It's Getting Easier for Teens to Achieve Early Stardom

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

With access to more tutorials, audiences, and distribution channels than ever before, today’s kids can achieve stardom before graduating high school.

How to …

… Publish a Hit Book

Millions of young scribes are publishing serialized fiction on social apps like Wattpad and Radish, as well as text-style chat fiction cousins Hooked, Yarn, and Tap. YA romance author Beth Reekles published her novel The Kissing Booth on Wattpad at age 15, then scored a publishing deal with Random House and a 2018 Netflix movie adaptation starring Molly Ringwald. Underrepresented voices thrive in this arena; 2017 reader favorites included LGBTQ characters, genre mashups (werewolf mystery!), and fan fiction.

… Climb the Billboard Charts

Seventeen-year-old MC Lil Pump emerged from a South Florida–based crew of so-called SoundCloud rappers by amassing almost a million followers on the streaming service. Last fall his single “Gucci Gang” peaked at #3 on the Billboard Top 100, and he’s now rumored to be considering several multimillion-dollar offers from record labels. The most successful new hip-hop artists combine vast streaming audiences and larger-than-life social media personas to create, as music industry lawyer David Jacobs says, “a spark that’s way more electrifying than any other genre.”

… Get a Film Deal

YouTube tutorials are the new film school. Twenty-year-old writer/director/Harry Potter bit player Bertie Gilbert has been releasing short films on YouTube (450,000-plus subscribers) and Vimeo since age 16. The young auteur’s dedicated fan base caught the attention of digital production studio New Form, which mines online platforms for viral up-and-comers. The company funded several of Gilbert’s films. His 2015 work, Rocks That Bleed, was screened at BFI’s Future of Film Festival that year.

… Become an App Star

The beauty of running a virtual business? Nobody knows you’re 18. Teen CEO Michael Royzen built his first app, a shooter called ASpirit4Mars, at 11 using the platform GameSalad. He learned to code from online tutorials and virtual communities like Stack Overflow. After teaching himself the iOS language Objective-C, he released cooking app RecipeReadr at 15, followed by the commute assistant Ryde at 16, and the AI-powered SmartLens app in March.

… Start a Mag

At 16, Evelyn Atieno used her self-taught coding, design, and writing skills
to launch Affinity, a social-justice-oriented magazine written by and for teens. Her 400-plus writers live-tweet political debates and solicit readers for story ideas. That engagement pays off: Affinity racks up more than 500,000 monthly pageviews.

… Build a Lucrative Videogame

Developer Alex Balfanz is putting himself through college at Duke University with earnings from his cops-and-robbers videogame Jailbreak. He built the hit at age 18 on the social gaming platform Roblox, which lets creators earn Robux—the site’s virtual currency—through in-game purchases. Not only can developers sidestep resource-heavy tasks like managing servers and configuring games for multiple devices, but they release titles directly to Roblox’s more than 50 million users. Top earners make up to $3 million annually.