The book of YouTube

One of the few adult females in the crowd was screaming at the hoards of young girls pressing in on the display table to “BACK UP”. However I noticed she wasn’t giving up an inch of her own position at the head of the loosely defined line as she waved a $100 dollar bill at the staff.

This wasn’t anything to do with 1D or Jesus. This was a mad rush to buy books. At a book convention. But before you go away feeling all happy about the state of the youth of today rest assured it has its roots in common or garden idol worship.

I went up to the shouty woman after the crush where she was standing with three teenage girls and hailed her as a fellow mother at a YouTube/Author gathering 1. She was much more committed and therefore the dominant female in this arena of fandom. I could tell by the twenty one pilots sweatshirt she had tied around her waist.

“We’re going to see them in September” she explained. I thought “We?” and “Why don’t you get your own hobbies instead of muscling in on your daughter’s with all your adult leverage Hunty?” before I remembered where I was standing and why I was there.

We compared notes. I had driven for 10 hours to get there but she had stayed in a nearby hotel and gotten up at 5 a.m. to be first in line at New York’s Javits Center.

Unfortunately the security guards hadn’t matched her anticipation of the throngs of fresh-faced teens at BookCon looking for a lineup hours before their shift even started.

Their bewilderment at the scene was palpable. It was 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning and the bookstore wasn’t due to open unil 11 a.m. yet the crowd was congealing and reforming behind anyone who stood still for two seconds as they tried to find an advantageous angle. One six-foot, 300 pound guard got a hold of a megaphone and was close to his edge.

“Get back!” he yelled. “This is not a lineup. There is no lineup. Stop trying to line up and get out of here!”

His hastily-summoned reinforcements trickled down from the upstairs showroom floor where some shift supervisor had mistakenly believed all the action would be taking place, instead of a makeshift bookstore for authors they had never heard of.

The red-shirted guards relented and allowed the crowd the lineup they craved. After a lot of pushing and shoving, they tried to organize the swarm of determined girls 3 and camp boys by weaving caution tape through the crowd.

The reason for all the chaos was marketing mayhem created by BookCon. A limited supply of these newly-released and signed books would come with a wristband. That wristband would allow you to line up on Sunday with 600 other people to have an individual picture taken with the author.

I did wonder if I could have just gone on Sunday and picked up the book, but when you have already committed to drive to New York City and walk to the slightly seedy bit of the Lower West Side on the off chance your offspring will get a whole second in the company of Connor Franta you don’t want to mess around with the odds.

I had said “No way” so many times to begging to go to these various Tri-State-based YouTuber meet-ups that I finally said “yes”. I think it might have been a direct example of the Law of Averages working in real life. But I hadn’t realized what I had signed up for. There was just so much waiting on cold, hard cement floors. I actually crept away from the tween crowd and went to watch a Judy Bloom panel on her new book at one point 4.

The crowds were patient and excited though…as long as they had wifi and battery power. Things got very tense when either of those were sketchy. We lined up for a panel on the transformation from Vlogger to Author 6 with one thousand others. The line snaked around the giant convention centre. After the requisite three hours, the crowd was allowed in to the cavernous hall.

Of course Shouty Woman was at the head of the line ushering her daughters to the front row. We were in the middle, somewhere between “insanely obsessed to the point of a sickness” people and “deludedly believing they aren’t that popular because none of my school friends like these people” at the back of the hall.

A deejay took to the stage and unnecessarily hyped the already hyper crowd up.

Videos of the YouTubers played on the screen and the pitch was feverish by the time the celebrities took to the stage in the flesh. I thought the world would crack open like a eggshell. There was bedlam, chaos, freaking out and the burly security guards had to urge the girls to stay off the chairs and out of the aisles with sign language, as nothing could be heard over the screaming. I felt like I was underwater. One girl was having a full-on body meltdown three rows up, throwing herself around in an actual ecstatic fit.

“Oh my god this is religion,” I thought.

That impression was borne out the next day when the hours of waiting for books and wristbands and tickets finally paid off with a moment in their YouTuber’s presence. Literally a moment. With 600 people to see, each fan is swiftly photographed and out the other side of the logo stamped alcove before they even know what just happened. 6

But those who had been touched by his glory wandered out in a daze — a kind of trance-like state, often with tears streaming down their faces. Could that be a religious ecstasy brought on by his mystical presence? Or just dehydration from waiting in line for three hours? I was half waiting for someone to come out screaming they had been cured.

At least the photos will last forever as proof they stood in that holy limelight for a split shuttered second.

Go to the Top

1 Some bright publishing company spark read the tea leaves or something impossibly more modern a year ago and got five YouTubers 2 to pen autobiographies of the last and only 20-odd years of their life. They were all on sale at the second annual BookCon, a lite literary event aiming at the younger demographics.

2  The famous people of YouTube with millions of subscribers making individual connections with their fans by eating marshmallows by the packet, playing parlour games with alcohol and laughing maniacally so their microphone levels peak.

3I have no fears my daughter won’t be able to get a drink from a busy barman in college.  Even at such a young age she demonstrated admirable elbow manoeuvring skills in the maddening crowd.

4 OH MY GOD Judy Bloom! Okay it was not the most high brow literary event I have ever been to and the fact there was a Teen Harlequin stall spoke volumes. Still, populism and literature aside, I was actually gutted to have missed the BJ Novak/Mindy Kaling panel where they revealed they are working on a book together. If I ever spoke internet fandomish I would totally ship them…But happily I don’t…apart from when I called that woman “Hunty” earlier.

5 Yes, you are correct, that is actually the most tenuous link for an excuse for a fangirl/boy book panel ever.

6 It is ironic that socially awkward people become YouTubers because they are not good at talking to people and end up making such strong connections with their fans that millions of people want to talk to them, stand next to them and make a connection and then they have to talk to 600 people in the space of 90 minutes.