a few people coming in with surprising requests. They started asking for things that I wasn't expecting. So series that I had read and enjoyed but weren't, like, top of mind.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The first person, I was like, totally. By the fifth person, I was like, how do you know about this series? Yeah.
--:-- Leah Koch: And she was like, oh my God, it's all anyone's reading on TikTok. TikTok, or specifically BookTok, the part of the platform that's all about books, was pulling in new audiences to romance.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And it kept happening. Customers would come in and ask for a book because they'd seen it on TikTok. Very notably to me, it was actually translating to sales.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And young people were coming into the shop and they were coming with shopping lists of things that they had seen on TikTok. And so we would start clocking, like whatever they were asking for. We're like, OK, we need to order more copies because next week, like, there's going to be a thing that everybody wants.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Today, people are still showing up at the Rip Bodice because of TikTok. But the influence of BookTok has gone way beyond a single independent bookstore.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Since 2020, BookTok has driven major sales, especially in the romance and fantasy genres. In one survey, TikTok found that more than a quarter of its users bought a book or started following an author after watching a video on the platform.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And some of the largest publishers in the U.S. are finding new talent, rethinking their strategies, and seeing windfalls from old titles because of TikTok. Authors, influencers, agents, and publishers all told us that today, TikTok's fingerprints are all over the book industry.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. Coming up on the show, TikTok and the book industry, a love story.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Author Penn Cole reads a lot of different books in the romance genre. I'm actually getting into sports romance lately, which is fun.
--:-- Penn Cole: I read my first hockey romance. I love that you can just sort of take the word romance and add a different word, and it's a whole category of books. It's amazing.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Exactly. Billionaire romance. Yes. Hockey romance. Mafia romance. It's a whole thing.
--:-- Penn Cole: Penn's own books fall into a genre called romanticcy, a combination of romance and fantasy that typically has a few main ingredients.
--:-- Penn Cole: A strong, usually female, main character, a love interest, who often starts out as an enemy, and then some kind of supernatural element, like dragons or sorcerers, or in a lot of cases, fairies.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And the plot is usually peppered with spicy sex scenes.
--:-- Penn Cole: It's the kind of novel Penn had dreamed of writing, but she didn't think she could make any money in it. And so I went into a different career for many years thinking, well, someday I'll write my book.
--:-- Penn Cole: Like, I'll get there someday. And then during the pandemic, as I think many people did, I sort of reassessed what I wanted out of life and whether I was really happy with where I was.
--:-- Penn Cole: And I realized that I really wanted to write that book that I'd always been kind of dreaming about writing. So I took a risk and I wrote my first book.
--:-- Penn Cole: That book is called Spark of the Everflame. It's the first in a four-part series, The Kindred's Curse Saga. And it's got a feisty heroine, a hot immortal prince, a human rebel faction, and a whole lot of will they, won't they.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Penn read me a snippet. I was made of swinging fists and rash words, my edges too jagged and my temper too hot.
--:-- Penn Cole: Nothing about me was delicate. Sometimes I wondered whether Henry's taste had changed or whether he thought he saw something different in me, the nurturing healer who stepped up to care for her family in her mother's absence.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But I didn't choose to be a healer, nor did I choose to take my mother's role. And I didn't want gentle or delicate. I wanted to burn.
--:-- Penn Cole: Ooh! I got little shivers there with that last line.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: When Penn started writing that first book in 2021 she already decided that she wanted to self-publish.
--:-- Penn Cole: She been to law school and worked as a consultant for small businesses helping them with branding social media and growth So she was pretty savvy when it came to launching her own career as an author.
--:-- Penn Cole: Why did you choose to self-publish? I was never afraid of the business aspect of being an author.
--:-- Penn Cole: The idea of marketing my book, of handling all of the financial details, the legal details, figuring out what the cover would be, all of that stuff excited me.
--:-- Penn Cole: So I knew pretty early on that I wanted to self-publish because, frankly, if you're going to do all of that work yourself, you want to keep the money.
--:-- Penn Cole: Because when you traditionally publish, you end up giving away quite a bit of your money. And so I thought, well, if I'm willing to do the work, I might as well, you know, reap the benefits of it.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And Penn quickly learned that a lot of that work needed to happen on social media. You have to be where the readers are and find ways for them to see you and to know that you even exist.
--:-- Penn Cole: Because you're not going to have the big promotions that these huge publishing houses get. Your books aren't going to be on the shelves at Barnes & Noble.
--:-- Penn Cole: You're not going to be, you know, listed as a hot book to read in, you know, Vogue magazine or something.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So even before she'd finished writing her books, Penn made an official TikTok account. And it was there that she found a lot of the readers she was looking for.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They were on BookTok. BookTok really took off during the pandemic, when many readers were stuck at home.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: One of the first books that went viral on BookTok is Colleen Hoover's dark romance novel, It Ends With Us.
