Influencer publishing is having a big moment with social media celebrities writing books

Last month, Penguin India, the largest English language books publisher in the subcontinent, threw a party in Mumbai. According to entrepreneur Ankur Warikoo, famous for his YouTube videos on personal finance — his most popular video is on “how to pay a 25-year loan in just 10 years” — when he first decided to pen a book, “I was writing for an audience that doesn’t read or has never read.” Last month, style blogger and fashion entrepreneur Masoom Minawala launched her first book, She’ll Never Make It. “People never equated social media creators or someone on the Internet as worthy of being able to write a book, because the belief always was that social media creators were a little frivolous,” says Agarwal. “Whether publishers are turning a profit on these books, that is going to be a function of what the publisher is paying to acquire the book, and eventually how much the book sells.” But Chandy adds that profit or loss, what definitely works is that “the publisher’s biggest headache” — having the book discovered by an audience — is taken care of. Like in sexuality educator Leeza Mangaldas’ case, we used a Q&A format for her 2022 book, The Sex Book, which mimicked the format she uses in her content online,” says Chatterjee of HarperCollins India.