On January 20, hours after President Donald J. Trump was inaugurated, thousands of readers lined up for one of the 1,100 midnight release parties held across the country for Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros. The book, which is the third in the TikTok-beloved Empyrean series, received a 2.5 million copy first print run, with one million copies preordered, according to the book’s publisher, Entangled Publishing. Today, many in the industry are wondering: will we see its like again?

Last Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), the law signed by President Joseph R. Biden in 2024 that effectively bans the social media app TikTok in the United States until it is sold by its Chinese corporate parent. As a result, TikTok was shut down in the U.S. for 14 hours, before returning after the company was assured by President Trump that he would take action to delay the ban shortly after he was inaugurated.

On Monday evening, Trump signed an executive order instructing the U.S. attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days, giving the government “an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward.” (TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was among the numerous tech CEOs and billionaires who attended yesterday's inauguration.) Whether the ban later comes into effect still remains to be seen.

With more than 170 million users in the U.S., TikTok has served as an important marketing channel for books in recent years—arguably the most important. By the end of 2024, the #BookTok hashtag had more than 42 million posts and 200 billion views, helping turn backlist titles into bestsellers and turbocharging the careers of such megaselling authors as Yarros, Sarah J. Maas, and Colleen Hoover. Approximately 59 million print book sales in 2024 could be tied to BookTok-related influencers or content, according to Circana Bookscan.

Leading book business figures have praised the app for providing a means to directly address readers en masse and create a new class of fans and influencers in an eroding book media landscape. “In an era where traditional marketing methods are evolving,” said Leigh Marchant, SVP and chief marketing officer at Hachette Book Group, “BookTok has been an amazing marketing tool for encouraging genuine, organic conversations, and has given us real-time insights into what resonates with audiences, leading to increased visibility and buzz for our books.” James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, noted that “fiction continued to be the big sales driver for B&N, helped in no small way by the publicity given to books backed by BookTok influencers.”

The industry has been bracing for the possibility of a shock to the BookTok system since last spring, when PAFACA was passed. While acknowledgment of the platform’s marketing and publicity power is overwhelming, many also assert that any concern over a drop in sales is overblown.

“It's not like BookTok invented great books, though it does provide a great platform to find them,” said Daunt. While he would love for BookTok to continue, he added, he is confident that another social media platform would come along to fill any BookTok-sized hole. He noted that, throughout his bookselling career, young people have always been a core buying group, pointing to the reading hysteria after Harry Potter was first released in the U.K. in 1997 and the enthusiasm for reading that occurred during the pandemic.

Michael Zuccato, chief marketing officer at Sourcebooks, emphasized that success on social media isn't about traditional marketing: “It's not talking to, it's not marketing to, it's a conversation and a discussion with.” The question, then is where those conversations might go should the ban go into effect and TikTok go dark.

“It creates a vacuum in the market, but nature abhors a vacuum,” Dominique Raccah, CEO of Sourcebooks, told PW regarding the possible ban. “We’ve been through platform shifts before. The need to connect remains. We’ll go where the readers and fans are. I remain belligerently optimistic.”

Talk Talk

The conversational approach to marketing spurred by social media has proven particularly valuable for smaller publishers, especially on TikTok, where its recommendation algorithm has been effective for targeted audience engagement. Hannah Moushabeck of the Norhampton, Mass.–based Interlink Publishing, which describes itself as the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the U.S., emphasized how the platform favors genuine spontaneity and authenticity.

“One of our first viral posts was completely organic,” she said. “I went for a walk to clear my head and I noticed that all of the surrounding houses had put outside facing our building signs that said ‘Free Palestine.’ To have all of our neighbors show this sort of subtle solidarity with us was just so special.” Moushabeck took a video of the scene and posted it to the platform, and the impact from just that one clip, she said, has been profound: “A lot of people will place orders on our website and say, ‘I saw the TikTok video and it really touched my heart and I wanted to support you all.’ ”

TikTok's effectiveness extends beyond sales, Moushabeck noted. “Whenever we used the term Palestine on other platforms, it would often be a problem,” she explained. “On TikTok, as we were more open about who we are, the algorithm targeted us at people who believe in collective liberation and at people who identify as anti-Zionists. Once that happened, it was like a waterfall. Suddenly, we had people coming to our events from Boston, or Maine, or New York City, because they had never been to a Palestinian-owned book company before.”

