In the age of TikTok and Instagram, book marketing takes some unusual turns. One such is the move by Atria, part of Simon & Schuster US, to sponsor TikTok influencer Marc Sebastian on a nine-month world cruise and provide him with a selection of books to read and post videos about.
He set sail on 5 January and has been posting about Atrias World Cruise Book Club ever since. The move by the publisher has divided the TikTok community, with some saying why to give a self-confessed non-reader such a treat, and others realising that is the whole point: to introduce non-readers into the world of books.
Publishers Weekly observes: It’s too early to tell if and how Atrias investmentaround $7,000 for the 18-day triphas paid off financially. At outlets that report to Circana BookScan, book sales for The Last One saw only a small bump following the announcement that Sebastian would be reading it on the cruise. The week of the January 6 announcement, it sold 247 copies, while the previous week it sold 193an increase of just 54 copies. (Sebastian’s announcement has received 2.6 million views.) The other seven Atria books in the running for Sebastian’s World Cruise Book Club all saw decreases in sales for the week of January 6.
It adds: But the marketing stunt has, at the very least, brought the publisher quantifiable visibility. According to TikTok, the Atria Books hashtag received 98,000 global views between December 12 and January 15, and #thelastone has received 4.8 million views since the Serenade of the Seas left port.
The #9monthcruise hashtag has received nearly 150 million views, and if just a small percentage of viewers buy one of Atrias novels, the experiment will have been a success for the publisher.
