BookTok has become one of the most expansive TikTok niches and has spawned an entire class of so-called “BookTok influencers,” whose content revolves around reviewing and recommending books. So when Penguin Random House was looking to revamp its social media strategy, it turned to two BookTok influencers to shape its neglected TikTok presence. 

The publishing giant brought in Kimberly Nwokorie and Simone Siew in late 2021. In under a month, one of Penguin Random House’s TikTok videos had already received 4 million views, far exceeding the company's previous peak viewership of around 100,000. The duo drove significant growth on Penguin Random House’s TikTok channel throughout 2022, increasing the company’s average views per video by 120 times compared to 2021 and boosting its TikTok engagement—including likes, comments and shares—100-fold.

“TikTok has now become our top platform for reach and awareness,” Alyssa Castaneda, associate director of social media at Penguin Random House, told Ad Age. “[Nwokorie and Siew] have helped us approach TikTok in a way that resonates with the consumer. It’s not us guessing what matters to consumers—they bring in a level of creative expertise we would not have without them.” 

It has also become an important vehicle in the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Penguin Random House will launch its “I Am La Cultura” book club this summer, which will be housed on TikTok and spearheaded by three soon-to-be-announced Latino BookTok creators.

Taking a page from BookTok

Penguin Random House established a TikTok presence early into the platform’s lifespan, creating its TikTok account in 2019. But initially, the company lacked a dedicated TikTok strategy or a team devoted to creating content for the platform, instead largely lifting content from the TikTok pages of its other publishing divisions, such as its young adult-oriented department, Penguin Teen. 

When Castaneda became the publisher’s head of social media in April 2021, she began exploring how the company could revive its primary TikTok page, @penguinrandomhouse, with fresh video content that would resonate with the BookTok community. During the same period, Penguin Random House launched an Instagram page for “All Ways Black,” its online platform designed to spotlight Black authors and their books, helmed by Cree Myles, a book influencer on Instagram. 

After talking with the social media team running Penguin Teen’s TikTok account, and witnessing the successful launch of the influencer-led “All Ways Black” community, Castaneda and her team sought to put influencers at the forefront of the company’s new TikTok strategy. 

“‘All Ways Black’ was really the first step into this idea of co-creation and truly giving [influencers] the creative flexibility to lead and help us determine where to go,” she said. “It gave us the perfect pathway to be like, ‘The way to enter this space is to follow that model and bring on members of the BookTok community to create this with us from the beginning.’” 

Castaneda and the company’s social media team hunted for creators who could fit the bill, scouring the #BookTok hashtag and leveraging internal tools such as Influencers @ PRH, a database of influencer partners across its various divisions. Ultimately, her team landed on Nwokorie, who currently has more than 135,000 followers on her TikTok account @kimmybookss, and Siew, a micro-influencer in the BookTok community with 24,500 followers on her page @balloonbreath. 

Castaneda hired the two influencers as freelance content creators at the start of 2022, tasking them with “creating, editing and posting all of the content to our TikTok account,” she said. The initial contract only had a four-month duration, as Castaneda planned to use the partnership to test the effectiveness of teaming up with BookTok creators. 

Within just three weeks, Nwokorie had already brought Penguin Random House its first viral moment with a simple video demonstrating how she set aside time to read in her busy schedule as a college student. The video received over 4 million views organically, quickly becoming the company’s highest-performing TikTok video. 

“We were like, ‘Something here is really working. Let’s just keep trying throughout 2022 to test some more,’” Castaneda said. “Now, as we [start] 2023, we have a totally different [social] strategy than when we entered into 2022. TikTok is now the priority platform because of the impact that we’re seeing there.” 

Nwokorie and Siew each produce two videos per week for Penguin Random House’s TikTok account, often informed by business insights or trends that Castaneda shares with them at the start of each week. But she has largely granted the duo full control over the content they create for the company’s TikTok. Videos cover everything from building stronger reading habits to books they recently enjoyed, and typically tap into trending audio or pop culture moments, such as one comparing various books to tracks from Taylor Swift’s album “Midnights.” 

Their success in building out Penguin Random House's TikTok presence has led Castaneda to renew their contracts for the entirety of 2023, she said.

“We can bring them [business] insights, but what they can really bring is that creative expertise to know what really resonates on TikTok,” she explained. “It really started with us being vulnerable on our part and just trusting the process—knowing that it would take time to ultimately get where we needed to be. But I think it allowed the partnership to really flourish over the year.” 

But beyond simply increasing brand awareness on TikTok, BookTok influencers posting videos of their latest “book hauls” and flaunting jam-packed bookshelves has led to direct sales for Penguin Random House and several other publishing companies. During a panel at last year’s Advertising Week New York, Penguin Random House Chief Marketing Officer Sanyu Dillon said use of the hashtag #BookTok contributed to the sale of 30 million books between January and October 2022. 

And in September, TikTok partnered with Penguin Random House to launch an in-app feature that allows users to include a link in their videos that takes their followers directly to a page about a specific book. Each book’s page includes a description of the book, the author and publisher, and a collection of other TikTok videos that also added links to that book. 

