'Scammer' influencer Caroline Calloway explains how she targeted 'culty teenage' fandoms and used bots to grow her following
Caroline Calloway/Instagram
Influencer Caroline Calloway is finally publishing her formal response to Natalie Beach's viral account of her stint as Calloway's friend and "ghostwriter," which appeared last year in The Cut.
The second part of Calloway's response essay, aptly titled "I Am Caroline Calloway," was released on Tuesday, April 7. Part 1 was released on March 31.
Part 2 focuses mainly on Calloway's years at Cambridge University.
Caroline Calloway — the influencer, artist, and alleged "scammer" best known for a controversial series of creativity workshops — released the second installment of her three-part essay, "I Am Caroline Calloway," on Tuesday, April 7. The self-published essay has been billed as Calloway's formal response to a viral 2019 New York Magazine exposé written by her friend and former "ghostwriter," Natalie Beach.
Initially, the 8 a.m. release for Part 2 was delayed due to what Calloway called a cyberattack on the website built to house the downloadable essay and collect donations for COVID-19 relief. In a tweet, Calloway explained the situation to her sizable following.
—◥◤Caroline Calloway (@carolinecaloway) April 8, 2020
Just after 10 pm, Calloway tweeted that her developer had finally gotten the website to a "stable place," and Part 2 was available as promised. Here's what we learned from reading it.
Part 2 picks up in the fall of Calloway's freshman year at Cambridge University.
There, she studied art history after dropping out of New York University and purchased 10,000 Instagram followers in addition to the 40,000 fake followers she bought the previous summer. However, Calloway noted in the essay that she needs to "tread lightly" when it comes to chronicling the picturesque, romantic parts of her time at Cambridge because "Flatiron Books owns everything that happened to [her] there."
Calloway's deal with Flatiron Books was for a memoir of her time at Cambridge, which was (and still is) going to be titled "And We Were Like." The book's original deadline came and went long ago, but it remains a work in progress. Calloway told Buzzfeed News she is hoping to have a manuscript for "And We Were Like" done in May, but said that it's "unlikely it could come out anytime before winter 2020."
One of the biggest "misconceptions" about her life, Calloway wrote in Part 2 of "I Am Caroline Calloway," is that she's "still not under contract for that f***ing memoir," making its status unclear.
When classes ended for the summer, Calloway says she moved to Sweden with her polo-playing then-boyfriend, Oscar.
It was during the summer of 2014, Calloway wrote, that she started building an "organic audience" of readers on Instagram. First, she "fattened up" her following on her fashion account, @briteandbeautiful, by cross-promoting other fashion influencer accounts on her feed in exchange for shout-outs on their accounts. All of this was done for free (or, rather, for exposure).
Then, as @briteandbeautiful, Calloway shared a post saying she was selling the account, which "stoked a bidding war, and made several thousand dollars via PayPal from a stranger." Calloway was "certain" the stranger "would scam [her]," but "they did not."
Using the profit from this sale — "a couple grand" — Calloway started buying ads for the Instagram account she really cared about: @carolinecalloway. In search of "readers that were predisposed to become obsessed with what they read," Calloway bought ads from Young Adult book fandoms that were popular at the time, such as "Harry Potter," "The Hunger Games," and "The Fault In Our Stars" — works that feature "a strong female lead" and boast "a culty teenage fanbase." She says she did this by contacting the people who ran book fandom accounts via Kik to propose buying a bundle of 10 shout-outs for $50, which comes to the "outrageous" price of $5 per post.
But Calloway still wanted to "hedge [her] investment," or "at least increase [her] return on each ad."
So, she bought "another 60,000 fake followers" to bring her total following to 110,000 — "all bots."
After that purchase, Calloway wrote, she never bought followers again because she "didn't need to."
"I started getting about triple the return on followers from each ad I ran for myself," she wrote. "Real followers started pouring in by the tens — and, then hundreds — of thousands."
To make the ad campaigns as "sticky" and "effective" as possible, Calloway also began updating @carolinecalloway with original content about her life in England between two and four times per day.
According to Calloway, Beach sent emails "begging" her to "go back to co-writing captions" together, as they had the summer before her first year at Cambridge. Calloway chose not to reply to these requests. Working on the ads and original content "alone," Calloway wrote, is what allowed her to find her own writing voice, and, eventually, build the personal and online community she has today.
The stories told in Calloway's "Cambridge Captions" took place in span of "only about ten days."
Calloway admitted that she's "not super proud of the writing quality in the Cambridge Captions," but she was careful to "save the bulk of [her] best material for publishers." She kept her posts "high energy" so her followers wouldn't catch on.
At 18, Calloway "decided" Byrd Leavell would be her literary agent. And at 22, she finally contacted him.
Calloway admired Leavell largely because he represented a memoirist she admired (and still does): Cat Marnell. But getting Leavell to sign her proved more difficult than Calloway thought it would be. She recalled contacting his office by phone and email to no avail. Then, one week before returning to Cambridge, she decided to try a different tactic: lying.
