![]() ![]() "I've never heard a Gen Z reader say, 'I don't want to read this because I can't personally relate to the characters ," Koch said. But this doesn't mean a character has to be exactly the same as them. Ultimately, Koch said, what gets a reader in their teens or early 20s to pick up a romance novel is if they're able to relate to a character's feelings and circumstances. BookTok reduces romance stigma, but upholds whiteness 1 on the New York Times bestseller list in January 2022. Though it's not new, it received a surge in popularity last year thanks to BookTok. The Ripped Bodice's top selling book, Koch said, is Hoover's It Ends With Us. "The way BookTok talks about books is very different from your traditional review," Hazelwood said. The answer is always TikTok.Īli Hazelwood, whose 2021 debut book The Love Hypothesis became a smash BookTok hit, said she had no idea of the book's virality until a friend told her a TikTok recommending it had 2 million views. "We'll get a rush of customers asking for something random and we're like, 'Why does everyone want this specific book?'" Koch said. Emily Henry has chosen another approach, leaving the space to readers – giving her an almost a mythical presence on the platform.īookstore owner Koch said she's noticed a large increase in younger customers coming into the store since early 2021 - something she "100 percent" attributes to TikTok. She's a frequent TikTok user, regularly engaging with her almost 950,000 followers. And as of April, nearly 41 percent of TikTok's global users were between the ages of 18 and 24 - with more than half of those being women, according to Statista.Ĭolleen Hoover is especially savvy at knowing how to connect with her fans. Sales for authors whose books have gone viral on TikTok had reached 12.5 million in 2022, as of July, according to NPD BookScan, a data service that tracks U.S. Much of the success of the romance genre with Gen Z readers is driven by BookTok, a subcommunity on TikTok for recommending, reviewing, and discussing books. "The last few years have been wild in the best way, and I'm very grateful to readers who continue to share my books and the books of other authors on their social platforms." Social media pushing romance to younger readers "I don't know that I'll ever have a grasp on it, but I'd like to think they're responding to the entertainment factor," Hoover said. Meanwhile, marketing trends, like covering contemporary romance novel jackets with cartoon figures and bright colors, has also helped pull in a younger audience, according to Leah Koch, who co-owns The Ripped Bodice, a romance bookstore in Los Angeles. Sahar Kariem, a 22-year-old stylist from Maryland, said Emily Henry's "balance of romance and life lessons," as well as themes of coming of age, have cemented Henry as one of her favorite authors. ![]() I feel like even if you can't express emotion in real life, reading it on paper, it's really easy to connect to it and relate to it," she said. "People gravitate towards her novels because they're really emotional. Kaileigh Klein, a 19-year-old college student in Ontario, Canada said she loves Hoover's books for just this reason – for the big emotions she writes about. ![]() "If you think about it, like millennials, their youth has been marked by global and social upset and unrest in many ways, so looking for a happy ever after or an emotional outlet in a book seems like a healthy way of coping." "Gen Z is a huge audience for romance," she said. But in the past several years, that has widened to include women 18 to 54, according to Colleen Hoover's publicist Ariele Fredman. A decade ago, the main demographic for romance was women ages 35 to 54. ![]()
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