Good inf luencers! The TikTok sisters getting teenagers hooked on books
LIKE other social-media platforms, TikTok has often found itself linked to the worst excesses of the internet era.
But it is now being credited with encouraging teenagers to get into the habit of reading – thanks to a corner of the service called BookTok.
Figures show that BookTok videos have been watched more than 43billion times, with two British teenage sisters among its most popular influencers.
During last year’s lockdown, Mireille Lee, 16, and her sister, Elodie, 14, from Hove, East Sussex, began posting short videos on books they had read.
Their account, @alifeofliterature, attracted thousands of views, which soon became millions. Each of their videos has been watched by more than 200,000 viewers around the world.
Among their most popular posts have been clips on Leo Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina and Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice.
But it was a video on We Were Liars, a novel for young adults by E. Lockhart, that brought them to the attention of publishers and agents on both sides of the Atlantic. First published in 2014, it originally had moderate success in America. But the Lee sisters’ video about the book was watched by more than seven million viewers, helping it to the top of the New York Times’ bestsellers list.
‘The speed at which our posts blew up took us by surprise,’ said Elodie. ‘Within a few weeks, we were getting hundreds of thousands of views and then millions. It was mind-bending, especially seeing how it encourages people to buy the books we feature.’
Mireille, who wants to go to Oxford or Cambridge after her A-levels, explained that she and her sister have had to scale back their BookTok activities following the opening of their school after lockdown.
She said: ‘We were reading one book each a week and then preparing the video review for BookTok. When we went back to school that became more difficult.’
As well as readers around the world, Mireille said she is inspiring her fellow pupils at Blatchington Mill School in Hove to pick up a book.
‘At school I’m called “The Book Girl”,’ she said. ‘We want more young people to enjoy reading.’
Will Rycroft, audience development manager at Waterstones, said the publishing industry has now woken up to the power of BookTok.
‘Romance is popular among BookTokkers, but also mythical retellings, stories of old myths and legends are huge,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s because we live in uncertain times and there is something satisfying about knowing the beginning, the middle and the end.’ Mr Rycroft said BookTok had also helped to turn obscure texts into bestsellers, citing the example of a British crime novel called Cain’s Jawbone, first published in 1934 and largely forgotten. The novel, by
Edward Powys Mathers, is published with the pages in the wrong order. Readers who rearrange the pages in the correct sequence can solve the six murders in the story.
The book was republished in 2019 and was expected to sell a few thousand copies but after a BookTok enthusiast made a video about it, it became a sellout.