Links of Interest: May 25, 2022

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TikTok

  • Canadian bookstore chain Indigo launches TikTok book club. The first event will be in-person and also live-streamed. Read more.
  • BookTok may be changing how we talk about books. There’s an emphasis on tropes that make readers feel something. Read Addison Rizer at Book Riot.
  • TikTokker lands book deal. She sent readers on a scavenger hunt to find copies of her self-published novel. Now Union Square & Co. will publish the work this summer. Read Katherine Fiorillo at Business Insider.
  • A self-published literary novel hits Amazon bestseller lists after getting attention on BookTok. The work is two years old, and the author has a modest social media following. Publisher Kenneth Whyte comments, “To BookTokers, the literary industrial complex is somewhere off in the ether. … If you’re publishing fiction the old-fashioned way, how do you compete?” Read his newsletter.
  • Did BookTok really get Gen Z into reading? Probably not—it has just given young readers a platform they like to express themselves on. Read Serena Smith at Dazed.
  • How Book of the Month Club has tapped BookTok influencers. The subscription program has worked with BookTubers and Instagram influencers in the past. Now, TikTok is where they devote the most time and effort. Read Phoebe Bain at Marketing Brew.

Acquisitions & Mergers

  • Tapas Media and Radish Media merge. Kakao Entertainment is merging its North America subsidiaries, Tapas and Radish, to create a digital publishing platform with more than 100,000 creators and 100,000 stories. Read Adi Tantimedh at Bleeding Cool.

Trends

  • Bestselling books have never been shorter. An analysis of 3,444 New York Times bestsellers for the last 10 years shows that average length has declined by 11.8 percent. Read Dimitrije Curcic at WordsRated.
  • On the rise of Insta-artists and Insta-poets: The author is not dead or dying in the digital age. In fact, we’re seeing a cult of celebrity surround today’s successful, online-oriented author. Read Kate Eichhorn at Literary Hub.
  • Will AI writers replace fiction writers? Fiction writing succeeds based on the “accrual of meaning,” says Lincoln Michel, and so far AI doesn’t know how to build that meaning. But what if that problem is overcome? Read Counter Craft.

Audiobooks

  • What makes a great or terrible audiobook performance? Narrators mess up when they overly act out the meanings of words or telegraph how the reader should think or feel. Read Mimi Kramer at Vulture.

Self-Publishing

  • Learn to identify a book’s sales problem. Sometimes there’s little you can do, but other times there are glaring issues. Read Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur.
  • A new bookstore focuses solely on self-published children’s picture books. Young Bookworms is based in Colorado Springs; the owner started writing children’s books two years ago. Read Amanda Hancock at The Gazette.

Culture & Politics