How BookTok is powering a brick-and-mortar bookstore boom

Inside The Ripped Bodice in Culver City, California — a Los Angeles suburb — a pride flag hangs near the ceiling, stitched together entirely from the covers of romance novels. Below it, shelves are sorted by subgenres of romance — such as contemporary, historical, paranormal, queer — and new releases catch the light because their pages are dyed and sprayed along the edges in bright colors, turning a paperback into something closer to a collectible.

On a recent weekend afternoon, tourists mixed with regulars browsed shelves and talked excitedly. "Romance flourishing right now is a wonderful thing," said Taylor Capizola, the store’s general manager, "because the world's very big, very confusing ... and romance remains this safe haven."

Few would have predicted a decade ago, when online retail and e-books were widely expected to finish off the neighborhood bookstore, that that safe haven would come in the form of physical books sold at brick-and-mortar independent bookstores.

The Ripped Bodice, which opened in March 2016, was the only store of its kind in the U.S. for years. Today there are hundreds more, in cities from Seattle to Cockeysville, Maryland.

All told, more than 1,500 new independent bookstores have opened nationwide since 2020, according to the American Booksellers Association. And the pace is accelerating: the ABA recorded more than 600 new store openings in 2025 alone.

Some of the very forces once blamed for in-person bookselling’s decline — online shopping and social media — are now among its biggest drivers.

On the social media front, BookTok, the books-focused corner of TikTok, has become a genuine sales engine. "What BookTok really does is determine books that get really popular," Capizola said. "So if we see people start talking about books online, we'll make sure to order more,” since a viral book can sell out for weeks.

The rebound follows a long, rough stretch for independent booksellers. Large chains expanded aggressively in the 1980s and '90s, squeezing out smaller shops. Amazon, founded in 1994, pulled most book sales online. Then came e-books and the 2008 financial crisis, which closed still more indie shops.

The turnaround began about a decade ago and accelerated during the pandemic. Forced to close their doors, many booksellers reinvented themselves: turning stores into fulfillment warehouses, setting up curbside pickups and deliveries, and finally taking online sales seriously.

"Booksellers have been kind of wary of it, or hadn't really done it in any depth," said John Mutter, the co-founder of Shelf Awareness, a daily trade newsletter that has covered the book industry for two decades.

Now, online selling is helping many booksellers get off the ground. At Village Well Books and Coffee, a general-interest bookstore and cafe just a few blocks from The Ripped Bodice, owner Jennifer Caspar oversees a thriving 5,400-square-foot business that started entirely online in 2020, helping her bring in revenues at a time when the pandemic had forced brick-and-mortar stores to close their doors.

Today, in-person shopping dominates Village Well's business. Online sales make up only about 3% of revenue, Caspar said, but remain an important point of contact to maintain relationships with customers. "We love that, like, when people are lying in bed in the middle of the night, and they feel like shopping, they can do it with us instead of going online to Amazon."

That's precisely the behavior Andy Hunter, CEO and founder of Bookshop.org, is trying to capture at scale. Launched in 2020, the online marketplace lets independent stores without their own e-commerce operations build homepages on the site, direct customers there, and collect a cut of every sale.

"The smaller stores, where $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 makes a huge difference and can pay the rent for a year — those are the stores that we're really helping a ton," Hunter said.

He estimates that Bookshop.org has clawed back roughly 2% of online book sales from Amazon, and he's now aiming to grow that share further by selling directly through TikTok.

Correction August 31, 2026: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized Bookshop.org.