--:-- Colleen Hoover: Because believe me, when I started this book, my life ended. It's crazy to think that this one book will probably change my life forever.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: This book did make me cry. I think it's an important read, and I can understand why it got so popular on TikTok.
--:-- Colleen Hoover: Hoover's book had already been considered a commercial success when it came out in 2016. But when users on BookTok picked up on it, the sales went bananas.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Hoover's publisher told me that by 2021, Weekly sales for It Ends With Us were 100 times more than what they'd been two years before.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Hoover later published a sequel. And earlier this year, It Ends With Us was adapted into a movie.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Other authors have also broken through, like Sarah J. Maas with her fairy series A Court of Thorns and Roses, which I devoured way too fast.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: There's also Rebecca Yaros and her novel Fourth Wing. And while not everyone makes it as big booktalk has raised up other romance and fantasy authors.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: TikTok says that this year there was a 300 increase in posts with the hashtag romanticy and the romanticy genre has grown into a 471 million dollar category.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So Penn Cole was able to ride this wave on BookTok. How did you try and build a following or a community on BookTok? What's the secret sauce there?
--:-- Penn Cole: Well, that is the million-dollar question. If you knew how to answer that easily, you would make a lot of money.
--:-- Penn Cole: Penn didn't have all the answers, but she did have a strategy to win over BookTok readers. She published the first three books of her four-part series quickly, within a few months, knowing romantic-y fans love a good binge.
--:-- Penn Cole: And she used the self-publishing platform on Amazon so Kindle readers could access the book and physical copies could be printed on demand.
--:-- Penn Cole: Penn also posted about once a day on TikTok and other social media platforms.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Was there a specific goal you had in mind?
--:-- Penn Cole: I think in the early days, I really thought you needed to go viral. I thought that I was shooting for that video that got a million views and that that would make or break my career.
--:-- Penn Cole: I have since learned that is not how it works at all. It is so much more complicated than that.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And so what changed your mind and how did you like adjust?
--:-- Penn Cole: At some point, I think I did have a video. It wasn't one of my videos, but it was a video somebody else made about my book.
--:-- Penn Cole: Here's the video. The video was posted just a few months after Penn released her first book. Shout out Penn Cole, this author. She was just exquisite.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I saw a spike and I thought, this is it. Like I've made it. My book's going to be huge.
--:-- Penn Cole: And then two days later, you know, the sales dropped down to what they were before. The views stopped.
--:-- Penn Cole: Because that's what virality is. It's a moment. And I think I learned after that that this is a long-haul thing.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So Penn refined her strategy. She made sure every post had details like what hashtags to use and a description of her series.
--:-- Penn Cole: It was a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall and waiting to see what sticks.
--:-- Penn Cole: I had joined a lot of groups on TikTok for authors, and I was, you know, uploading art and making memes out of my characters.
--:-- Penn Cole: I was, you know, doing videos about me as an author. And so it was just every single day trying something new and hoping that something would strike a chord with readers.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Girl, how much time did this take? So much time. So all of the time.
--:-- Penn Cole: Eventually, Penn found her footing on TikTok. Readers who were fans of other romantic-y books started picking up on her series.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I just finished the first book in the Kindred Curse Saga, The Spark of the Everflame, and it was absolute perfection.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I was so obsessed and binged it so quickly within like a day and a half that I am currently charging my Kindle so that I can read the second part.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I started to see my book growing in sales without a viral moment at a very steady, regular pace.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And it was just by talking to people, replying to comments when people said, oh, I'm interested in that book or asking questions about it.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You know, looking at videos that people who had read my book, if they made a video about it, thanking them and talking to them in DMs about what they liked or what their theories were really engaging with them.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The first month I sold maybe a hundred copies I can remember exactly And it was like And I was stoked I was so excited.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Of course, it cost me way more than that to put out the book. So I was still deeply in the red.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And then the next month, it like quadrupled. And then the next month, it like added a digit. Wow.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And it grew and grew and grew. I think by the end of the first year, I think we'd sold like 300,000 copies of the books.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Those numbers were just kind of mind-boggling. A lot of this growth came from e-book sales.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But Penn felt that if she wanted to get bigger, she needed to actually get her book into bookstores, which is really hard to do without a publisher.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: There's still a huge segment of the market that doesn't read e-book at all. So I knew that I had the potential to really grow my reader base in a significant way if I could get into those bookstores.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But that door was pretty much shut to me, other than a handful of bookstores that had stopped my books.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: One publisher caught Penn's eye. Atria, which is part of one of the biggest publishing houses, Simon & Schuster.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Penn liked how Atria worked with social media. And Atria was into Penn, too. The brand was keeping an eye out for self-published authors who'd already built a big audience.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: In July of this year, they got together. Atria would publish Penn's novels in print and get them in more bookstores.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And so far, it's made the difference she hoped it would. I think by the end of the year, we're going to hit a million copies sold in about a year and a half of the books being on the market, which is unheard of.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I mean, even the average traditionally published book is only selling maybe five figures if they're lucky, right?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: It's just, it's crazy to think about. As publishers take note of success stories like Penn's, they're also recognizing that TikTok offers really precise information into what readers want.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And that new insight is shaking up the publishing industry. That's next.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com slash podcast for 40% off. Terms apply.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: BookTok has jolted the publishing industry, which is usually pretty stagnant. Serkana BookScan, a publishing tracker, says that in a typical year, overall print sales grow or shrink by about only 1 to 2 percent.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And this year was no exception. But for BookTok authors, it's a different story. In the U.S., BookTok authors sold 20% more books in print this year than the year before.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That's 55.4 million books. And that has piqued the interest of some of the country's biggest book publishers.
