Books About Influencers: 9 Novels About Going Viral and Regretting It
There is a detail in one of my own books that I keep coming back to. A man with nineteen thousand followers makes about eighty dollars a week from them. He has never told anybody that number. On the internet he is somebody people wait on. On his delivery route he is just the fellow who brings the gas.
That gap is what every good book about influencers is actually about. Not the phone. The distance between the person in the video and the person holding it.
Nine books below. Four are literary novels by other people and five are comedies by me, and I will tell you which is which.
Books about influencers worth reading
Followers, Megan Angelo
Two timelines. In 2015, Orla and Floss work out that you can manufacture fame if you are willing to stop having ethics about it, and the internet rewards them with the most frightening possible outcome, which is success. In 2051, Floss’s daughter lives in a Californian community where millions watch her and a network choreographs her day around sponsors. The 2051 half is the one that stays with you, because it is barely a stretch.
Social Creature, Tara Isabella Burton
Louise is working three jobs in New York. Lavinia is on sabbatical from Yale and chasing a life that looks correct from outside. Their friendship gets intense and then toxic and then considerably worse. People compare it to The Talented Mr Ripley, which is fair, except that here the performance is happening on a feed and everybody can see it. The nastiest book on this list and the best written of the four.
No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood
Lockwood is a poet and it shows. Her narrator is famous for viral posts, flies around meeting fans, and gets paid to talk about the internet, which she calls the portal. The first half is fragments and jokes and the feeling of a brain that has been online too long. Then the second half happens, and I am not going to tell you what it is. Read it.
Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler
A narrator who lies more or less constantly, pulling apart the way people perform themselves online. It came out within weeks of the Lockwood and the two got compared endlessly, which was unfair to both. This is the colder and more argumentative of the pair. If you like a narrator you are not sure you trust, take this one.
And then there is my stuff
Mine are comedies and they are not trying to be those books. The literary ones are about what the feed does to a mind. Mine are about what it does to somebody’s week, their job, and whoever has to live with them.
I Faked a Robbery for Content
Dewey Otis Shirley drives a propane truck across the west half of a dry Alabama county, twelve hours a day, with a phone stuck to the vent mount. Four years of that has got him nineteen thousand people who show up to watch a man be certain about things he has never looked into. It pays about eighty dollars a week and he has never told anybody, including his grandmother. Then he decides to make something bigger happen. This is the one I would put in front of anybody who thinks the genre is only jokes. Full story here, or read the summary on Amazon.
Cancelled Karen Gets Her Revenge
The other side of the lens. Karen Cavanaugh wanted a vanilla oat latte. The queue took forever, nobody called her name, her drink went cold on the counter, and she complained for perfectly good reasons. Then the phones came out, the part that caused it got edited away, and the internet met a villain it had already decided about. The rest of the book is her doing something about that. Read the summary.
The Video Rage Baiter and the Karens
Chad “Clipz” McMillan has a career that depends entirely on provoking strangers until they lose their temper on camera. Grocery stores, airports, dog parks, car parks. He is very good at it, which is the problem, because the supply of people willing to be filmed at their worst is not infinite and he has started running out of county. Read it alongside Cancelled Karen and you have both halves of the same transaction. Read the summary.
Lettuce-Eating Lucy Gets the Squirts
Lucy Lou LaRue loses her job at the Piggly Basket after an incident involving a rotisserie chicken, and does what anybody at rock bottom would do, which is reinvent herself as a clean-eating wellness influencer. The glow-up begins with three bowls of suspiciously warm romaine bought off a roadside produce truck. It goes extremely badly, at scale, in public. The wellness industry deserves this book. Read the summary.
Andy the Influencer Discovers His Micro Penis
Fame, followers, and one very small discovery. Andy has built an entire personality out of being admired by strangers, which is a fragile thing to build on, and this is the week he meets something he cannot filter, crop or caption his way past. The shortest and silliest one here. Read the summary.
Where to start
If you want the book that will actually change how you look at your phone, No One Is Talking About This.
If you want to watch two people build fame out of nothing and regret it, Followers.
If you want mine with something underneath it, I Faked a Robbery for Content.
And if you have ever been the person in the video without agreeing to be, Cancelled Karen Gets Her Revenge, which is the one readers tell me they felt personally about.
One honest note
Mine are adult comedies and the four literary ones are not comedies at all, so do not go from Lockwood to me expecting the same book. What they have in common is that none of them think the internet is the villain. The people are the villain. The internet just gave them a camera and a number that goes up.
More of mine in that vein: stories of the odd and unusual, or dark humor books for the funny-about-terrible-things end of the shelf. Otherwise browse the full catalog.