She called Leavell's office a second time and asked to reschedule an existing appointment with Leavell. Then, she created a Gmail account and emailed Leavell's secretary to get the agency's address, while pretending to be her own assistant.
Leavell gently told her that 350,000 followers on a "random app" meant nothing to publishers, and that she needed press coverage in order to sell a memoir. Calloway recalled Leavell telling her that if she could translate her Instagram into articles about her from big outlets, she could come back in the spring and he'd sign her.
The next day, Calloway flew back to Cambridge for her sophomore year and began pitching herself relentlessly to reporters she found on Twitter. In the spring of 2015, she finally landed an interview with the Daily Mail. Soon, other outlets followed suit, including ABC, NBC, The Ellen Show, and Vice.
Calloway says she flew back to New York and signed with Leavell during spring break of her second year at Cambridge.
Her Instagram account had reached a point where it continued to grow whether she posted or not. But by the fall of her third year at Cambridge, Calloway's addiction to amphetamines, specifically Adderall, was starting to impact her ability to function. Calloway, who'd been taking Adderall for five years at that point, was staying awake for periods of 48 to 72 hours at a time. Soon, she began losing circulation in her hands.
"My career had never been better and my addiction had never been so all-consuming," Calloway wrote of this time.
To make matters worse, Calloway's father had reneged on his agreement to pay her tuition at Cambridge, and the school was threatening to evict her if the balance of $40,000 wasn't paid.
"What began over the summer as doing huge amounts of Adderall with Natalie in my turquoise apartment as we brainstormed a book proposal with no deadline became, overnight, writing a book proposal overnight," Calloway wrote.
According to Calloway, Beach never helped her "accrue fame," never assisted with any "outward-facing publicity stuff," and "never spoke" to her real audience. Beach helped her "write captions that no one read," and a book proposal "only book editors saw" during "two periods of three months over the past nine years." As Calloway sees it, she and Beach were "collaborating." The writing was reportedly split evenly between them.
"I hope we publish that document on its own someday, under its original title, SCHOOL GIRL, and under its original genre, fiction, with both our names on the cover," Calloway wrote of the book proposal. "Because I'm proud of it."
Calloway said it was Beach who taught her to ditch the aspirational tone she usually employed on Instagram for something more "relatable" while writing the book proposal because readers "'hate the reach in long-form prose.'" Instead, Beach encouraged Calloway to portray herself as the "'plucky underdog.'" Calloway believes Beach was weaponizing this same strategy against her in the piece Beach wrote for The Cut about their toxic friendship.
Calloway's agent sent the finished book proposal to editors in New York and Calloway pretended to be sick so she could skip class and put her "sly charms" to work on "every publisher in New York."
In the fall of 2015, Calloway's book sold.
Calloway says she was told the US deal closed for $375,000 and "foreign deals would bring this number to just a hair over half a mill." Calloway remembers crying out of happiness, then sadness when she got the call.
This is when Calloway began taking sleeping pills — first melatonin, then "over-the-counter pharmaceuticals," then prescription pills obtained from her "shady Yelp doctor" in New York. Calloway had the money to fly back "whenever [she] wanted."
In the spring of 2016, Beach moved to Cambridge to help Calloway write "And We Were Like," but what Calloway really wanted was "a friend."
Of the "secrets" Beach revealed in her essay for The Cut, Calloway said one hurt "more than anything else."
"She made my suicidal ideation part of the public record," Calloway wrote.
"From May of 2017 it took roughly a year to quit Adderall, go through withdrawal, and get back on my feet psychologically," Calloway went on.
Calloway wrote that, around this time, she broke her Instagram hiatus once to acknowledge that Beach's involvement with her captions and her book proposal. Calloway said she went through the proposal line by line to note which sentences were hers and not hers, then sold scans of the pdf on Etsy for $4.99.
Calloway offered Natalie the same 35% cut they'd originally agreed upon for the book deal. But Beach asked that her name be scrubbed from the project and said "credit didn't matter to her."
"It did not occur to me her story would be more valuable to sell to an editor of a major publication someday if it looked like I had hidden her," Calloway wrote.
Part 2 ends with a series of what Calloway says are unedited emails sent back and forth between her to Natalie Beach.
In late March 2018, Calloway emailed Beach in an attempt to apologize and reconnect. Beach replied in mid-April saying that she would always "cherish" the memories they made during their "wild, formative years," but she felt their "relationship" was "over." Caroline replied the same day to say everything Beach had written was "so true," and that she loved her.
In a final email dated September 4, 2019, Beach wrote to Calloway to give her a "heads up" about her essay for The Cut.
These emails, Calloway said, were the last time she and Beach spoke. Yet, Beach conspicuously chose not to mention them in her essay for The Cut. To Calloway, this omission seems "unethical."
"I would later find out that it was in February when my reputation was at its lowest that Natalie went in for the kill," Calloway wrote. "She reached out to The Cut (they didn't reach out to her) and she pitched a tell-all about me."
When contacted by Insider, Beach said she couldn't comment on Calloway's essays because she hadn't read them.
Read more:
Read the original article on Insider