--:-- Felicity Valance: Hi, I'm Felicity. I'm the director of digital marketing for Penguin Young Readers at Penguin Random House.
--:-- Felicity Valance: Felicity Valance has been in legacy publishing for nearly two decades. And she says BookTok allows her to reach readers in a way that she was never able to before, even on other social platforms.
--:-- Felicity Valance: So obviously the algorithm when we talk about TikTok is the more you scroll and engage with certain pieces of content, the more it will feed you that content.
--:-- Felicity Valance: Whether it's creators that you follow or things that you save, TikTok will then say, oh, this person likes this. We'll give them more of that.
--:-- Felicity Valance: And that's different than how algorithms worked with other social media platforms in the past.
--:-- Felicity Valance: In the past, correct. Yeah, it used to be either chronologically or just like who had the most clicks and engagement, who had the most views. That's what you were being served.
--:-- Felicity Valance: That shift from being shown what is generally popular to what you were interested in meant that readers didn't have to look for content about the books they liked. It was just served up to them.
--:-- Felicity Valance: In fact, that's what happened to me. BookTok kept feeding me content, and I kept eating it up.
--:-- Felicity Valance: There were straight-up book reviews, sure, but people also use memes. They make skits about their favorite plot points. They joke about story tropes. And they share their opinions on everything from character arcs to book covers.
--:-- Felicity Valance: So now, with BookTok, someone like me, from my perch at Penguin Random House, is able to see in real time what readers actually care about, what books were featured in the videos with the most comments, which titles were being recommended the most.
--:-- Felicity Valance: And then I can respond accordingly. So I think there's a lot of listening to readers that TikTok has really amplified.
--:-- Felicity Valance: We're able to sort of see trends emerge. You know, romanticism isn't a word that we all talked about three years ago.
--:-- Felicity Valance: So seeing romanticism come out of places like TikTok, publishers and editors were able to sort of say, right, what could I acquire that suits this?
--:-- Felicity Valance: Our sales team are able to say, what do we have that already exists on our list that could suit this reader's interests?
--:-- Felicity Valance: That second look at old titles in particular has led to a slew of re-releases in the BookTok era. Because publishers realized, if you give its packaging a glow-up and put it in the hands of the right influencers, a book years or even decades old can see a fresh uptick in sales.
--:-- Felicity Valance: We are aware of books from our backlist that the read itself really speaks to what the reader's interested in. But maybe it doesn't look right amongst what's on the shelves right now.
--:-- Felicity Valance: And so is there an opportunity for a reader to rediscover that if it had the new jacket? But also, I think it's more a case of new readers discovering it.
--:-- Felicity Valance: We're aware that a book that we know to be existing for a long time, they may have never heard of. I'm still flabbergasted when people sort of bring up old books and be like, I found this new great book.
--:-- Felicity Valance: It's called The Fault in Our Stars. And I think, what? How is that not monolithically heard about? But people do. And so we're really aware of it's not an old book repackaged to them. It's just a new book.
--:-- Felicity Valance: BookTok hasn't just changed how publishers are thinking about marketing their catalog. Felicity has also been trying to work with authors and influencers to get her books in front of the right readers.
--:-- Felicity Valance: So we kind of pivoted our resources a little bit and said you know what let focus on creating content for this platform more for our key core audience
--:-- Felicity Valance: Would you say that TikTok today is more influential than, say, a publisher's weekly review or, you know, a ranking, a top 10 books of the year ranking?
--:-- Felicity Valance: It really depends on the book. It totally depends on who the readers are. And I think all of those things still matter in their own way.
