The blind leading the blind. Or in this case, Atria leading KKR money on a wild goose chase.
Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, recently acquired by private equity firm KKR, has paid for a TikTok influencer’s cruise, reports Kathleen Schmidt in her latest essay over on SubStack.
The TikTok influencer, who has 1.5M followers but will remain nameless here, is being paid by the publisher to go on Royal Caribbean’s “ultimate” 9-month world cruise. The cruise itself “spans 274 nights and visits 60 countries. The cost starts at $53,999 per person and can go up to $117,599, excluding taxes and fees, and passengers can join it for various legs,” explains Kathleen Schmidt, adding that Atria Books is paying for some or all of 18 days worth of cruise time, with the influencer promoting a selection of Atria titles.
It seems this particular influencer (if you can’t sleep at night without a name and face, click through to Schmidt’s post) is one of many on the cruise, which seems to be a popular way for TikTok and other social media influencers to increase their audience share.
But it transpires this particular influencer, so carefully chosen by Atria, isn’t a fan of books and isn’t even on BookTok. So WTF is Simon & Schuster doing, throwing Peter Stavros‘s money about like there’s no tomorrow?
When I called the KKR acquisition of Simon & Schuster “a digital beacon of hope,” this was not the kind of digital beacon I had in mind.
Richard Sarnoff, Ted Oberwager, Chresten Knaff, Madeline McIntosh, are you even aware of this?
Schmidt is unimpressed by the influencer’s “ability to promote a book in a way that creates demand for it,” adding, “his videos about the book had significantly fewer views than the ones where he showed viewers different aspects of the cruise and what was happening on board the ship.“
According to Schmidt, the influencer openly admits to not being a reader, and of the eight titles Atria has handed him for the cruise, he will read just one, and that will be picked by his followers, who presumably will not have read these particular books either, and likely as not will not be readers themselves.
The blind leading the blind. Or in this case, Atria leading KKR money on a wild goose chase.
“When beauty and fashion influencers promote products on social media,” writes Schmidt, “the brand they align with makes sense for their profile. On BookTok, there are influencers whose enthusiasm for books oozes from every video.“
So why would any book publisher choose a non-reader, with no BookTok following, to go on a cruise to promote a handful of books that the influencer has never read?
As Gordon Gekko famously said, “A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place.“
It seems Atria has been very lucky to get together with KKR’s money, but now seems determined to prove the original proverb correct.
Read Kathleen Schmidt’s full SubStack post here.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Pulse newsletter.
