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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Official BookTok Chart to Launch in UK
The only thing surprising about this announcement is that it took this long to happen. Our friends across the pond are getting a BookTok chart that will track the top 20 titles on the platform. Here’s how it will work: NielsenIQ will provide sales data; TikTok will provide engagement data; and an algorithm from Media Control, which will be weighted to favor book sales over engagement, will produce the official ranking. If my conversations with marketers and publicists over the last few years are any indication, that weighting toward sales data is the crucial detail. There’s no guarantee that going viral will result in sales. Indeed, there’s often quite a gap between how popular a book seems online and how it actually sells. This new ranking could prove quite useful in helping industry pros in the ongoing/neverending effort to determine how much social media really matters.
The Books Behind This Year’s Big Pictures
As the Academy Awards approach this Sunday, Publishers Weekly has rounded up their original takes on many of the books connected to the year’s biggest flicks. There’s Hamnet, of course, and Train Dreams (my favorite under-the-radar film of 2025), plus Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which inspired One Battle After Another. Nonfiction fans, don’t despair. Biographies of Mary Shelley, Turgenev, and lyricist Lorenz Hart (played beautifully by Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon) also await.
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Margo’s Got Momentum
I’ve been curious-slash-worried about how AppleTV’s adaptation of Margo’s Got Money Troubles would shake out ever since it was announced. For a book about a young woman who starts an OnlyFans to support herself after having a relationship with her English professor, the vibe is quirky and surprisingly wholesome, not always an easy needle to thread on screen. Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nicole Kidman lead the absolutely stacked cast of the show, which debuts April 15, and I could not be more delighted to see that the early reviews are strong. Rufi Thorpe’s novel is exactly the kind of thing I want to see more of from publishing, so here’s hoping that viewers will become readers and send a signal for more like this, please.
The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week
Page-to-screen sensations continue to dominate Goodreads, but as Wuthering Heights falls out of the top 5, I can’t help but hope that word has finally gotten out that the book is not (like, really, really not) spicy and romantic.