Collection development is an important piece of the work you do to serve your community. You want to ensure that your reading recommendations are timely and relevant to what your patrons hear. That means you must keep up with the books readers are talking about and, importantly, where they’re talking about them.
An incredible amount of this conversation happens on BookTok, the community of TikTok users who discuss, critique, and evangelize books of all stripes. Here are four trends, genre and otherwise, that we’ve noticed on the platform.
BookTok Trend #1: Indie breakouts
TikTok is the place for indie authors to find their audience and break out. This can happen both for authors published by smaller houses (not the traditional “Big Five”) and authors who have independently published their stories as ebooks. In situations where indie authors get very popular, it's common for a traditional publisher to pick up the author and polish up their backlist for a print re-release, complete with wider marketing and distribution support.
BookTok Trend #2: Backlist, backlist, backlist
Another way BookTok often breaks the mold is its tendency to catapult years-old titles into the spotlight, leaving publishers scrambling to print more copies. Some of these books are beloved classics reaching a new generation of readers (see the resurgence of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and its dark academia bona fides) and some are more recent releases seeing a wave of sales and attention they didn’t receive upon initial publication.
BookTok Trend #3: Romantasy
BookTok’s obsession with romantasy (a portmanteau of, you guessed it, romance and fantasy) is not new but also shows no signs of waning. At NoveList, we define this genre as lending equal weight to both fantasy plot and worldbuilding and the development of a central romantic relationship. Rebecca Yarros’s smash hit Fourth Wing remains the popular face for this genre blend, leading a growing crowd of new releases and resurfaced old favorites.
BookTok Trend #4: Sports romances
Romance isn’t the only genre TikTok users are discussing and reading (straight fantasy, horror, and even the odd nonfiction title all have thriving communities on the platform), but it does attract a lot of notice and boasts a lot of specific subgenres. Of these subgenres, the sports romance has been having a moment! Hockey romances have attracted the most mainstream attention and commentary, but there are also rapt audiences for romances featuring both football players (a perennially popular American sport) and Formula One drivers (aided by the sport’s recent boom in popularity with new viewers).
TikTok can be intimidating and impenetrable to the uninitiated, but you can trust we’re keeping a finger on the BookTok pulse so that our recommendations stay relevant.
Kendal Spires is a Collection Development Librarian for Core Collections and NoveList. She is currently reading Young Hag and the Witches’ Quest by Isabel Greenberg.
