Where film and TV commissioners and producers once looked at what was being read by their fellow commuters on their daily train or bus ride, BookTok is now the place they look for the buzzy lit hits, say leading executives from Amazon MGM Studios, Fremantle and Banijay.
BookTok, the reading subcommunity on TikTok, has fuelled screen adaptations such as Lionsgate’s $400m box-office hit The Housemaid, Canadian series Heated Rivalry and Amazon shows Off Campus, Boys Of Tommen and Maxton Hall – The World Between Us. More than 75 million posts have now been created globally using the BookTok hashtag.
“At this point, my personal and work have merged into one. I live on there,” said Tara Erer, Amazon MGM Studios’ head of originals, UK and Northern Europe, during an on-stage SXSW London discussion on June 4.
“Maybe because a lot of what we do, and what we want to do, is very much about younger female audiences. It is such a luxury to be able to get so close to the audience. It’s terrifying as well, because when you get it wrong, they tell you.”
Erer confirmed she works directly with members of the BookTok community to find her next hit. “[Amazon execs] can spend so much time on it, but you’re still going to get a very high-level view.”
Amazon is also harnessing the popularity of individual BookTokers by casting them as extras.
“If we do make things that they’re interested in, [we are] bringing them into the production,” said Erer. “We have this show in Germany, Maxton Hall, produced with Fremantle, and we’ve had BookTokers and content creators in the show. This sense of marketing, PR, social, it’s [starting] very early. It used to be that you would give marketing [department] the final film. Now, I bring my social team in when we have a draft of the script.”
Amelia Brown, Fremantle UK CEO, recalled there was a hesitancy from streamers, studios and producers to option Mona Kasten’s novel Save Me on which Maxton Hall – The World Between Us is based.
“Everyone was a bit unsure of whether that kind of content would work on German TV, and then the Frankfurt Book Fair happened, and apparently [Kasten] had 900 people queuing up at her desk for [book] signing,” said Brown. ”That’s quite unheard of because it’s a book fair full of agents and publishers, and these were fans. That’s when Fremantle and everyone went, ’hang on, there’s something in there’.”
The series went on to garner the largest ever first week global viewership for a non-US original show on Amazon Prime Video.
Brown considers BookTok as “the most authentic discovery of feedback you can get”.
Banijay’s head of adaptations Hannah Griffiths said that by the time many books break out on BookTok, they have already secured a publisher and are likely to have been optioned, so for book scouts in the screen industry, it is about discovering the work of self-published authors. “Largely, those books at the moment are coming out of America. Though I imagine that will change,” she said.
Death of dystopia
Griffiths recalled a tough period in which romantasy was the dominant popular literary genre. “For book scouts in TV, I don’t work in film, it was a nightmare because for three years all the oxygen in bookshops was being sucked into this genre we couldn’t make anything with. We couldn’t make a show out of a romantasy [book] series, there wasn’t the budget.”
The trend she has seen now is a shift more towards romance, and within that “super niche categorisations of romance, like age gap romance… I talk to drama producers all the time, and I’m saying, ’how are we meeting this need for romance?’”
Dystopian fiction, Griffiths said, is out. “I remember the 10 years of dystopian fiction. No one wants to think about that now, because we are living in a dystopian reality.”
Amid the feverishly fast-moving world of internet trends, the executives said the slower pace of the commissioning and production process can be mitigated.
“It’s more genres and themes,” said Brown, of what Fremantle is looking for online. “The beauty of these fan sites is you’re being fed stuff on BookTok because of things that you want, not because of things that are popular, which is a very interesting take on an algorithm. That’s how we should look at the information, how we’re using it and what we’re learning.”
She also noted, ”Books that are 10, 15 years old are also resurfacing,”
Rise of Substack
Commissioners and scouts are also looking for source material on Substack, self-publishing platform Wattpad and podcasts.
Erer noted, “We are hiring younger executives who are immersed in those worlds. It comes naturally to them. It’s not an artificial way of looking into things.”
“One of our big struggles is to try to move that traditional business model into the new world,” agreed Brown. “It’s a little bit sometimes like turning the Titanic. But to do that, you need to listen to young people to whom it’s second nature.”
“One of the big sources for me was nonfiction, the memoir,” said Griffiths. “There are so many shows that are huge hits that came out of memoir, and memoir died. So, where are those people? They’re writing on Substack. That’s definitely the place I go to look for non-fiction.
“Non-fiction has been decimated by the podcast,” she added, pointing towards historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s shift away from writing books to focus on their immensely profitable podcast, The Rest Of History. “Why would they bother writing a book?”
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