On BookTok, TikTok’s community of bibliophiles, crying is commonplace

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Eloise Hampson’s anguish has been viewed more than a million times.

Complete strangers have witnessed the 17-year-old’s face crumple, her desperate stare into the middle distance, the heavy sigh she releases before dropping her head into her hands, body shaking. She recorded the tearful time-lapse for TikTok last year as proof: This is how it feels to read Colleen Hoover’s novelGenerations of people have been taught that public displays of weeping are the height of embarrassment.

Search the #CoHo hashtag on TikTok and the videos say it all: moody music, sobbing emoji and requests to be punched in the face by Hoover because “that would hurt less than these books.” If Instagram is a platform of pristinely filtered perfection, certain corners of BookTok are smeared with runny mascara and littered with used tissues.

In other words, BookTok didn’t make Hoover a bestseller, but it pushed her popularity to new heights. Right around the time she was struggling to write her first romantic comedy, TikTok usage was exploding, as kids and young adults found themselves with more hours to fill and fewer social engagements. Given the timing, maybe it makes sense that the platform became a place to share tumultuous emotions.

, from 2017, have also seen big sales bumps because of BookTok activity. In 2021, Hoover’s print unit sales were 693 per cent higher than in 2020, and, published in 2016, sold 768,700 copies last year, 18 times what it sold the year prior.It Ends With Us

 

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