A debut author struggling with sales became Amazon’s No 1 bestseller this week after a video of the writer at a quiet book signing went viral on TikTok.
58-year-old Shawn Warner was sitting at a table in a Kroger store in Fort Worth, Texas, behind piled copies of his YA murder mystery, Leigh Howard and the Ghosts of Simmons-Pierce Manor, when two strangers approached him and began asking about the novel.
TikToker Jerrad “Red” Swearenjin, who filmed the interaction, said he started talking to Warner because the writer looked “super defeated”. The video, which has now been viewed nearly 18m times, shows Warner explaining that the book is “about a teenage girl who teams up with a ghost with multiple personalities to solve the mystery of her parents’ murder.”
Swearenjin can be heard asking Warner to sign a second copy to be given to a TikTok user, adding that he will try to get the writer “a little bit of love” on the social media app.
The video was posted to TikTok on Sunday and was flooded with supportive comments and users vowing to buy the book. On Monday, Warner tweeted that the novel became No 1 in Amazon YA sales, and soon after it was No 1 across all book genres.
“When Red came up and talked to me, I was just so eager to talk to anybody at that point because there was a lull in my sales,” said Warner in a video response to the book’s success. “What’s happened has been beyond my imagination. I’m so grateful,” the author added in a caption.
Warner worked as an infantry paratrooper, a paediatric therapist and in computer science before becoming an author. “At every stage of my life, people have complimented me on my writing,” he states on his website, but those same people said “you can’t make a living” being an author. “I was dumb enough to listen,” he adds. “So here I am, living out my childhood dream.”
Warner’s novel was printed in paperback by independent Texas-based publisher Black Rose Writing in November 2022. Audiobook and hardback editions of the book are “in the works”, Warner said in his TikTok response. In another video, he said that he is considering locations for future book signings.
TikTok has become a breeding ground for bestsellers over the past couple of years, with the online hype of millions of likes and comments boosting book sales. Former social worker and YA fiction author Colleen Hoover was called the “reigning queen of BookTok” after her TikTok fans shot her novel, It Ends With Us, to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. TikTok has now established its own book awards, and its owner, ByteDance, is launching a publishing company, 8th Note Press.
In the caption to Red’s viral video of Warner, the TikTok creator wrote: “I honestly don’t even read books nowadays. But something just told me to get a couple.”
