The TikTok romantasy craze bringing readers back to bookshops

Starlin Marot has just opened Bad Girl Books, the UK’s first romantasy-only bookshop. “The whole reason I’m able to have a bookshop is because of BookTok,” she said, referring to the massive online community on TikTok where influencers share book recommendations and reviews. There are currently over 80 million videos on TikTok under the hashtag BookTok, many of them about the genres of romance and romantasy (romance and fantasy). Increasingly, these communities are going offline – attending events, book clubs and workshops. Spaces like Bad Girl Books are popping up across the country to meet this demand for real-world community events.

Marot, 30, crowdfunded her bookshop through her social media followers, who are mostly women and queer people. Last year, she left what she described as a “toxic job” in brand management and began posting videos about romantasy books and bookbinding. When she announced plans for a two-day pop-up bookshop, demand grew rapidly. “Within a day, 50,000 people had seen the video and 1,000 people had booked to come,” she said. The success developed into four sold-out pop-up events before she raised enough money to open her permanent Oxford store with support from the online community. In her first week, she has sold 950 books.

A little over half of UK adults (53%) identify as regular readers. Consumer data from TikTok found that 78% of BookTokers – young people who engage in book content on the platform – have reported an increase in reading in the past few years. These BookTokers were twice as likely as the general population to have attended a book-related event and 79% of BookTokers bought a book in the last year. These numbers are much higher than the rest of the country, where children and young people’s enjoyment of reading has just begun to recover after four years of decline. New figures from the National Literacy Trust show that only 36.1% of children and young people said they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2026, up from 32.7% the previous year – the first increase since 2021.

Yet Katie Fraser, deputy editor of The Bookseller, is skeptical of BookTok’s benefits. “It’s counterintuitive. How does BookTok actually help you get off screen? You’re engaging with a social media platform that wants to keep you on it as long as possible,” she said. Fraser saw the trend as part of the aestheticisation of reading online. “Being seen with books is becoming more of a social signifier,” she said. Reading has become part of the “It Girl” look, signifying “intellect” and “trendiness”.

But Fraser is heartened by the rise of bookshops in whatever form they come. “Romantasy bookshops are not the sign of the end times,” she said. “The appetite for these bookshops to succeed is great considering the backdrop of the rest of the industry.” Although independent bookshops are at their highest number since 2012, their overall figure has been steadily falling since 2005 – the same year that Amazon launched its next-day delivery service.

Cassie Simmons, the founder of Main Character Books, a romance-only bookshop in Spitalfields Market, east London, thinks part of the problem is snobbish judgment. “You can’t advocate for people to read, but then judge what they’re reading. These are novels, people are having fun with them,” she said. Her bookshop hosts regular sold out “spicy reads” open-mic nights where customers can read their favourite “smut”. Because Main Character Books is surrounded by office buildings, businessmen often wander into the shop accidentally. “They’re always like, ‘Do you have self-help books?’ And we’re like, ‘Well, these books will help you,’” Simmons, 38, said.

Simmons’ customers are avid readers, but many buy the majority of their books on Kindle. For BookTok fans, bookshops are often the place where they come just to buy special editions or merchandise. Sarah Maxwell, who owns Saucy Books in Notting Hill, west London, thinks of her customers as collectors. “They read on Kindle, and then they want the trophy. They want a physical copy as a representation of their favourite book,” she said.

Still, romance and romantasy stores are a lucrative business. Just in the last year, six specialty romance or romantasy-only bricks-and-mortar shops opened across the UK, the publisher HarperCollins partnered with TikTok to sell its books on the platform, and TikTok launched an official BookTok bestsellers chart. The BookTok creator Coco Omer, who quit her job as an editorial assistant at Penguin to pursue influencing full time, sees this moment as the next transformation of publishing. “You’re really starting to see the shift in culture,” Omer, 30, said. “Because of AI and technology, we’re about to have a renaissance. Books are such a solitary experience, but the ‘For You’ page [on TikTok] is bringing people to find their real community.”

by Ellen Peirson-Hagger

1. White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Ronald Meyer

What right does a short story first published in 1848 have being on a list about the influence of social media on publishing in 2026? Well, that’s exactly the power of BookTok, which in 2024 made the Penguin Classics little black book edition of this tale of love and loneliness in 19th-century St Petersburg the fourth most sold work of literature in translation in the UK.

2. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz

Another older work that has become a surprise hit thanks to BookTok is this eerie work of speculative fiction, whose narrator is the youngest of 40 women encaged together for reasons never discovered by the characters nor the reader. The tenderness of the friendships the women forge despite the harshness of their post-apocalyptic surroundings has resonated with Gen Z feminists, leading the novel to become a mainstay of bookshops’ literary fiction sections three decades after it first appeared in French.

3. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

It’s not only historic works that fly. Vietnamese-American author Ocean Vuong is celebrated both on and offline, but his highly lyrical, emotive works are especially popular on BookTok, where there is no such thing as oversharing. His 2019 debut novel – which is framed as a letter from a son to his illiterate mother – has inspired many thousands of passionate fan responses, and there is no doubt Vuong’s star status would not be quite so bright were it not for its devoted online following.

4. The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Dark academia – the internet aesthetic that romanticises the arts and higher education – continues to boom on TikTok, and no work in this arena is more lauded than Donna Tartt’s debut. This novel following six Classics students at a Vermont liberal arts college was a commercial success upon publication in 1992, but thanks to BookTok its influence persists and continues to spawn countless imitations. Of course, none beat the original.

5. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas

To truly understand the influence of TikTok on publishing, go into a bookshop and see just how much display space is given over to romantasy, the genre full of explicit sex and high-stakes violence that exploded thanks to the platform. Sarah J Maas’s five-book series was one early success and continues to boom, earning Maas £11.5m in book sales in the UK in 2025 – making her the fourth-biggest author of any genre by revenue.

Photograph by Steven May / Alamy