The viral publishing sensation that may be BookTok’s last
As the US faces a potential ban on TikTok, the viral success of Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean series shows just how influential the BookTok community has become
Published 21 January 2025
TikTok has a lot to answer for.
Even before you consider its implications for national security, TikTok is responsible for more dance challenges than you can shake a leg at, a national shortage of cucumbers in Iceland, a sudden rise in the popularity of sea shanties, and the unholy concoction that is ‘proffee’.
But it’s also home to BookTok, described as ‘the last wholesome place on the internet’. BookTok is an online community where BookTokers create short form video content about the books they love to read.
Largely comprising teenage girls and young women, many of whom identify as belonging to an ethnic minority or the LGBTQIA+ community, your mother’s chardonnay-fuelled book group this is not.
While there are BookTokers of every literary persuasion, the community skews heavily towards Young Adult (YA) fiction and ‘romantasy’, an often sexually explicit mash-up of the fantasy and romance genres.
BookTok originally grew in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic and by October 2024 the hashtag #booktok had over 38 million posts with more than 309 billion views.
That’s the equivalent of every person on the planet viewing it 38 times.
With these numbers in mind, it’s not hard to see why BookTok is now the single biggest influence on reading trends worldwide.
An enthusiastic recommendation from a notable BookToker like @aymansbooks or @caitsbooks can launch an author’s literary career, even if they don’t have a literary agent or a publisher, and retailers like Barnes & Noble, Dymocks and Big W all have sections of their websites dedicated to titles popular on BookTok.
Of Amazon’s 20 bestselling titles worldwide in 2024, seven of the top 10 titles have been ‘BookTok sensations’, including Frieda McFadden’s The Housemaid and multiple titles from ‘romantasy’ author Sarah J Maas and romance author Colleen Hoover.
At #14 and #20 on that bestsellers list sit the first two books in Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean series – Fourth Wing which was released in May 2023 and Iron Flame which followed just six months later to capitalise on its success.
Having originally conceived of Empyrean as a three-part series, Yarros swiftly signed a lucrative five-book deal when Fourth Wing stayed at the top of The New York Times bestseller list for 18 weeks.
On BookTok, the hashtags #FourthWing and #RebeccaYarros have more than a billion views combined.
So, it's a near certainty that when the third instalment of the series Onyx Storm is released on 21 January 2025, it will enjoy similar chart-dominating success.
The book has been available to pre-order for months and, reminiscent of the heyday of the Harry Potter series in the early 2000s, bookstores worldwide are hosting instore events including midnight release parties which will attract legions of costumed fans (retailers of black leather flight suits may also enjoy a rise in sales).
The series has many of the hallmarks of YA fantasy fiction. An unlikely but feisty heroine. A devastatingly handsome but emotionally repressed love interest. An enemies-to-lovers narrative arc. An intergenerational battle between good and evil. Dysfunctional families. Dragons.
Decidedly not intended for younger readers, though, are the frequent sexually explicit – or ‘spicy’, if you’re a BookToker – passages.
As such, the publisher recommends the series for readers aged between 18–25, though thousands of videos on BookTok make it clear that it has entirely predictably found a voracious younger readership, too.
While Yarros’ publisher, Entangled Publishing, has not yet shared the initial print run for Onyx Storm, we know that the initial hardback print run of Fourth Wing was an astounding 315,000 copies (for context, an impressive print run for a hardback novel is considered to be 75,000 or more).
Success on BookTok gives publishers the confidence to order these dizzyingly large print runs as they know that a ready (and often impatient) readership already exists.
Similarly, studio executives are more likely to buy the adaptation rights to books that have enjoyed BookTok popularity. Indeed, Fourth Wing has already been optioned for a TV series for Prime Video, and a film adaptation of Coleen Hoover’s novel It Ends with Us (2016) has recently enjoyed box office success, grossing US $351 million worldwide.
But, happily, it’s not just new titles like Yarros’ series that benefit from the BookTok effect.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella White Nights – hardly standard fare for Gen Z readers – has found a rhapsodic readership within the community, with over 54,000 units of the Penguin Little Black Classics edition selling in 2024.
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Similarly, in 2023 the inaugural TikTok Book Awards UK and Ireland included a ‘Revival’ category, allowing BookTokers to vote on their favourite ‘classic’ novel.
From a shortlist including Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) emerged victorious, introducing a new generation of readers to the Bennet family.
Though BookTok is a thoroughly digital phenomenon, it has had a significant positive effect on the fortunes of the printed book.
The TikTok Book Awards partnered with bookshop.org, an online bookseller that offers the convenience of Amazon whilst financially supporting local, independent booksellers in customers’ own communities.
Additionally, a significant proportion of BookTok content celebrates books not just as literary texts but as desirable physical objects, and BookTokers scramble to get their hands on deluxe limited editions with intricate endpapers and ‘spredges’ (a design printed or sprayed on the edges of the book’s pages).
Many Empyrean fans create videos showing off their bookshelves, which resemble nothing so much as shrines to Yarros’ fictional world complete with dragon figurines and other merchandise.
Given that the launch of the Kindle in 2007 had publishing houses bleakly prophesying their own demise, this giddy resurgence in the popularity of the hardback book – amongst a generation of digital natives, no less – is a welcome market development.
But after TikTok went dark for more than 170 million users in the US on 19 January 2025, and with no guarantees over its long-term survival (despite the ban being temporarily delayed by President Trump), what is the future of the coziest corner of the internet?
BookTokers, authors and publishers alike will be on tenterhooks as they wait to find out how this story ends.