Why a HarperCollins Director Says Books Now Sell on BookTok

Books recommended on TikTok sold more than 50 million copies across Europe in 2025 alone, generating close to €800 million in revenue, according to figures TikTok's own newsroom published this year. That kind of number is why book publishing, an industry once built on newspaper reviews and bookstore placement, has spent the past few years restructuring its marketing around a single hashtag: #BookTok. Sam Fox has watched that restructuring from the inside. As director of content creation and marketing strategy at HarperCollins Publishers, and before that brand marketing lead at Teen Vogue, Fox has spent her career managing the shift from traditional media buying to platforms her industry now treats as essential infrastructure.

Fox laid out that shift, and the career path behind it, in a conversation with Students Incorporated co-hosts Premi and Rebecca.

From Dance Major to Marketing Director

Fox's route into publishing had nothing to do with books at first. She entered university training to be a professional dancer, while double-majoring in English and working as an editor at her college newspaper. By graduation, she'd dropped dance for journalism, landing a fellowship at AOL where she learned to chase breaking news, run social media channels, and interview celebrities. She stayed on full time after the fellowship ended, and six months later, Teen Vogue called about an opening. It wasn't the editorial job she expected: it was a marketing position on the magazine's social media team.

Fox said she almost turned it down. What changed her mind was hearing the stories Teen Vogue wanted to tell, the kind she said she wished she'd had access to as a teenager. She spent six years there, working from social platforms up into brand strategy, before HarperCollins recruited her to bring that same approach to book publishing.

"Marketing at Its Core Is Another Form of Storytelling"

That Teen Vogue run is where Fox said she learned the framework she still runs her team by.

Marketing at its core is another form of storytelling.

She said the most successful marketers care about a brand's actual story and want to share it, not just move a unit off a shelf. She now applies that lens across a team of digital marketing managers, social media managers, and video producers whose job is to get HarperCollins authors' stories in front of readers wherever they already spend their time: a bookstore shelf, a retail partnership, or a fifteen-second video.

That range shows up in how Fox described an ordinary week on the job. It might include brainstorming concepts with the social and video teams, filming content in-studio, walking authors through campaign plans, presenting sales numbers to leadership, and coordinating with retail partners and influencers on joint campaigns. No single day covers all of it, she said, but the range is the point: a modern publishing marketer is expected to move fluidly between a boardroom pitch and a TikTok shoot.

The Billboard That Went Viral

One campaign Fox described captures how far that job has moved from a traditional media buy. For the release of the final book in one of HarperCollins's bestselling series, her team built what she called something closer to a movie trailer than a book trailer, complete with a dragon breathing fire and other story-inspired set pieces, and ran it on billboards across New York City alongside the publisher's social channels. Fox recalled riding the subway and watching her own team's video play overhead.

The same campaign included a TikTok video in which the team begged the author to reveal how the series ends. She never actually tells them, and the clip went viral anyway. That same day, Fox said, the author appeared at a bookstore where hundreds of fans lined up to meet her. Fox called it a full "360" campaign, one that worked because the story was allowed to live everywhere a fan might already be looking for it rather than in one polished, single-channel spot.

Why BookTok Stopped Being Optional

The numbers explain why Fox's team treats platforms like TikTok as core infrastructure rather than a side bet. Beyond the roughly 50 million European book sales TikTok's newsroom attributes to BookTok recommendations, the platform is estimated to have influenced 59 million U.S. print sales in 2024, and research firm WordsRated has found that individual titles that break out under the hashtag see sales jump by an average of 600 percent. More than a third of readers between 16 and 39 now say they discover new books on TikTok first, and roughly 45 percent of TikTok users report buying a book after seeing it on the app. The #BookTok hashtag itself has drawn more than 200 billion views across 36 million videos, a scale no single publisher's marketing budget could buy through billboards or magazine ads alone.

Publishing trade outlets covering the shift this year describe a matching change inside publishers: in-house marketing teams increasingly include dedicated social content creators and TikTok strategists, some now court individual creators directly for cover reveals and advance-copy partnerships, and marketing staff describe more autonomy to post quickly without the layers of approval a billboard campaign would require, since trends on the app can turn over in a day. It's exactly the kind of restructuring Fox's own career traces, from a magazine's social team to a publisher's content strategy operation built to move at the same speed.

The Reese Witherspoon Effect, and the Netflix Bump

Fox pointed to two other forces reshaping the industry beyond short-form video. The first is celebrity-run book clubs, which she said are having "a really significant impact" on what readers buy. Reese Witherspoon's book club is the clearest example: selections from Reese's Book Club drive average sales increases of three to four times a title's baseline volume, and the club's pick of Maria Hummel's novel "Still Lives" once pushed that book's sales up 103 percent, according to trade coverage of the club's track record. Book clubs of that kind have become a real line of business: subscription-based book club models generated an estimated $698 million in 2025, close to 60 percent of total revenue across the book club market, industry research firm MarketIntelo has found.

The second force is the direct pipeline between books and screens, which Fox said "always ends up generating its own sales to the books." That connection has only gotten stronger since she spoke. Book-based titles drew more than 9 billion views on Netflix in 2025, accounting for close to a fifth of all hours watched on the platform that year, according to Netflix's own reporting, and the streamer's Frankenstein adaptation triggered a 180 percent spike in sales of the movie tie-in edition of Mary Shelley's novel. It's the kind of secondary sales bump Fox described watching happen with young-adult adaptations, now playing out at a much larger scale.

Her Advice: Live Where Your Reader Already Is

Asked what advice she'd give someone trying to break into publishing, Fox didn't point to a résumé line or a graduate program.

"My biggest piece of advice is to get on BookTok," she said, arguing that using the platform for fun and understanding what makes an account succeed there makes a candidate "an asset to the publishing industry" before they ever apply for a job. Her broader definition of the work, she said, comes down to empathy: putting yourself in a reader's shoes and asking what would make them buy a book or follow an account. For students who already spend time in those spaces, she framed that fluency less as a career hurdle than as a skill they may not realize they've already built.

It's also a quieter argument about where cultural authority over books now sits. A decade ago, a title's fate rested largely with critics, bookstore buyers, and morning-show producers. Today, on the evidence Fox described, that fate increasingly rests with whoever decides to film themselves reacting to the last page, and with the publishers who have rebuilt their marketing departments, from billboard budgets to TikTok strategists, around getting that person to hit record.

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