What happened to books when a video app started recommending them
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TikTok started recommending novels a few years ago, through what's become known as BookTok, and the backlist, the quiet shelf of older titles no publisher was actively pushing, was the part of the industry it changed the most visibly.
BookNet Canada measured the effect directly. In a report published September 29, 2022, the organization tracked Canadian print sales of 20 backlist titles trending on BookTok from July 2019 to June 2022: as a group, titles published between 2015 and 2018 rose 1,698 percent; those from 2019 rose 812 percent; those from 2011 to 2014 rose 395 percent, and older ones 489 percent. All 20 together rose 1,047 percent.
Those aren't marginal bumps. As a group, the 2015 to 2018 titles were selling about eighteen times their mid-2019 level by mid-2022, and single titles peaked far higher: It Ends with Us, from 2016, was up 42,133 percent between November 2019 and June 2022. The study tracks sales, not editions or marketing.
A peer-reviewed study went looking for the mechanism behind numbers like that.
Balling and Martens, publishing in the journal Convergence through SAGE on November 14, 2024, interviewed publishers and booksellers in Denmark and the United States and framed what they found as a disruption of what's known in book history as Robert Darnton's communication circuit, the traditional chain running from author to publisher to bookseller to reader.
Recommendation, in their account, disrupts that chain: BookTok launched backlist titles onto bestseller lists and helped create genres such as romantasy, and publishers and booksellers now use it to market to readers.
The category that has benefited most visibly from this kind of momentum is romance, and within it the romantasy and sports-romance strands.
One title in particular shows how far that momentum can carry a single book: Onyx Storm, by Rebecca Yarros, had the biggest opening week of any adult title in BookScan's twenty-year history, more than a million copies in January 2025, according to Circana data reported by Publishing Perspectives on April 21, 2025.
The effect isn't confined to sales figures either. Publishers Weekly documented in 2024 a parallel rise in special physical editions, sprayed page edges, collector boxsets, ribbon markers, driven by the same audience discovering and displaying books as objects worth photographing.
The Folio Society reported growth of 55 percent since 2017, and publishers followed: Orbit launched a Gold Editions line and Macmillan a limited-edition imprint, Fablelistik Editions, while Gollancz issued a limited fortieth-anniversary Neuromancer and HarperCollins a collector's edition of The Poppy War (Andrew Liptak, December 2024).
A related category shows the same pattern on a smaller scale, without the numbers yet to match.
Cozy fantasy, popularized by Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes in 2022, has been tracked by specialist outlets like K-lytics as a recognizable trend riding the same recommendation currents, though no consolidated Circana figures for the category across 2024 to 2026 appear to exist yet.
It's a useful reminder that not every visible shift in what people are reading has caught up with the data that would confirm its size.
Not everyone reads this shift as an unambiguous good for reading itself.
Alongside the sales data sits a critique, aired in student publications rather than backed by its own dataset, that recommendation reduces novels to a checklist of tropes, spice level, trope tags, aesthetic, rather than restoring people to reading as a critical or reflective act.
That's a real disagreement worth naming plainly. The sales numbers and the peer-reviewed interviews describe a genuinely large new readership and a second life for books that would otherwise have gone quietly out of print.
The trope critique describes something closer to how those same books are now being sold and discussed. Both things can be true of the same platform at once, and the two available bodies of evidence, the measured one and the more anecdotal one, simply aren't answering the same question.
What isn't in dispute is the scale of what changed for a specific slice of publishing: a backlist title with no marketing budget behind it can now sell better than it ever did on its original release date, purely because enough people, one video at a time, decided to tell each other about it.