Is TikTok Saving Print Books and Bookstores?

A Rising Tide

Buoyed by Kristin Hannah’s The Women and BookTok’s favorite romantasy series, print book sales were up 1.1% year-over-year in Q2, nearly offsetting a Q1 decline and taking us into the second half of the year with an H1 loss of just 0.4%. The rise in print sales is accompanied by last week’s news that foot traffic is up in Barnes & Noble stores, a trend that appears to extend to Books-A-Million and Half Price Books as well. There are two interesting nuggets here: 1) people are buying more print books, and 2) they’re doing it in brick-and-mortar stores.

So, what’s going on? It’s impossible to know for sure—correlation doesn’t prove causation and etc—but I’d guess that a shift in macroeconomic vibes is part of it, and visually-oriented social media is another significant factor. If you want to participate in the latest TikTok trend, you need the physical book. Publishers are pumping out special editions and sprayed-edge hardcovers (Barnes & Noble even devoted a whole segment of its list of the best books of 2024 so far to them) to stoke the demand, and it seems to be working. The increase in foot traffic is harder to pin down, but TikTok demographics could have something to do with it. Many of the users driving the romantasy trend are teens who may not have their own credit cards and/or whose parents prefer to shop with them IRL. Not to mention all the content you can make out of your trip to the bookstore! Additionally, there seems to be a slow but steady upward trend in Amazon’s pricing of hardcovers, which may make online book shopping less compelling. Are we seeing a generational shift in consumers’ incentives or a temporary, trend-driven pop? Only time will tell.

Double the Adaptations, Double the Fun

Emily Henry, who will adapt her latest novel, Funny Story, for a feature film, is now batting a thousand on the page-to-screen scoreboard. Henry, who kicked off the contemporary rom-com craze (and whose book designers we have to blame for the fact that all rom-coms look the same these days), has now sold all five of her popular novels for adaptations. Funny Story is the first one she will be writing herself.

In other adaptation news, Lev Grossman is back! The author, best known for The Magicians series, which the SyFy channel spun into a fun and occasionally campy series adaptation, has sold the rights for his new novel The Bright Sword, a reimagining of the legend of King Arthur, for series development. The Bright Sword comes out next Tuesday, July 16th and already has the stamp of approval from Book Riot’s Jeff O’Neal, who praised it on a recent episode of the Book Riot Podcast.