In today’s social media obsessed culture, many people have an incessant thirst for more and more likes, retweets, followers, mentions, and reposts. This constant quest for greater attention, exposure, and adulation from a mass-market audience seems to be the ultimate goal rather than the quality of interest and influence of each individual subscriber.
More is better for most social media participants, and ordinary people seek to emulate pop-culture stars such as Kylie Jenner, who boasts more than 146-million Instagram followers. Jenner commands a huge audience allowing her to communicate with fans, endorse and pitch products, and keep her large world of followers up to date on life events. Jenner has earned tremendous advertising power and earns $1.2 million for each sponsored post that she broadcasts to her huge stable of Instagram followers.
Until the internet became broadly adopted, the world of advertising and the broad pursuit of potential customers remained the same for decades. Think back to thirty years ago. If an advertiser wanted to reach 150-million people at one time quickly and efficiently, it could spend millions of dollars on a thirty-second Super Bowl commercial. But even then, the advertiser could assume that ninety-nine percent of the audience reached would have no interest in its product even if those viewers hadn’t left the room to grab snacks when the commercial was broadcast.
These days, however, if Kylie Jenner wants to reach 150-million people with her message or product endorsement, a single Instagram post will suffice. No cost, no middleman, no time wasted, and no permission required. And the audience viewing each of her posts is a much higher-quality group with a high interest level. That’s because they have all individually chosen to follow her account. Members of this committed group are all interested in updates on her thoughts, life events, and product pitches. Her Instagram followers are self selected and a highly passionate group of followers so that each of Jenner’s posts are worth much more in advertising value than even a Super Bowl commercial.
The media industry of past generations revolved around scarcity. The world had a small and limited number of TV stations, radio stations, retail store shelf space, and customer purchasing options. The internet has changed everything, however, and the current day’s marketplace has replaced scarcity with a world of abundance. We all carry a media studio in our pocket, and each one of us can create a podcast, a YouTube video, a news and content website, or a shopping center. We can reach out to millions of people with our creations and offerings. The challenge these days is not in creating art or inventing products to sell, but rather in how to stand out in a very saturated market with an infinite number of consumer voices and choices. The hurdle is not in shouting loud enough; it is in being heard. In today’s crowded marketplace, instead of trying to gain the maximum number of fans or followers for your art or products, the answer may be to cultivate a small number of die-hard fans and true believers who can then spread the word to others. Then those people will spread the word to others. And sometimes all it takes is one influential person to spread the word of your art and to change our culture forever.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. The Great Gatsby, written by Fitzgerald while living with his wife Zelda in France and Italy in 1925, is his most read and revered novel. The book’s most enduring impact was in taking succeeding generations on a trip to the Roaring Twenties, with its focus on jazz, gambling, excess drinking, and reckless living. However, when it was published in 1925, The Great Gatsby sold a disappointing 21,000 copies in the first year, which was less than half of sales for Fitzgerald’s first two novels. Not only did The Great Gatsby go unnoticed by American readers, Fitzgerald himself was rarely mentioned as one of America’s greatest writers at his early death. In 1937 Fitzgerald walked into a bookstore to buy copies of his books for a friend, only to discover there was not one of his books on the shelves. In 1940, before dying of a massive heart attack at forty-four, Fitzgerald had only earned a total of $2,000 in royalties from his work on The Great Gatsby. The book, beloved and celebrated by so many readers today, was unappreciated and virtually undiscovered when he died. At his death, the novel had fallen into near obscurity, and Fitzgerald died believing himself to be a failure and that his work was trivial.
Luckily, one man saw the genius of Fitzgerald’s work and wanted to champion it and share it with the world. The revival of Fitzgerald’s literary works began in 1941 when Edmund Wilson, a friend of Fitzgerald from Princeton, edited and published The Last Tycoon, a Fitzgerald manuscript that was 70 percent completed at the time of Fitzgerald’s death. The printing of the volume included The Great Gatsby, and some of Fitzgerald’s best short stories, which gave new readers the opportunity to take a fresh look at this seminal work, which laid bare the parties, high-society trappings, excess, and quest for status that raged in the Roaring Twenties.
During the 1940s, the literary world finally took notice of Fitzgerald’s greatest work, and seventeen new editions of The Great Gatsby were published during the decade. But popular interest in the book didn’t spike until World War II. In 1942 a group of publishing executives created the Council on Books in Wartime. The Council’s purpose was to distribute paperback books to soldiers fighting in the war. Due to the rekindled fame of the novel that Wilson had helped to ignite, The Great Gatsby was chosen as one of these books. Some 155,000 copies of the book were shipped to U.S. servicemen overseas. According to the Saturday Evening Post’s contemporary report at the time, the novel proved to be “as popular as pin-up girls” among the soldiers. Each copy of the book was passed around to as many soldiers as who wanted to read it, and the servicemen brought their affection for the book home with them after the war ended. This “Armed Services Edition” of the book helped revive Fitzgerald’s literary reputation and secure The Great Gatsby a place among the most beloved American novels.
Fitzgerald died in 1940, but it wouldn’t be until the 1950s that Fitzgerald was crowned as one of the greatest writers of his generation. By the 1960s The Great Gatsby had become a standard text in the curriculum in many high schools and colleges, with a vast majority of literary experts praising it as one of the greatest novels of all time. The book’s publisher Scribner notes that more than twenty-seven-million copies of The Great Gatsby have been sold worldwide since the novel’s original publication in 1925, and the book still sells more than 500,000 copies every year.
Words of the Wise: Although there were many readers who were familiar with the book prior to Fitzgerald’s death, it took the push of one determined true believer to reintroduce the now renowned work to the world and into the lofty place in our public consciousness where it lies today. While most people try to attract as many followers as possible, we can still achieve success if we attract a small group of truly interested and committed disciples to help spread the word.
