Fyodor Dostoevsky's White Nights has unexpectedly become the best-selling Penguin Classic of 2024, surpassing perennial favorites like Pride and Prejudice. This phenomenon is attributed to the influence of BookTok, a community on TikTok where readers share literary recommendations, particularly among younger generations.
As the literary world enters a new year, it’s time for publishers to look back at the hits and misses of the year just passed. What, for example, do you expect was the UK’s bestselling Penguin Classic title of 2024? In most years, the correct answer would be a predictable one: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In 2024, however, one surprising title has leapfrogged all the others to become Penguin’s top-selling classic of the year: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1848 novella White Nights, which has shifted more than 50,000 copies since last January. But this answer raises bigger questions. What is the appeal of a lesser-known early work from Russia’s trickiest master that has led it to outstrip hardy perennials such as F Scott Fitzgerald and Emily Brontë? The solution, in part, lies in TikTok, the short-form video social media platform favoured by the young: two-thirds of its users are under 35, and a third are under 25. And within the platform lies the BookTok community, where readers share brief, heartfelt literary recommendations. It’s massively influential: a poll in 2022 found that three-fifths of 16-25-year-olds said BookTok had helped them discover a passion for reading. Careers have been built on BookTok — though it’s traditionally been the preserve of contemporary writers of young adult fiction. English author Alice Oseman’s graphic novel series Heartstopper, about two schoolboys who fall in love, went global there. The same happened with Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, which blew up so much that it became the bestselling novel in the US of 2022 and 2023. It’s hard to go viral outside the mainstream, and Hoover’s books are not high literature: they are consciously sentimental and carelessly written. Yet in the shadow of these juggernauts, more interesting things are happening too. Classics are finding new life, helping them break away from the long tail of slow, regular sale
BOOKTOK CLASSICS Dostoevsky SOCIAL MEDIA TIKTOK
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