It’s not too late for publishers to redeem something from the short-term cash-grab and emerge from the BookTok game – whether it is banned or survives the political battles ahead – with a coherent international strategy for selling English-language markets to the world.
The Bookseller reports today on the UK Publishers Association celebrating the “huge” role exports played in the 2022 UK book market, as “BookTok encourages a new generation of readers to pick up and read books in English on the continent.”
Sian Bayley quotes Chris Turner, international sales director at PRH as saying:
“The European market has always been very important to us, but in recent years there’s been an incredibly positive trajectory. BookTok has been a real driver for this, along with increasing English language levels among younger readers, and a willingness from our trade partners to give more retail space to English language titles. It’s a market we’re excited to continue to publish for and invest in going forward.“
And then there’s Hachette’s international sales director Abigail Mitchell, who said:
“We are seeing excellent growth in all of our European territories, not just Germany and Spain. The performance can be largely attributed to BookTok which has encouraged a new generation of readers to pick up and read books in English. We have invested in a dedicated head of sales for Europe so we can continue to harness this growth, finding new readers in new and existing markets.”
Jonathan Atkins, international director at Pan Macmillan, said BookTok was “clearly influencing a much younger audience than we have typically appealed to in the past.”
And then there’s Nicholas Hayne, international sales director at Simon & Schuster UK, who said:
“Sales are up across Europe, with Spain and Germany (in particular) having seen fantastic growth since 2020 onwards. We’ve published some of the biggest TikTok driven titles of the past three years and this has contributed massively.”
Now English-language sales abroad has been a common theme here at TNPS since we launched. Some examples:
and it’s great to see our point being driven home by actual publisher numbers, even if the horizon only extends to western Europe.
But… And this is a very big but… This new growth UK and US publishers are seeing is almost entirely on the back of the social media phenomenon on TikTok known as BookTok, the tail of which western publishers have lately been riding high, but with little or no thought for the future.
In April Montana became the first US state to ban TikTok outright, and others are poised to do so. That became all the more likely this past week as TikTok was revealed to be keeping US personal data on Chinese servers.
The EU has already banned TikTok for government employees, and the prospect of a Europe-wide ban grows stronger as new revelations about TikTok data security emerge.
The EU has never been shy in putting data protection first, and publishers fawning over the BookTok effect need to get their heads out of the TikTok quicksand.
Abigail Mitchell’s words – “We have invested in a dedicated head of sales for Europe so we can continue to harness this growth, finding new readers in new and existing markets” will come back to haunt her if TikTok is banned.
But the silver lining here is that publishers are finally beginning to grasp the huge opportunity that English-language publishing represents, not just in Europe but globally.
Instead of spending all their energies milking BookTok for all its worth, they might want to start looking seriously at the truly global markets that prevailing territorial rights policies, drawn up in another century for another publishing model, are currently stifling.
They might want to ask themselves why BIG BAD WOLF BOOKS [BBW BOOKS] can take literally millions (over 30 million) of English-language books to countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Taiwan, the UAE, South Korea, Pakistan, Thailand, etc, and attract crowds of hundreds of thousands, sometimes running 24/7 sales to meet demand.
Publishers putting all their eggs in the BookTok basket is asking for trouble. But its not too late for publishers to redeem something from the short-term cash-grab and emerge from the BookTok game – whether it is banned or survives the political battles ahead – with a coherent international strategy for selling English-language markets to the world.
