The White Stuff

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In a recent article in McGill University’s alumni magazine, Christian Lander found wild success with social media. You may not recognize the name, but you might recognize his book, Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions. It’s a recent hit book that grew out of his blog. Yes, that’s right… A hit book out of a blog. Granted your mileage may vary, but this is an example of how you can leverage social media into a successful business.

From McGill News.

CHRISTIAN LANDER, BA’01, is one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who quietly started a blog this past January. But his received a little more traffic than usual.

Within a month, his website of satirical cultural observation was averaging 300,000 hits daily. By Valentine’s Day, literary agents were wooing the 29-year-old former sports editor of the McGill Tribune.

By March, he’d quit his day job to expand the blog into a book.

Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions (Random House) hit bookstores on Canada Day. Nobody is more surprised by this whirlwind than Lander himself.

“It just started out as a joke I thought my friends would like,” says the Toronto native, who now lives in Los Angeles. “Every day I’m beyond astonished at what’s happening.”

From hardwood floors to “having children in their late thirties,” film festivals to farmer’s markets, Stuff White People Like is a tongue-in-cheek field guide to young(ish) middle-class liberals. “Immediately following graduation but prior to renovating a house,” Lander writes in a typical passage, “white people take their first step from childhood to maturity by hosting a successful dinner party.” He cites his McGill years as an eye-opening introduction to this strange sub-species.

“Believe it or not, there are a few people at McGill who fit the profile,” he quips.

“This generation still has the same need to compete with their neighbours [as previous generations did], but they don’t do it in financial terms,” says Lander of his peers. “Instead of who has the biggest car, it’s who has the most travel experience, or who has the most vintage T-shirt, or who has lower carbon emissions.”

The book has earned a flurry of attention worldwide (Australian and Dutch editions are in the works), and while Lander would love to parlay his sudden success into a job writing for The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, he insists there’s no master plan at work.

“If someone gave me a ton of money and said, ‘Recreate what you did,’” he cheerily admits, “I couldn’t do it.”

JAMES MARTIN, MLIS’05

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