New to BookTok? Here's what 325,610 posts could, and couldn't, tell me

The question

Everyone I asked about writing romance told me the same thing: BookTok. Nobody could tell me what that actually meant. Is it a handful of influencers I have to impress? Do authors pay for posts? Does any of it sell books?

This was the start of romance signal. I'd been googling TikTok research, and my data brain wanted to take a swing at it. So I bought a file of BookTok posts from Bright Data, a company that collects public web data and sells it. It was expensive, and big enough that I had to keep it in Google Cloud Storage, in what became my data library. The posts were collected from four hashtags: #booktok, #bookstagram, #romancebooks and #bookrecs. I included the three besides #booktok to try to capture some of BookTok's early growth. I was so new that I really just wanted to understand what I didn't know. I wanted a starting place. It's bought data, which doesn't meet the sourcing rule for my case studies, so it lives in the Notebook.

What I found

• It's a crowd, not a clique. Solid in this file. The 15 most-played accounts get 6.4% of all plays, and the 1,000 most-played posts come from 788 different accounts across the five years. There's no gate, and no short list of people to win over either.
• But attention is lopsided. Solid in this file. Accounts with 100,000+ followers made a fifth of posts but half of the top posts. Still, one in five top posts came from accounts under 10,000 followers. The small accounts are the ones I could realistically reach, and they aren't a dead end.
• Romance BookTok talks in tropes. Solid in this file, for the tags I checked. No trope tag I checked is more than 15% one account, and #darkromance alone spans 3,280 accounts. The most useful BookTok question about my own manuscript is a writing one: which tropes does it truly deliver?
• Free books seem more common than payment. Outside sources. Only 0.25% of posts carry a paid-ad hashtag, and creators say free and early copies are far more common than payment. UK creators say their usual prices are generally £500 or lower, about $674 at the time.
• Two tags, two shapes. Suggestive. #booktropes spiked to 128 of every 1,000 posts and fell to 2.6, a spike that is more likely the vendor's collection than BookTok itself. #romantasy climbed to 24.8.
• Does any of it sell books? Unknown. TikTok ties about 59 million print sales in 2024 to BookTok, but it's TikTok's own figure, and it doesn't say how a sale gets "tied". Nothing in my file connects a post to a sale.

What I'm taking back to my desk

No gate to get through, and lots of ordinary readers talking in tropes. My BookTok homework for now is the same as my writing homework: know exactly what my book delivers.

The full entry has how I'm thinking about each finding, and the caveats behind every finding.

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