“#BookTok validates that word of mouth is still the most powerful force for our industry,” Castaneda said in a press release about the TikTok feature. “People want to know how a book will make them feel, and TikTok values authenticity more than any other platform.”

TikTok further embraced the influence of its BookTok community in November, when TikTok Shop U.K. launched a new in-app shopping category called “Books on TikTok,” teaming up with publishing companies and retailers—such as HarperCollins and Bookshop.org, respectively—to enable consumers to purchase books they discover on BookTok directly on the platform.

Publishers and booksellers alike have recognized the power of BookTok and worked to establish a presence on the platform and within the BookTok niche. HarperCollins’ TikTok accounts often share videos resembling content produced by BookTok creators, including book recommendations and reading-related takes on platform trends, and Barnes & Noble has both a main TikTok page for the overarching brand as well as dozens of separate accounts for its different stores across the U.S.

The book retailer also highlights novels popular on BookTok in both its physical stores—placing books frequently discussed in the TikTok community on tables featuring in-store signage labeled “#BookTok”—as well as its website, which has a dedicated “BookTok” shopping tab. Barnes & Noble also recently announced a “BookTok Festival” to be held at its New York City flagship next month, which will feature publishers, authors and BookTok influencers.

“All Ways Black” and Bookstagram

Social media communities centered around literature have existed for years, from Instagram’s “Bookstagram” to “BookTube” on YouTube. 

Before teaming up with Nwokorie and Siew, Penguin Random House was already partnering with Bookstagram influencer Myles to curate the “All Ways Black” community and run its Instagram page. 

The company initially partnered with Myles after she proposed the idea of a read-a-thon revolving around Black literature. She led the weeklong virtual event, called “Black Like We Never Left,” in January 2021, kicking off on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. A few months later, when Penguin Random House contacted Myles about extending the partnership by positioning her as the face of a more permanent virtual community focused on Black authors and their books, she jumped at the chance.

“We wanted to have always-on communications across our audience—to go beyond just the cultural heritage moments and be authentically speaking to our Black audience throughout the year,” said Anthony Key, the company’s head of multicultural marketing. “Because we had worked with Cree before, it was really a no-brainer.” 

As the platform’s curator, Myles creates Instagram content to promote upcoming Penguin Random House releases by Black authors, “mak[ing] sure that they get the attention and spotlight they deserve,” she said. Much of her content as a Bookstagram influencer centered on the lack of Black representation she found in the Bookstagram space when she first entered the community in 2016. Becoming a contracted creator with Penguin Random House has allowed her to continue her goal of uplifting Black authors on a larger scale, she said. 

Since launching in June 2021, the “All Ways Black” Instagram page has amassed a community of 40,000 followers who discuss their favorite authors, books and passages in the kind of space they may not have encountered on Bookstagram in the past, Myles added. 

“What Penguin did in terms of bringing me in—and it didn't have to be me, it could have been anybody from the Black Bookstagram community—is create that authenticity,” she said. “It's not like a huge billion-dollar corporation pandering to a certain demographic. It’s not a boardroom of white executives. I’m responsible for all the content.”

A TikTok book club 

Developing continuous strategies for engaging with marginalized consumers has been a primary focus for Penguin Random House in recent years, with initiatives such as “All Ways Black” helping to diversify the company’s consumer base and make it “more reflective of the U.S. population’s makeup,” Key said. And with nearly one-third of TikTok users identifying as Hispanic or Latino, according to data from the Pew Research Center, the company aimed to create a community for Latino readers on TikTok. 

Key and marketing manager Haley Larson decided to center Latino BookTok influencers in the development of the “I Am La Cultura” TikTok community by launching a contest asking them to apply to become the book club's future leaders by sharing their vision for what a TikTok-based book club could look like.

“We really wanted to tap into the community and find people who are really passionate about these books and who wanted to start a conversation more broadly,” Larson said. “The Latinx community is so diverse and so broad. There's so many different groups within this community. And we wanted to make sure that it wasn't just one specific voice trying to represent everyone.”

The contest, which ran from Oct. 5 through Nov. 14, invited BookTok influencers to duet a video posted on Penguin Random House’s TikTok page using the hashtag #IAmLaCulturaContest. The hashtag currently has over 5.4 million views. The TikTok page of Penguin Random House’s Spanish-language division, Penguin Libros U.S., uploaded a Spanish version of the contest video, which received an additional 932,000 views.

With the “I Am La Cultura” book club set to launch this summer, Key and Larson are working closely with the three winning BookTok influencers—who will be announced in the coming weeks—to develop the community’s framework and determine what the book club will entail, relying on the influencers’ familiarity with the club’s audience and with TikTok itself. 

“There’s a large number of BIPOC creators on TikTok, and I think that’s specifically what we’re trying to tap into,” Key said. “We wanted to have somebody representative of the community come onto the Penguin Random House platform and be able to speak authentically to the audience in a way that feels fresh, that feels relevant, and really just feels like we're speaking their language.”