Unlocking success: Booktok's role in creating publishers top female romantasy authors.
What on earth is 'Romantasy' and how are these fan-fiction authors going straight to the top of the charts? Lets read into the marketing strategies behind it.
“Big numbers are TikTok led books so we can’t really ignore it anymore. I mean, not that we’re trying to ignore it.'“
The App TikTok is taking the publishing industry by storm with its sub community ‘BookTok’ which has over 31.4 million posts under its hashtag. This sub community is making books go viral and shooting up to the top of the book charts by users promoting and discussing books across the app. It’s allowing small authors to be able to self-promote their work with quick easy content, which is easily accessible and influences others to purchase their books. Publishing companies have finally had to give in to the frenzy by utilising the marketing side of BookTok.
“I was in a meeting the other day with Nielsen, they’re in charge of the charts. and they were going through the results of like last year, and how the market is performing. And I think, like all of the top books at the moment. I would say, it’s probably like 70% of the books that are doing big numbers are TikTok led books.” - Becky Lushey
The young adult romance fantasy authors have cracked the code into getting readers hooked into their fictional worlds, engaging the buyers to purchase multiple editions of books. Some they may not even be able to read, like if the book is in another language which is more common than you think. The romantasy audiences are drawn to the non-traditional happy endings with high stakes and heightened drama, and the readers want to get crushed by the books which leaves them wanting more.
Looking into two specific female authors Olivie Blake and Carissa Broadbent with their books that were pre-published by themselves, went viral on TikTok and then were published with Pan Macmillan who marketed and progressed using the already established audience on BookTok. Pan Macmillan gives free roam to the Press copies and so the working relationship between influencer and publisher is based more on trust rather than free labour.
“Our way of working with influencers and bloggers tends to be a lot more like we have a relationship where we will give you free books. If you are someone who is talking online and will share about those books, and you don’t. We’re not paying you. You can give a completely honest review if you don’t like the book.” - Becky Lushey
Exclusive interview with marketing manager Becky Lushey enabled us to investigate further into really how wild this book craze is. Becky won an award for her marketing campaign on the successful series of The Atlas Six series (Atlas Paradox), which made a collective of over £227,000 in paperback sales alone. - Nielsens Bookscan.
With the last novel within the trilogy only being released earlier this year across all platforms it sold a total of 12,597 copies according to Nielsen bookscan. Blake ,originally being a fan-fiction author with her writing on Archive of Our Own. Her original Harry Potter fan fictions have gotten upwards of 300,00 hits therefore she already had an established fandom. The first book The Atlas Six already had a lot of buzz around it, with it going viral a couple of months before Pan Macmillan acquired it the turnaround rate was less than 6 months.
Using influencers to promote special editions of the books such as the FairyLoot edition and Illumicrate edition are just one way of how Pan Macmillan promotes their books. These are two companies that sell monthly subscription boxes that are within the romantasy/YA genre. These subscription boxes boost the hype around the newly released novels and even so may even reach number one even after a few weeks of it being out because of the anticipation, which a lot of the other authors dislike these services because they deem it ‘unfair’ as they usually don’t run across other book genres.
Carrying on with Fairyloot the anticipation for The Ashes and The Star Cursed King is high, which is the second novel in the Crowns of Nyaxia series by Carissa Broadbent. They’re releasing a special joint edition of the first two novels which is coming June/July and their book order for this series is massive.
“Fairyloot normally their subscription box. That’s monthly. That order is about 22,000 copies. That is a huge number of books. For context like to get to the bestseller list our hardback you probably need like depending on the time of year… you need like 1,500 copies, 2,000 copies, so to have 22,000 is crazy.” - Becky Lushey
As we wait for early June with an official print copy of The Ashes and The Star-Cursed King, to which Pan Macmillan only have the print rights to, they plan to push it to the collector audience, which is where Booktok comes in. As collecting books and showcasing your bookshelves is a popular trend on the app, they will target this audience which is usually of an older demographic to be able to afford the various versions.
Their plan with marketing for this anticipated duology is doing ‘fancy mail outs’ with extra bits of PR to do with the novel to which they will send out to the influencers to promote it right before it’s published. Which is where my second interview with ‘BookToker’ Lucy Osborne comes in.
“I studied English Lit at uni and really missed chatting about books with people after i graduated so I wanted somewhere to connect with other book lovers.” - Lucy Osborne
lucysbooknook0 on TikTok boasts about her love for this book on her page.
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“I thought the writing was excellent and was immediately drawn in the world. The world building was expertly weaved into the narrative which not many fantasy novels succeed at.” - Lucy Osborne
Lucy told me that she already has the book on preorder, but is hesitant to purchase the Fairyloot special edition because of the price, so perhaps that’s one thing Fairyloot could take in consideration when trying to widen their audience.
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