TikTok's Owner Wanted to Publish Books. Not Anymore.

New York Times

20-06-2025

When 8th Note Press launched in the summer of 2023, the small publisher had a big advantage over other new presses. It was started by the Chinese technology company ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, the wildly popular social media platform where viral endorsements can transform books into best sellers overnight.
That was not enough, it seems, to build a successful publishing business. In late May, 8th Note Press began informing writers that it was shutting down and returning publication rights to the authors.
News of the press's demise, which was reported earlier by the The Bookseller, came as a shock to authors who were swayed by the possibility that 8th Note could help engineer best sellers with elaborate marketing campaigns on TikTok. Instead, 8th Note has started taking down digital editions of their books, effectively unpublishing them.
The literary agent Mark Gottlieb, who sold the debut novel 'To Have and Have More' to 8th Note, said the company was doing 'irreparable damage' to its authors by shutting down so haphazardly. While publishing imprints frequently come and go, the books and authors they publish are usually moved elsewhere within the parent company, rather than being taken out of circulation entirely. If a book is published then quickly disappears, it can be difficult to resell it to another publisher, Gottlieb said.
'They're wrecking careers in the process of doing this,' he said of 8th Note. 'If you're an author and this is your first book, what the history is going to show is that your book published and quickly went out of print.'
8th Note's precipitous fall was surprising, given its parent company's vast resources and reach.
Just last year, the press seemed poised to expand. Last October, its executives announced a partnership with the publisher Zando to put out print editions of its books and distribute them to physical bookstores. The plan was to release 10 to 15 titles a year, with a focus on romance, romantasy and young adult fiction. Later, the imprint indicated to agents that it was expanding into science fiction and fantasy.
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