Canadian book influencer Morgann Book’s first viral video had nothing to do with reading.
At age 16, she was working at the Dairy Queen her parents owned and posted a video on TikTok making and decorating an ice cream cake.
“It immediately went viral,” she said on The Next Chapter.
“Within 24 hours it had hit probably a million views and I gained 40,000 followers.”
For the first two years of her social media career, her videos were all about the inner workings of Dairy Queen. But her followers were also responding to the voiceovers about her life, her studies and, true to her last name, her love of books.
“I found it very easy to just talk about what I was reading and what I wanted to read,” she said.
At the same time, books and reading content was becoming more popular on TikTok and she realized that BookTok was the right place to move her videos forward.
To bridge the gap for her audience and connect ice cream with books, she started to draw book covers on the cakes — and the rest was history.
Now, the 22-year old Ancaster, Ont., native has 2.6 million TikTok followers, brand deals and her own podcast, Off The Shelf, dedicated to books and authors.
“I’m always reading or talking about books these days, which is the greatest thing ever,” she said. “You tell 13-year-old me that I basically get paid to read these days and it’s essentially a dream come true. I love what I do.”
Lifelong love for reading
Book’s passion for reading was fostered by her family, whose running joke is that because of their last name, reading is in their DNA.
She grew up loving dystopian novels like The Hunger Games and Divergent, and when she was 13, she read 160 books, she proudly recalled.
“I don’t have that much time on my hands anymore,” said Book.
Before last year, she was mostly reading romance and fantasy novels, but decided she wanted to expand her tastes for herself and her audience.
That led her to her “thriller era,” when she sourced recommendations from her mom, a lover of the genre, and BookTok.
She’s since read 25 thrillers this year, including titles by Freida McFadden, Riley Sager and Alice Feeney.
“If I’m obsessed with the writing or the story or the twist, yes, I do tend to go through their entire backlist,” she said.
A passion for talking about books
While Book says she reads two to three titles a week, she’s never at a loss of what to read next with all the recommendations she gets from her audience.
She has to balance her time between recommendations, work commitments and her personal tastes, she says.
“I’m going to pick up a book not for the purpose of work, but then sometimes it becomes work because if it’s a good book, I obviously want to share it with people.”
And as someone who never expected to be in the spotlight, her passion for sharing her favourite books propels her in her work as an influencer.
“I’m still an introvert at heart,” she said. “I still get very nervous in social situations. I still get a bit of anxiety when I’m going to do a panel.”
After doing so many media appearances over the past year, the anxiety has begun to dissipate, she says. But it’s also because she’s dealing with a topic so close to her heart.
“A lot of readers are introverts until you ask us about books and then we can talk for hours on end,” she said. “As much as I love to read, I also love talking about books just as much.”
