UPDATE 6-24-24: A new Wall Street Journal article lends even more support to the thesis of this post, that the trend is moving away from personalities: Social Media Influencers Aren’t Getting Rich—They’re Barely Getting By.
I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus for a few months, but I’m back for the next few weeks with a series of key learnings that we’ve discovered in 2024 at Invite Resources, the ministry at which I serve as Executive Director and Publisher.
The first is this: the future of publishing isn’t personalities. It’s communities.
Let me explain.
The “Rick Warren Model”
This spring, Invite Press made a significant financial commitment to publicizing several of our new, frontlist titles. Our approach was to follow what I’ll call the “Rick Warren Model” of platforming Christian personalities through earned media campaigns.
The Rick Warren Model actually predates Rick and his super popular The Purpose Driven Life. It began with Hal Lindsey in the 1970s. The Big 5 publishers in NYC realized that Christian publishing was a huge market. They began to acquire or build their own Christian imprints as well as to platform pastors and other Christian “personalities” using tried and true earned media campaigns (e.g., an invitation from a producer to appear on Oprah or Good Morning America).
Christian publishing really broke open in the mid 00s when Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life became the biggest selling non-fiction title of the 21st century.
Social media perpetuated the same model as we moved into the late 00s, but shifted the locus from gatekeeper interests to self-publishing savvy. Mike Hyatt’s Platform capitalized on this phenomenon in 2012, and everyone hopped on the platform wagon.
Now, every high schooler wants to be an online influencer.
But that’s the problem. One of my principles of innovation is that anything omnipresent is also soon to be obsolete.
Len’s Paradox of Innovation: The more omnipresent something becomes, the greater the chance it has of becoming obsolete.
Yes, everyone wants to be an influencer now. That means the Wild West days of influencing are over, and to gain market share today requires an immense amount of equity, either sweat or capital. YouTube’s advertiser threshold keeps growing. Publishers are spending way more to reach far fewer customers today than they did in the 2000s and 2010s.
Sure, personalities are important will remain so. The established ones still carry much weight. Every Beth Moore product generates a load of interest and revenue.
But if you’re using the Rick Warren playbook to launch an unknown name today, either via earned media or social media, you’re not skating to where the puck is going.
What We Learned: Influencing is Down. Communities are Up.
I had sensed this change coming for a while, but it was confirmed for me with the launch of our spring 2024 line. Our publicist is at the top of the industry and has done incredible work. Our authors have made dozens of appearances on national-level media. Yet earned media success has not translated to sales as we thought it would. Our books have launched quite well by today’s standards, but we were expecting much more.
Publicity has a place, and we will continue to use it in targeted ways, but the earned media landscape has shifted.
3 Reasons The Model No Longer Works
1) The technology landscape has changed.
Private, handheld devices and platforms encourage private consumption. It’s been five years since we first learned that people spend more time watching tiny screens, by ourselves, than on large screen televisions, together.
2) The media landscape has changed.
Delivery systems - the “casts” of the world - are totally diffused. It’s hard to get a critical mass of eyeballs to anything. Sure, you’ve still got the Super Bowl and Barbenheimer. But the exceptions prove the rule. Television viewership is a small fraction of what it once was. Radio is down. Reading is down. The NBA Finals, which started last weekend with the local Mavericks, drew 22% of the audience of the 1998 Finals featuring Jordan’s last game.
What is up: personal consumption on custom generated playlists. Kids prefer YouTube over Star Wars, and no, these aren’t comparable. One is branded content, but the other is a platform. The medium has finally become the message.
3) The political landscape has changed.
We are less civil and amenable to people who espouse positions with which we disagree. We dismiss them and their favorite resources as untrustworthy.
This last one is key to understanding where the puck is going.
The New Trend: Friend of a Friend Recommendation
In a polarized, fragmented world, what matters more than anything is personal recommendation. While the old model no longer works, Invite Press has seen some titles surprisingly move thousands of units. How? Bulk sales, based on the power of recommendations—not just personal ones, but friends of friends and networks of networks. Paradoxically, the rise of personal platforms has created a need for community consumption.
The trend is rooted in a single word: trust.
Who do you trust?
People make decisions based on who and what they trust. Trust in traditional media is at record lows, and trust in social media has never been great. Increasingly, the most reliable and trustworthy source is a friend of a friend.
What matters in the future is what is happening in the communities to which you aspire.
A personal recommendation from a trusted colleague or friend is the new differentiator.
If you like a community because you like the people that are in it…
If you sense a community is doing fresh, authentic, and innovative things…
If you see the fruit of collaboration and authentic, genuine creativity and innovation in the community…
Then you will be much more likely to engage with the resources they actively use. Not even recommend, like an endorsement. But actually use.
People go with what they trust, and it’s no longer possible to create a “trusted authority” devoid of personal context or network connection in today’s environment. Thus: the future of publishing isn’t personalities. It’s communities.
Takeaway: If you create content, you need to be thinking about its “community quotient”. In other words, how do you make your work accessible and usable by groups?
The future of publishing isn't personalities. It's communities.