BookTok Has Saved Barnes & Noble. Here's How The Once Threatened Retail Chain Is Triumphing Amid Viral Blockbusters

In a plot twist to rival any bestseller, Barnes & Noble has pulled off the comeback of the ages. A few years ago, it appeared the beloved bookstore chain was on its deathbed. It was hemorrhaging cash and closed 150 stores. It seemed destined to go the way of its former rival, Borders. Confounding expectations, however, it opened 60 stores nationwide last year— more than it did in a decade between 2009 and 2019 — and plans to open 60 more in 2025. It has an unlikely angel on its shoulder to thank for its resurrection — TikTok.

Community First

The China-based app, itself threatened with a demise in the U.S. before President Donald Trump intervened, has a rabid following of book lovers via its BookTok channel, which emerged in 2020 during the pandemic, causing a literary virality authors and retailers could only dream about. Seizing the zeitgeist, Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt began prioritizing customer preferences over publishers' promotions, nurturing a community of readers that determined the displays in each store, according to the popularity of books in each market. Thus, instead of being a one-size-fits-all corporate retailer, it adopted the personalized feel of a community bookstore.

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“The problem with Barnes & Noble, when I took it over, was that the bookstores themselves weren’t very good,” Daunt told CNN. “I think a proper bookstore has to be curated, and that is the essence of one of the core skills of what it is to be a bookseller. You are trying to have the titles that you think will most interest your customers and display them.”

Turning Away Corporate Cash

Daunt’s maverick approach wasn’t without its risks. Publishers pay to display, handing over cash for prominent positioning. It also puts a lot of trust in each bookstore’s manager to accurately curate based on taste and sales. Younger families with kids were catered to in certain stores, while older, more affluent buyers in others. The gamble worked. Foot traffic has increased by 7% since 2019. Year-over-year visits have increased nearly every month since November 2023, according to location analytics company Placer.ai. BookTok’s audience helped with the curation.

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The BookTok Influence

“A lot of stores took advantage of the heyday of BookTok and created tables and specific displays of varying sizes because they had that flexibility, which is another beautiful thing about the stores really determining their own destiny,” Shannon DeVito, Barnes & Noble's head of books, told CNN.

Step into any Barnes and Noble, and you’ll see the BookTok influence, with a whole section dedicated to the social media sub-channel, which makes it easy to grab, dance, and film for the users. Barnes and Noble has taken things one step further, incorporating a sprayed edges section that feeds into one of the latest trends in publishing, adorning special editions with embellished edges. The retailer’s website shows dragons flying up the edge of Rebecca Yarros‘ multimillion-selling "Onyx Storm", an all-black “Night Court”-themed edition of Sarah J. Maas‘s "A Court of Thorns and Roses," and a poolside scene painted on the pages of Emily Henry‘s "People We Meet on Vacation."

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Amazon: Friend Not Foe

Interestingly, Daunt views Amazon AMZN as an ally rather than a rival in Barnes and Noble’s success. “It’s taken is all the boring books out of our stores,” Daunt told PBS. “We used to have great, huge medical sections that taught doctors and nurses and all the other professionals. But those books are very boring. No more. You go onto Amazon, bump, it arrives through your letter box three minutes later.”

Another interesting component of Barnes and Noble’s success is that its expansion has included taking over struggling local bookstores, thus still serving the community with a literary fix.

“Bookstores get into trouble. What we now do as a chain is, we rescue them. We give them a safe home. We don’t change them. We don’t change the people. We don’t change the name. But we give them the structure of the large chain,” Daunt told PBS.

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The Experiential Factor

Barnes and Noble’s most significant selling point over Amazon is its sense of community, which inspired the BookTok movement during lockdown. It’s fitting that the two worlds have now come together.

“If you buy Percival Everett‘s “James” from Amazon, it’s the same Percival Everett I will sell you,” Daunt told PBS. “But if you come into this store to buy it, you will come in, you will be surrounded by other books, which you can browse and engage with. Almost certainly, you will have another fellow customer saying, ‘Oh, have you read this by him? Have you read that?' You will have an experience. And when you walk out of the store with it in your bag, it will lift you. It’s the same book, but I promise you it’s a better book and the reading of it will be more pleasurable because you bought it in a bookstore.”

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