BookTok drives about 3% of UK book sales: Nielsen

Consumers inspired by BookTok accounted for 90 million book purchases in the UK last year, according to Nielsen’s latest Books & Consumers survey, reports the Bookseller.

The monthly survey asks 8500 UK consumers aged between 13 and 84 questions related to their book buying habits. Responses are extrapolated to estimate the UK’s consumer book purchasing market in the year to March 2023.

Nielsen UK research director Steve Bohme said BookTok still accounts for ‘a relatively small proportion of book purchases’, with about 3% of all books purchased originally discovered via video platforms such as TikTok and YouTube.

Nielsen reported that sales of titles that feature ‘TikTok’ in their subtitle data totalled £46 million (A$82.7m) in 2022. The figure is based on top 100,000 bestseller list data and includes work by the likes of Colleen Hoover, Alice Oseman, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Karen McManus, Ali Hazelwood, Ana Huang and Elena Armas.

The demographic most likely to use TikTok—women aged 13–34—were also the biggest book buyers in 2022, accounting for 83 million sales.

In total, UK consumers bought an estimated total of 348 million books in 2022 across all formats—a 2% decrease in volume since 2018—worth a total of £2.5 billion (A$4.6b), a rise of 4% over the five-year period. Sales in 2022 were 4–5% down over the pandemic-boosted years of 2020 and 2021. The market contraction in 2022 was driven by a 10% drop in ebook volume and a 3% decline in print.

Category: International news