Influencing reading: The numbers on social media’s effects on books, reading tell different stories

The alarm bells have been rung – reading is a dying activity.

Young adults are picking up their phones instead of picking up a book. Social media will bring the end of literature. The future is doomed. (Insert wailing here.)

But is any of that actually true? As it turns out, booksellers don’t think so. At least, they say it’s a bit more complicated than that.

In some ways, social media has given the literary world a new life by providing a new place to grow, evolve and thrive.

The numbers are muddy, though.

If you search, “Are book sales declining?” and “Are book sales rising?”Google gives you a “yes” to both.

Yes, print book sales in the past decade and a half were consistently lower than those in the early 2000s, hitting rock bottom at 591 million copies in 2012. Yes, those very sales are also climbing more recently – so much so that 843 million copies were sold in 2021, which was U.S. publishers’ highest number since 2003. Yes, bookstore sales in 2019 were the lowest they’d been in a quarter century.

It’s a strange mix of statistics that all point in different directions, influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of Amazon and e-books and the age of the internet.

So where does social media fit in?

For reference, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok launched in 2004, 2010 and 2016. Technically, sales started declining right around that time.

But now, in a world where social media use is only increasing, print book sales are back to where they were before any of those platforms launched.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say that social media has contributed to a reduction in readers at all, at least not more than anything else has,” said John Waite, owner of Auntie’s Bookstore. “There are so many instances where social media can just amplify the signal of a good book or an unknown book, and it will blow up to be an amazing seller.”

BookTok, a TikTok community where users promote, review and talk about books, is one of the best examples of social media’s influence on the literary industry.

“For stores and writers and publishers, something like BookTok is a miracle,” Waite said.

The hashtag #booktok has 158.2 billion views – genre niches like #fantasybooktok and #YAbooktok have nearly a billion each.

On Instagram, where hashtags are tracked by the number of posts and not the number of views, #bookstagram has over 90 million posts.

“If somebody likes a book, and they talk a thousand other people into buying that book, that’s pretty fabulous,” Waite said.

“It has always been that some people like to read and take that time, and others don’t,” he continued. “I would even say that social media and TikTok has quote-unquote ‘tricked’ some nonreaders into becoming readers.”

Publishers Weekly reported that 30% of last year’s print sale gains in the young adult fiction category were directly stimulated by activity on BookTok. The fastest-growing category of book sales is young adult fiction, which is the most popular genre on BookTok, with an increase of 47% over the past five years, according to the trade magazine.

There are many reasons social media’s effect on reading culture has only become noticeable recently.

TikTok, which launched in 2016, has gained in popularity significantly in the past five years. So, all that online buzz, specifically directed toward younger generations, is new.

The pandemic also had an impact on encouraging people to pick up a book while they were stuck in their homes, which helped book sales to skyrocket even when bookstores worldwide were closing. And all that extra time people spent on the internet only helped the BookTok community to build.

“I think the last few years with the pandemic, people figured out where there was a lot of value, and one of those things that had a lot of value were books,” Waite said. “The pandemic, honestly, helped us a lot when all is said and done. People were like, ‘I want to be in bookstores, I want to support local bookstores.’ We were very lucky that way.”

The ebb and flow of different social media apps have always played a role in influencing book sales, albeit in different ways, said local author Tamara Berry.

“I’ve been published for 11 years now,” Berry said. “So I’ve seen the waves of different social media come and go. When I first started, Twitter was huge, and then Instagram took off, and now it’s TikTok.”

What sets TikTok apart from other platforms is its popularity with the younger generation. And while that influence may pose problems, when it comes to getting young adults interested in reading, there aren’t many more effective tools.

But it’s not all paid promotion and marketing strategy. In fact, books only tend to gain traction when they go viral “organically.”

“Publishers often want us authors to get on TikTok and be a part of that community, but they don’t have the evidence to back up that it works when its coming from the author,” Berry said. “Because the things that take off and do well for sales are when readers talk about an author’s book without the author having any part in it, or say in it.”

The reason why TikTok has functioned so well as a tool of influence in consumer markets, not just in the book industry, is because a user’s feed isn’t compiled of accounts they have chosen to follow. Instead, the app suggests videos based off an always-changing, algorithmic profile of the user’s interests. This is how ideas, opinions and recommendations can reach a much larger group of people than allowed by the operating systems of other social media platforms.

And you don’t have to have a following for your video to go viral.

Social media has also given retailers an extensive guide as to what gets readers excited, at exactly the moment they become excited about it.

It wasn’t so long ago when national bookseller Barnes & Noble seemed to be limping towards their demise – now, they’re launching expansions nationwide.

When you walk into a Barnes & Noble today, some of the biggest and first displays are labeled “What’s Hot on Booktok!” or “Viral Favorites.” There’s often no pattern in target-age or genre in the books stacked upon those tables, because there’s often no pattern as to why the internet likes one book over another.

It’s the same strategy that local bookstores like Auntie’s use : catering to their base. And sellers know that much of that base is online.

Sometimes the hottest book on social media is a debut from a new author. The next week it’s a novel that was released over a decade ago.

Social media also allows new writers to promote their work for free, which is especially helpful to self-published authors who often struggle to get the word out about their books without the professional guidance and funding of a publishing house.

“When I started, you kind of expected the publisher to break you into the big world,” said Jess Walter, a local author, former Spokesman-Review staffer and recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe award.

It’s a whole new game of marketing and luck. But it’s not always viewed as a positive change.

“Instead of bringing your work to a publisher and having them expose you to the world, the publishers now hope that you bring, you know, thousands of followers and then that helps them sell books,” Walter said. “So, it’s almost like the process has been reversed. But I always try to remind writers that their job isn’t social media. Their job is to write.”

Still, many authors use social media platforms to try to promote their work. The hashtag #authorsoftiktok has over 2.2 billion views.

But beyond promotion, online communities allow authors to network with other writers and readers. Some send free copies of their novels to bookish-influencers with high followings. Others make advice videos for young hopefuls on how to navigate the publishing industry. Young authors connect with peers so they can edit each other’s work.

It’s a worldwide sphere of community (and competition) at your fingertips.

“They’re always trying to find some way to get their work in front of readers,” said Walter. “I think social media is a great way to do it. I think it’s an imperfect way to do it, but everything is imperfect I suppose. Especially for young writers developing a hopefully natural social media presence, for young adult writers especially, that can be really important.”

“If I were starting out now, though, I would probably invest much more time in social media than I do,” Walter said.

In many ways, it’s a roll of the dice – for both authors and readers.

Authors have to hope the algorithm sends the right post to the right people. They also have to hope the influencers to whom they send their novel will take the time to read it, and then will like their book enough to rave about it online. Otherwise, they’re losing money.

Readers, in return, have to hope the recommendations they see on the internet aren’t just going viral because the video was filmed with good lighting, engaging background music or a fast-talking reader.

It’s like judging a book by its cover but meta.

“I don’t know if I’ve seen a lot of rhyme or reason for the way these things are,” said Waite. “If a prominent person talks about a book, a lot of the time they seem very genuine about it. It’s not often that they’re being bought and paid for it.”

“When a book blows up, we get a thousand calls, but sometimes nobody has it, including the publisher, because it’s been out of print for a while,” Waite said. “And then the publisher runs out and prints it again, and, you know, it does really well. So, you never know what’s gonna hit. It could be a big Stephen King, or it might be something obscure. I think it’s all good regardless.”

Berry agreed.

“I’m for anything that gets people interested in books and excited about books, especially since social media skews younger,” she said. “I think it’s brought in a lot of young readers who might not have otherwise stumbled into a lot of their favorite series.”