This is an excerpt from MarketerHire's weekly newsletter. Raisin Bread. To get a tasty marketing snack in your inbox every week. subscribe here. If you’ve been hearing a lot of chatter about “book talk.” it may have actually been about #BookTok. It’s the literary side of TikTok. and it’s huge. The #BookTok hashtag has 24B views on TikTok and counting. Last time we checked. eight out of the 10 paperback fiction NYT bestsellers were hits on #BookTok. So what's the playbook for marketing long-form stories on a short-form video app… work. exactly? We asked Lauryn Hickman. a #BookTokker with 280K followers. Use storytimes.
Storytimes — in which a creator tells a first-person Georgia Phone Number List story to their front-facing camera — really capture attention on the app. And doing one in character as a novel’s protagonist can hook people who don’t identify as readers. Hickman has learned. Exhibit A: Hickman's post about Christina Lauren’s 2019 novel The Unhoneymooners. which went viral. Like. 4M-likes-and-16M-views viral. The day she posted it. It eventually reached #8 on the paperback fiction bestseller list — seven places above its 2019 peak. Try trendy Pinterest visuals. Slideshows of “lots of Pinterest photos” that capture the mood of a book can perform well. Hickman said.
Exhibit A: her TikTok titled “Convincing you to read The Love Hypothesis based on its aesthetic.” set to Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” and packed with Adam Driver cameos. Hook the viewer in the first 15 seconds. TikTok technically allows three-minute videos. but Hickman’s creator analytics show her that most viewers swipe away after just eight seconds. So shorter videos — usually less than 15 seconds — perform best. Don't pay for every mention. Most of Hickman’s posts are unpaid. she said — and that’s typical for #BookTok creators. Publishers are launching unpaid accounts. too. Penguin Random House has a verified account with 8K+ followers.