A big, big thank you to everyone who joined us online last night for our final #BookMachine Campus event of 2024 - and to our wonderful speakers who covered so much ground on the topic of BookTok and bookfluencer campaigns 👏

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At TikTok shop, they look at click through rates (hooked by the content, like the product) and also click to order - what's the value to the customer? Is the book on offer, or perhaps exclusive, and different to elsewhere in the market? This is key for building into community - giving back can be great.

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TikTok - Genuine, authentic relationships with the book in question - what they enjoyed, what the book made them feel. They've seen the highest spikes in this type of content at Little, Brown.

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For Francesca, in the thriller space, backlist content plays really well into showing her community where to start with an author. She's had a lot of author spotlight style content do really well recently and help to create that frontlist buzz.

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Influencers are of course able to be more authentic than the brand themselves so they are invaluable to this process for publishers.

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Content can also come from the authors themselves as content creators. Gemma shares an example of engaging an author around a book publication anniversary as well as working with creators / influencers and readers.

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Backlist feeding into your content strategy, e.g. where do you start with a particular author? Anniversaries of backlist titles can be perfect opportunities. What content can you create that's genuinely engaging? Creating longer-term engagement and establishing a fanbase.

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What Little, Brown want to do as a publisher is publish books that resonate with a whole range of people across society, not just a particular segment of it. BookTok and working with content creators in this way enables the spread of this, which is AMAZING.

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Gemma pushes back on criticism that BookTok is "dumbing down" reading - it's making reading cool! She's been running Waterstones BookTok events which can help to promote reading as fun and accessible and moving away from hierarchy and snobbish approaches to genre fiction, for example.

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Patrick has realised that TikTok shop does serve a pretty broad book market, though sub-niches do emerge. Nutrition topics and self-improvement is becoming dominant on the platform (self help books are growing) but also genre led fiction, children's books etc.

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The thriller genre is pretty niche! Each niche really is a world of its own and still very much delineated by genre, as well as different people being part of those conversations. The content itself does vary drastically in terms of what resonates, as well as separations between platforms - it's not a one-size-fits-all.

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Broad appeal vs niche campaigns. At Little, Brown, they have a huge Romantasy list - the audience is fairly niche and the readers are on TikTok, they are super focused here. Exclusives, signed editions. This is at the forefront of their minds for these campaigns.

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What Live can be at its best is traditional bookselling. Being effusive about the books you are reading directly - a kind of virtually hand-selling! The UK consumer can be adverse to this, but this could change in the next few months/years.

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What makes good, stoppable content on TikTok isn't always what makes good content within the broader ecosystem. The rise of Lives have been shifting how authors and publishers to engage and find a follower base.

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Impacts on acquisitions and campaigns - can showcase the size of the market, is this a growing area? Also feeds into audience-first approach and creative messaging and how you will go about talking directly to the audience.

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At Hachette, their consumer insight trend reports are key - taken from lots of different platforms including YouGov reports. Trends include side hustles, how to manage money, "worktirement", self-reliance.

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For creators, it can be a consideration not to get too swept up into trends and to be mindful about what will work for your audience and will resonate as your platform builds.

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Let's talk trends! TikTok tends to be the space that first initiates trends in the book space, which filters into other platforms. The wider, non-BookTok community set the trends and it's picked up and adapted for this space - fun, quick content that TikTok is popular for.

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From a TikTok Shop perspective, they are trying to build into communities that are localised (in the UK - there are others around the world). Their goal is to monetise for creators and brands and assist with brand building in this way. More of a local basis compared to other platforms.

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What about X and other platforms? There is more of a presence for thriller readers on X for example (demographics?). Threads, for an influencer, it's a hard jump and a big commitment (can't go for glass half full!).

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