The power wielded by the collective reader communities of BookTok is catching the eye of TikTok itself, and they want some of it. In April of this year, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, filed a trademark with the US Patent Office for a new publisher named 8TH NOTE PRESS, which would notably be focused on, among other things, “Book publishing; publishing of books, e-books, and audio books; providing online non-downloadable fiction and non-fiction books on a variety of topics; publishing services, namely, publication of books in tangible print and digital copies and through electronic delivery.” There’s another point that roughly paraphrases to creating virtual communities online around books through social media apps but suffice it to say, we’re seeing what looks like a big push into the book publishing space.
It’s hard to overstate exactly how much BookTok is changing the practices in and around publishing, for better and for worse. And we’ve seen how efforts by ByteDance to boost their new non-TikTok ventures like Lemon8 with paid influencers really does work, with a huge rush of downloads being led in no small part by a sudden flood of TikTok posts urging folks to check out the app on the day it was scheduled to launch in March 2023. Which is what makes the prospect of ByteDance also selling their own books that much more unsettling, if nothing prevents them from leveraging BookTok to promote the books 8th Note Press puts out over others.
TikTok has even started rolling out its new integrated TikTok Shop for some creators to sell directly through the app, which further blurs the line between TikTok as a social media platform vs directly selling the products being recommended by its users. This is by no means exclusively a problem with TikTok, but it becomes a much more prominent one if a publisher owned by the same parent company also benefits from selling books on TikTok. Given how we’ve seen other online retailers like SHEIN steal best sellers for themselves by scraping user data, it would suggest to me that it’s not a matter of if ByteDance will do this, it’s when.
Now, why does this feel so painfully familiar? Well, let me tell you about a small little online bookseller by the name of Amazon. The tech juggernaut, which has at least 60% of US households subscribed to Amazon Prime, a third of the internet relying on its web services, and accounts for roughly half of the US’s online purchases (never mind the fact that Amazon workers are forced to pee in bottles and can’t unionize), has quite a large base of users to pull data from. And with that information, Amazon is able to undercut its own sellers and create its own Amazon products, even taking data directly from its sellers to do so. Amazon is a peak example of what happens when a company has unmitigated access to user data and uses it to make sure no one else can compete with them.
As reported by The New York Times, ByteDance has a simple response to questions about plans for this publisher, stating “the company said that 8th Note Press is a separate entity from TikTok.” This vague statement provides the bare minimum articulation of both companies being distinctly separate while still not responding concretely to any suggestion that TikTok could be used to selectively boost book sales. With 8th Note Press only having been filed three months ago at the time of this article’s publication, it’s much too early to suggest any definitive plans before seeing more information. However, with confirmed plans from author emails that TikTok plans to open its own US online shop, all current signs are pointing to a clear intention to prioritize the sale of ByteDance’s own products over its creators.
Also quoted in the same NYT article, authors who have already been approached by ByteDance for book deals have mentioned painfully low offers, with romance author Tricia O’Malley quoted as being $3500 per book for the rights to two of her books. And yet, O’Malley also acknowledges that “the reality is that BookTok is selling books”, making her choice to reject the offer a tough decision. This kind of money for a book deal from ByteDance, which reported an overwhelming 25 billion dollar profit last year is frankly insulting and speaks to either an ignorance of the field of publishing or a clear understanding of the power that TikTok holds in the publishing space.
All of this doesn’t even begin to touch on the other issues at play here, including the use of TikTok’s algorithm to feed off of BookTok trends and the possibilities to have unsigned authors scooped up by 8th Note Press if they see success on TikTok before anyone else can. The US government appears to have a much more vested interest in antitrust proceedings currently, with the current head of the FTC Lina Khan leading the charge to break up potential monopolies or uncompetitive markets. It remains to be seen whether the US will take a vested interest in the potential for ByteDance to carve up its own little corner of the US publishing market.
(via: The New York Times, featured image: Flickr)
