{"id":6846,"date":"2022-07-15T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-15T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/eh-toc-toc-toc\/"},"modified":"2022-07-15T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T12:00:00","slug":"eh-toc-toc-toc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/eh-toc-toc-toc\/","title":{"rendered":"Eh, toc toc toc"},"content":{"rendered":"

My kids, if they think something is ridiculous, tap their fingers to their heads and cry, \u201ceh, toc toc toc.\u201d When I told them that there is in fact a video site called Tik-Tok, they took a second to assess the news, then danced round the room shouting \u201ceh, toc toc toc. Eh, toc toc toc.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Tik-tok doesn\u2019t just exist; it\u2019s huge. In the first quarter of this year, Tik-tok saw more app downloads than anything in Facebook\u2019s stable. It\u2019s true that Tik-Tok still skews heavily towards youth \u2013 but kids read books too and every major publisher now includes \u201cBookTok\u201d in their marketing plans.<\/p>\n

For most authors, these facts are basically terrifying. It\u2019s rare that an ordinary writer has a significant Twitter following. They\u2019re still more unlikely to have a meaningful base on Tik-Tok or Instagram or anything else. Many authors are somewhat introvert and loathe the idea of having to go out on social media to promote themselves.<\/p>\n

At the same time \u2013 and everyone says it, so it must be true, right? \u2013 authors these days have to do more of their own marketing than ever before. That presumably means that authors have to be on Twitter and Tik-Tok and everything else if they ever want to get a book deal. It can easily sound as if the doors of the industry are closed to most authors.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019ve never ever believed that \u2013 mostly because it\u2019s simply not true. But I\u2019ve lacked hard data to prove my point. Today, thanks to the redoubtable Jane Friedman, that\u2019s no longer the case.<\/p>\n

In her latest Hot Sheet<\/a> newsletter (subscription needed), Jane presents an interesting piece of analysis.<\/p>\n

First, she looked at the market for memoir. If any part of the books market should be eaten up by celebrities and social media influencers and all that, then it should be the memoir market, because that\u2019s directly about the author themselves.<\/p>\n

In practice, Jane found 159 memoirs published in the first part of 2022.<\/p>\n

Those memoirs divided up as follows:<\/p>\n