--:-- Felicity Valance: And the lightning strike of TikTok can be happening one day and then the next day it's not. And if I had the viral button to press, I'd press it every day. If only. If only.
--:-- Felicity Valance: Oh, I'd love it.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Despite the powerful impact that BookTok has had on publishing, it also comes with challenges. For one thing, romance and fantasy are often taken less seriously by the broader literary mainstream.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: If you look up chatter about BookTok on other corners of the internet, you'll find a lot of haters. Here's one tweet to give you a taste. Quote, book talk style books are anti-literacy, anti-art, and reading stuff like that is not the same as reading actual literature.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I brought this up with Felicity. There's the criticism that book talk books are not that quote unquote good. How do you respond to that? And have you heard that?
--:-- Felicity Valance: I have absolutely heard that and I will fight people about that. No, that sounds very aggressive.
--:-- Felicity Valance: But I think to judge someone's reading tastes like that is really dangerous. Reading is such an enjoyable pastime that we want people to not feel pressured to read the right books.
--:-- Felicity Valance: We want them just to be entertained and have fun or be serious or learn. And yeah, I don't like the idea of saying book talk books are bad.
--:-- Felicity Valance: I think people have different tastes. And also the tastes of someone who reads 20 books a year versus the person who reads two books a year are wildly different.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: How does that play into this maybe broader view that genres like romance and fantasy and young adult fiction are not, like, taken seriously?
--:-- Felicity Valance: I mean, I think it's like all entertainment orientated towards women. That tends to be given a side eye, and I don't love it because I think that's wrong.
--:-- Penn Cole: It's very real. I actually just had a conversation with my publisher. They, you know, wanted to put viral BookTok hit, you know, BookTok sensation, Penko, putting it in ads, pretty much everywhere that you need to sort of describe the book.
--:-- Penn Cole: Because that communicates to booksellers in particular, bookstores and buyers for these big book chains. That's sort of a code word for this book has a lot of fans. It has a big reader base.
--:-- Penn Cole: But for readers, I think it has a very different connotation. And I had to sit down with my publisher and say, I'm not sure that putting this in reader-facing spaces is necessarily the being the best idea.
--:-- Penn Cole: Because there is a big group of people that feels as if BookTok books are not any good. It sort of gets painted with a broad brush where people discount my books and assume they're going to be fluff.
--:-- Penn Cole: They're not going to be serious. The writing quality will be bad. They'll be unedited or they were, you know, make all these assumptions about what's inside my book without ever giving me a chance.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And like with all social media, people on TikTok can be mean and being in it all the time can be rough on authors.
--:-- Penn Cole: I can't even count the number of times I have cried or, you know, had to just go and get offline because someone said something really mean.
--:-- Penn Cole: And of course, they have every right to say that, right? Like, we want people to give honest reviews, but as an author, seeing it can be hard.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The worst part for Penn was having to push back the release of the fourth and final book in her series.
--:-- Penn Cole: Because being a book talk author is a lot of work, and it leaves less time for, well, writing.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Of course, most of my readers were so supportive and so kind about it and said, take all the time you need.
--:-- Penn Cole: But, I mean, to be very honest about it, I had to start going to therapy. I had to seek professional help because it was, I felt so guilty.
--:-- Penn Cole: I really beat myself up over it. I thought I was given this opportunity to have a bestselling book that was doing really well and that I was going to ruin it.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: It starts to have an effect no matter how mentally strong you are.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: One thing we should note, looming over all of this is a possible ban on TikTok in the U.S., a ban that's meant to start in January.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The Supreme Court has agreed to hear TikTok's challenge to the ban before it goes into effect.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Still, there's a real risk that the platform goes away. But even if that happens, a lot of other social media sites now operate the way TikTok does.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So BookTok's legacy is likely to live on. That's especially true for readers And in particular, those who love cowboy-werewolf romances And sexy fairy love stories
--:-- Penn Cole: Penn says BookTok has given these readers more agency Traditionally, you know, for as long as books have existed It has been a handful of gatekeepers in the biggest publishing houses That have decided what readers are going to read
--:-- Penn Cole: And now publishers are rushing to keep up with what the readers are saying they like, as opposed to publishers telling readers, this is what you get to choose from.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: It sounds like you think TikTok will have elastic effect on the publishing industry.
--:-- Penn Cole: I think TikTok is changing and will continue to change everything about publishing. It's giving readers power that they have never had before.
--:-- Penn Cole: It's allowing authors to hold on to their rights, to make money outside of the publishing machine.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I think the publishers who pay attention and who adapt rather than resisting are going to really rise to the top.
--:-- Penn Cole: So I think that has, it's really like a sea change that is in the process of occurring right now.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I don't even think we know yet the full effects of how it's going to change publishing.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: This episode was originally published in December. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow with a new episode.