Independent bookstores saw similar success. Christina Pascucci-Ciampa, founder of All She Wrote Books, a queer, feminist bookstore in Somerville, Mass., emphasized the platform's authenticity. “What I like about TikTok is the ability to be raw,” she said. BookTok users, she added, “are people that just love books, love what they're reading, and want to talk about it.”

Pascucci-Ciampa emphasized the platform’s particular importance for LGBTQ+ book discovery and community building, explaining that TikTok has helped to center and elevate queer stories and create connections between booksellers and readers. The app, she explained, often directly helped to drive in-store traffic and sales: “People will place orders specifically saying ‘I saw that video of you talking about this book. I need to read it,’ ” she said. TikTok proved even more transformative for the bookstore during a critical moment: When All She Wrote Books was displaced from its original storefront, a viral TikTok video by creator Mercury Stardust helped the store raise $30,000 in three days for its relocation.

The Sourcebooks executives noted that TikTok’s relationship-building impact extends past the business-consumer community—author-reader relationships, too, flourished on the platform. “Authors can come onto TikTok and be their true selves and they step off their pedestal,” Raccah said. “And readers really got a sense of their author icons becoming their friends, becoming part of their community.”

Garrett Perkins, chief revenue officer of Givington's, agreed. The direct-to-consumer book fulfillment company, which is based in Fayetteville, Ark., works with a wide range of authors, including Seth Godin and Lysa Turkeurst, bringing in $12–15 million in annual sales. Perkins cautioned against over-reliance on social media as a community, advocating instead for what he called a “three-legged stool” approach, emphasizing content and commerce alongside community.

“Having a large following on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube subscribers—that's not a community, that's a platform,” he explained. “When your content is only on a platform, the people that'll pay you are paying you sponsored ads—they're paying for your eyeballs.” He pointed out that no tool is perfect, underscoring that true community requires direct connection: "If you don't have their email address or anything to contact them directly, then you're not in community with them."

Tick, Tick, Tick

Even with an executive order keeping the lights on for TikTok in the U.S. for a little while longer, change looms for the platform nonetheless. And the book business is preparing for it.

“It comes down to what is more of a long-term approach,” said Pascucci-Ciampa. While the social media platforms that currently exist—TikTok, Instagram, and others—continue to power connections between the book business and its readers, the big question, she explained, is, “How do we still do that in ways that we have the ability to kind of control?” Moushabeck agreed, noting that Interlink is “pivoting more toward our email list and even more in-person events, without any kind of algorithmic interference.”

Perkins sees the situation as an opportunity for evolution in author-reader relationships. “Those who aren’t looking to have millions of followers but looking to have 30,000 will start moving to platforms that provide better ability to build a business,” he predicted. “Whether that be through a digital app experience, whether that be through a newsletter, whether that be through selling directly to them, whether that be just providing value to them directly, nothing can replace that, because no one sits in between.”

The publishing world, Perkins continued, already has access to “third-party platforms that do a better job at creating direct relationship and community building,’ citing Patreon and Substack as examples. Where authors connecting directly with readers via such methods, are concerned, he added, “we continue to see them not just do well at the moment, but for the long-term."

As for the future of TikTok, Soucebooks's Zuccato was confident that even if a ban does come fully into effect, a new technology or platform or tool would come along to fill in the void. “Smart tech will always catch up with what the community wants,” he said.

Hachette's Marchant concurred. “It’s really all about user-friendliness,” she said. “The thing about TikTok is that it makes it so easy to make videos. So whatever platform that fosters that ease of use is going to be the one that wins out. I feel real hopeful that there will continue to be platforms and technologies that enable people to discover and share books.”