The craft (and business) of TikTok storytelling, according to author Jason Pargin

It has. I mean, this kind of saved my author career, if we’re being frank. The most recent book that I put out, it overwhelmingly sold because I relentlessly pushed it on TikTok. But what TikTok demands is about 100 times greater than what the average person thinks in terms of trying to promote something. So if I make a video about my book where I’m reading an excerpt or otherwise talking about some subjects, and I’m going to tie it into the book, for about every 2,000 views to the video, I’ll sell one copy of the book. So the video gets 40,000 views, I can expect to sell about 20 copies. If it’s just a piece of trivia and I don’t mention the book at all, it’s just me as TikTok guy, I’ll sell about one copy for every million views. And those sound like hopeless numbers for somebody trying to sell their book on TikTok.