TikTok’s influence on direct book sales 'relatively small' but growing rapidly, says Nielsen

One in four book buyers used TikTok/BookTok in 2022 and these consumers accounted for nearly 90 million book purchases last year, according to findings from Nielsen’s latest Books & Consumers survey.

However the platform still accounts for "a relatively small proportion of book purchases" according to Nielsen’s UK research director Steve Bohme.

Each month, the market measurement firm surveys 8,500 UK consumers aged between 13 and 84. Details from these surveys have been extrapolated to estimate the UK’s consumer book purchasing market in the year to March 2023.

In a presentation delivered at the London Transport Museum today (Wednesday, 22nd March), Nielsen revealed that UK consumers bought a total of 348 million books in 2022, across all formats including e-books. Over the past five years the general trend has been a slight contraction of volume sales, while value (helped by an increase in average selling price) rose. That 348 million unit sales represents a 2% decrease in volume since 2018, but spending in 2022 clocked in at £2.5bn, a rise of 4% over the five-year period. 

Sales in 2022 were 4-5% down over the pandemic-boosted highs of 2020 and 2021, though Nielsen noted the longer-term outlook is "still positive, only 2022 could not quite keep up with the bumper sales" of the two Covid years. Last year’s market contraction was driven by a 10% drop in e-book volume (to 72 million) and a 3% decline in print sales (to 250 million). Meanwhile, the audiobook growth slowed from its previous gaudy highs, but at 27 million audiobook volume purchases were still up by over 50% since 2018. 

Overall, TikTok’s influence on direct book purchases remains relatively small. In 2022, just 3% of all books purchased, roughly nine million, were originally discovered via video assistance platforms (which Nielsen counts as YouTube and TikTok).

While it is difficult to put a specific figure on the platform’s overall influence on the books market, Nielsen reports that sales of titles which feature the word "TikTok" in their subtitles (for example, "TikTok made me buy it" or “The TikTok sensation of the year") totalled approximately £46m in 2022. This figure is based on top 100,000 bestseller list data and includes work by the likes of Colleen Hoover (£15.9m), Alice Oseman (£9.9m), Taylor Jenkins Reid (£2.5m), Karen McManus (£2.0m), Ali Hazelwood (£1.4m), Ana Huang (£1.3m) and Elena Armas (£1.2m).

Plus, the video sharing platform is undoubtedly making a mark on one highly influential demographic of book buyers. Females aged between 13 and 34 (F 13-34) were the biggest book buyers in 2022, accounting for 83 million sales (followed by females aged between 35 and 54, who accounted for 73 million sales). They were also particularly important in the printed fiction market, accounting for three in 10 purchases within the sector. In addition to this, F13-34 was the only category whose book-buying capacity increased compared to 2021, up 1%.

According to Nielsen, this age group was also the most likely to use TikTok. In total, 49% of respondents in this category said they use the platform – more than twice the average – while 14% said they use BookTok specifically, more than three times the average.

F13-34’s engagement with platforms like TikTok and YouTube are reflected in their buying habits. Within this age group, 9% of fiction titles purchased and 15% of romance titles were initially discovered via video assistance platforms. Five titles in particular relied heavily on video sites: It Ends With Us (S&S) by Colleen Hoover; They Both Die at the End (S&S Childrens) by Adam Silvera; The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury) by Madeline Miller; The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (S&S) by Taylor Jenkins Reid; and The Love Hypothesis (Sphere) by Ali Hazelwood, of which 20% of collective purchases were discovered via video sites.

Linked to this, while fiction sales were down slightly on 2022, the adult romance genre (which performs particularly well on TikTok) displayed growth for the third year running. It was the only adult fiction genre to do so, and also proved to be the fastest growing fiction genre.

Nielsen noted that Instagram usage still ranks above TikTok for the F13-34 age group, with 70% of respondents in this category using the app. TikTok, however, remains the most rapidly growing social platform overall.

The data outlines that, while important to some sectors, video sites remain less important sources of book discovery overall than previous readership (103 million books), physical shops (63 million books), word of mouth (54 million books) and online book retailers (48 million books), with discovery via physical shops up 13% in 2022 compared to 2021.

However Bohme said: “While sites like TikTok and YouTube may still account for a relatively small proportion of book purchases […] they helped consumers discover more than twice as many books in 2022 compared to 2018.”

Bohme added that the sites may well have indirectly boosted other increasingly influential methods of book discovery, such as social media (which Nielsen counts as platforms like Facebook and Twitter) and author activity. The influence of video sites is growing rapidly compared to other sources: they were up 38% on 2021 in terms of the volume of sales they influenced – the largest year-on-year influence across the discovery categories that Nielsen analysed. This was followed by physical shops, which regained influence in driving discovery post-pandemic with a 13% increase.