Authenticity over algorithms: How these founders leveraged BookTok to launch businesses
Spencer Platt // Getty Images
Authenticity over algorithms: How these founders leveraged BookTok to launch businesses
If you’re a book lover, the algorithm knows what you’ll read before you do. Open TikTok and within minutes you’re drowning in “dark academia” recommendations, literary fiction round-ups, and breathless reviews of the latest fantasy romance series. The algorithm is ruthlessly effective at showing you books you won’t put down.
The rise of BookTok, as it’s affectionately called, has made being a bookworm cool again.
But something fascinating is happening in the spaces between those viral videos. Readers are also craving what algorithms can’t provide: surprise, discovery, and the irreplaceable feeling of a book chosen just for them by another human.
Sales for physical book subscription sales surged 264% in 2024, and more than half of book shops are selling globally, according to data from Shopify. Book club events grew by 31% last year, romance-fantasy gatherings quadrupled, and “silent book clubs” more than doubled, according to Eventbrite data. Behind every statistic is the same story: readers using social media to find their people, and readers-turned-entrepreneurs building businesses to bring them together.
Across TikTok and Instagram, a new breed of book entrepreneur is emerging—not opening corner bookshops but launching subscription services from their apartments, building book clubs that exist entirely online, and creating literary communities that run on unboxing videos and perfectly curated surprises.
Selling surprise in an age of predictability
For Carl Matheson and Kate Blazeska of the Australia-based book subscription service Book Box, curation isn’t just business, it’s personal. Reading was how Blazeska learned English after immigrating to Australia at age six. Books became her gateway to a new language and life. Now she’s turned that transformative experience into her business model, spending hours hunting through Goodreads, indie publisher catalogs, and book industry platforms to introduce Australian readers to new authors.
Her approach is deliberately countercultural. Blazeska closely tracks BookTok’s biggest hits—so she can avoid them.
“Those tend to be the overhyped, oversaturated titles that every person probably owns. The minute customers see these videos from big influencers and get it in their book box, it feels like we didn’t put in effort,” says Blazeska. “The whole idea is we want to find the books that aren’t as seen and make them seen.”
Meanwhile in the U.K., Marianne Chala has been playing an even longer game. She had been a traditional bookseller for her entire career when she started the Willoughby Book Club in 2012. This was long before BookTok existed and subscription boxes were all the rage.
“Back then it was quite an unfamiliar concept,” Chala says. “You can get anything on subscription now—a loo roll, toothpaste—but back then, doing something curated and surprising, it was new.”
Her radical premise: Let a human choose your next read. She and her small staff do the patient work of matching books to readers based on detailed questionnaires and decades of bookselling instinct.
“We’re not algorithms, we’re people here, noodling around in the bookshelves,” Chala says. “And it’s a real privilege. Our subscribers get a surprise each month, and we get to take them on a journey.”
Both Book Box and Willoughby Book Club succeed by doing what online megaretailers can’t: curating selections that feel personal because they are personal. When Chala gets an obscure book, she thinks of exactly which one of her subscribers is going to love it. Some subscribers have been with Willoughby so long that she’s now choosing books for their young children, watching entire families grow in their love of books.
Growth is a marathon, not a sprint
When a micro-influencer posted about Book Box on TikTok, it exploded to 100,000 views overnight. This happened in Blazeska and Matheson’s first year of business.
Matheson didn’t panic when the views exploded, he got strategic instead. He transformed the user-generated content into a Meta campaign.
“For us, if it’s performing organically, it always performs on paid advertisements because you are promoting it to the right audience,” he says. They understood that UGC was their best ad format and used it to anchor their growth early on. Now, Book Box attributes about a third of their growth to social media.
For book subscription businesses, the pandemic accelerated everything, forcing readers online and building trust in digital commerce.
“Everyone was stuck at home and had time for reading again,” Chala says. “People were forced to shop online, which gave a wider market trust of shopping online in a way that we didn’t have before.”
Letting customers be your R&D department
The real innovation isn’t only the subscription model—it’s the community infrastructure.
Book Box built a private Facebook group where they share behind-the-scenes content and get customer feedback. “Not only did it make our customers feel a part of the whole brand,” Matheson says, “it also made them feel a part of the building of the product they receive.”
Customers vote on book choices, share unboxing videos daily, and influence product development. “Every day we see shares on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram or our private group about their unboxing, what they loved that month, what made them feel special,” Blazeska says. “It’s really amazing to see.”
Meanwhile, Chala has witnessed Willoughby grow into a judgement-free sanctuary for readers tired of literary snobbery.
“I remember a time when it seemed the whole world was scornful and dismissive of what we then called ‘chick lit.’ So it’s really lovely to see women, particularly young women, reading whatever they like,” she says. “We’ll help you read what you like and hopefully introduce you to more.”
Now she curates without hierarchy. In Chala’s hands, every book, whether high-brow or beach read, arrives as a gift worth celebrating.
“I think this return to books and reading is a way for people to feel that sense of shared community,” says Chala.
Books aren’t the product anymore, belonging is
Neither business is merely selling books. Their models succeed because they solve multiple problems. Readers get discovery without decision fatigue. Authors get audiences without massive marketing budgets.
For entrepreneurs watching BookTok’s billions of views and wondering how to capitalize, these founders offer a counterintuitive playbook: Ignore the obvious choices everyone’s making, and build for the communities others overlook.
“If you build a really good community and treat your customers right, they will follow you wherever you go,” Matheson says.
That’s the real lesson for anyone watching this space. The platforms will change. The algorithms will shift. The trending genres will evolve from “romantasy” to whatever comes next.
But readers will always need their community—even if those people exist primarily in Facebook groups and unboxing videos. Chala, Blazeska, and Matheson offer human touch in an increasingly automated world.
This story was produced by Shopify and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
