An official “BookTok” chart is set to launch later this year in the UK, offering a monthly rundown of the the most popular titles on social media platform TikTok.

The ranking will combine verified retail sales data with social media engagement to track which books are resonating most strongly with readers online.

The Top 20 chart will be compiled by NielsenIQ BookData, the publishing industry’s key sales data provider, working in partnership with Media Control.

To create the ranking, NielsenIQ BookData will identify titles generating significant engagement on TikTok and rank them by sales volume. TikTok itself will provide data on engagement, while Media Control will apply an algorithm, weighted more towards book sales than engagement, to produce the official ranking.

BookTok – a community of readers sharing recommendations and reaction videos about books on TikTok – has become one of the most powerful forces in publishing over the past few years. Viral posts can propel years-old titles back to the top of bestseller lists and introduce new authors to global audiences, particularly younger readers.

Many of the platform’s biggest hits are in the romance and fantasy genres, alongside the fusion genre romantasy. Authors such as Sarah J Maas, Colleen Hoover and Rebecca Yarros have all seen explosive sales growth after their books circulated widely on BookTok – series including A Court of Thorns and Roses by Maas and Yarros’s Empyrean sequence, beginning with Fourth Wing, have become staples of the platform.

The charts were first trialled in Germany and are now being expanded to the UK.

“In recent years, #BookTok has developed into one of the most important drivers in the international book market,” NielsenIQ and Media Control said in a statement. The new chart creates, “for the first time, a reliable data-based link between social media resonance and real sales performance.”