Have you ever wondered what it's really like to be an influencer? In Chasing Likes, Carlee shares the highs and lows of what it's really like to be an influencer. In a behind the scenes look, she shares the hard work and hustle that it takes to be successful in the field amid all the competition, drama and adolescent behavior that go along with it. Being an influencer isn't all fancy parties and gift boxes arriving at your door - it's a competitive business and there is always someone waiting to take your place. She demystifies the fallacy of what influencers post to their social media feeds and dives into the truth on how influencers make a living trading in the currency of perceptions. In what appears to be a world of wannabe reality stars, Carlee speaks to the main problem facing influencer marketing today: what she dubs "the authenticity gap". Chasing Likes covers everything you've ever wanted to know about the influencer world from mom shaming to mean girls, frenemies, the realities of Instagram engagement, and tackling current social issues including posting the infamous "black square".

Right this minute, you are the proud owner of a library full of content. And congratulations, it’s all about you! Cute, rambunctious, smart, or downright unflattering photos, videos, phrases, behaviors, what and who you like and love, where you’ve been, and what elicits your frown or thumbs down. You and your reactors have been building your life-brand since the birth of your life online. With trolls, cancel culture, reputational damage, and career destruction tainting our new connected reality, isn’t it time you take control of it? Generation Brand is a modern playbook for cultivating your life-brand seamlessly through every life stage, leading to your early career and career advancement, as it gains power and strength with the rapid accumulation of live-out-loud content. Besides the different scenarios of life-brand, author Irina Soriano explains how it enables every human with social media access to impact positive change in their life and our society over the course of a lifetime. Also, start your exciting life-brand journey in real-time with an original Life-Brand Launch Kit designed by the author. It’s your life(-brand)! Love it forever. Book Review 1: "Irina Soriano is boldly taking a stand on gender equity for ‘Generation Brand’ (those born 2012-2030), introducing new thinking that has a clear link between the need to polish the social media landscape that girls and women are growing up in and empowering them to feel confident, equal to their male counterparts, and ultimately motivated to propel their career path to executive levels. The masses can benefit from the concept of life-brand and mastering it for a fulfilling, fair and just life.” —Susan MacKenty Brady, CEO, Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership Book Review 2: “In a world of rapid change and innovation, this book is both a wake-up call about the pitfalls accompanying this progress, and a roadmap for using the concept of life-brand as a new tool for social good and personal welfare. Managing your personal information and how it impacts your reputation and life-brand is going to be an essential part of everybody’s toolkit. Today, we are able to project our views, beliefs, knowledge, experience, and personalities onto a wide, sometimes even global canvas. Learning to do that safely and effectively is going to be an indispensable skill set for ‘Generation Brand’ and future generations, both in the workplace and in private settings.” —Christopher Willcox, former CEO JP Morgan Asset Management

“Daniel Barbarisi plunges into an adventure from another era when he goes in search of buried treasure, guided only by a cryptic poem, a mischievous art collector, and the footsteps another pursuer who died on the quest… Every page draws you deeper into this no-man’s-land where fortune—or tragedy—awaits.” —Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run When Forrest Fenn was given a fatal cancer diagnosis, he came up with a bold plan: He would hide a chest full of jewels and gold in the wilderness, and publish a poem that would serve as a map leading to the treasure's secret location. But he didn't die, and after hiding the treasure in 2010, Fenn instead presided over a decade-long gold rush that saw many thousands of treasure hunters scrambling across the Rocky Mountains in pursuit of his fortune. Daniel Barbarisi first learned of Fenn's hunt in 2017, when a friend became consumed with decoding the poem and convinced Barbarisi, a reporter, to document his search. What began as an attempt to capture the inner workings of Fenn's hunt quickly turned into a personal quest that led Barbarisi down a reckless and potentially dangerous path, one that found him embroiled in searcher conspiracies and matching wits with Fenn himself. Over the course of four chaotic years, several searchers would die, endless controversies would erupt, and one hunter would ultimately find the chest. But the mystery didn't end there. Full of intrigue, danger, and break-neck action, Chasing the Thrill is a riveting tale of desire, obsession, and unbridled adventure.

Want to create but don't know where to start? Need a shot of inspiration? Dare to Create! is the ultimate guide to fueling your artistic journey, from your first steps to the expression of your own style. Overcome creative blockages with the 35 inspiring challenges in this book as engineer-turned-artist Marie Boudon guides you in developing your art. Whatever your level (beginner or advanced) and your mode of artistic expression (drawing, painting, collage, photography, etc.), this is the ultimate guide to boosting your creativity and making beautiful art! This colorful book includes:

• Advice on how to “let go”

• Exercises to awaken your imagination and inspire

• Techniques to forge your own creative process and avoid dead ends

• Inspirational testimonies from beloved artists and creators

And much, much more!

Real Recognition investigates the complexities of literary and social recognition with the aim of putting a fresh, cross-disciplinary spin on reader identification and social acknowledgment. Engaging with contemporary Danish and Anglophone works on racialization, disability, and gender, Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl argues in favor of a close relation between aesthetic appeals to recognition and the political dimensions of literary texts. Moreover, she proposes a framework bent on experience and relations, as opposed to identity and status, for articulating new fruitful understandings of how literary texts call for aesthetic and social recognition. Based on this, she argues that literary texts can make readers get what social validation is about – and thereby help us redefine a key concept in the social sciences. Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl earned her PhD in literature and sociology from the University of Southern Denmark in 2020. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher within narrative medicine and literature-based social interventions at the University of Southern Denmark in collaboration with the National Institute of Public Health in Copenhagen. Chapter 3 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Cyber-risks are moving targets and societal responses to combat cyber-victimization are often met by the distrust of young people. Drawing on original research, this book explores how young people define, perceive, and experience cyber-risks, how they respond to both the messages they are receiving from society regarding their safety online, and the various strategies and practices employed by society in regulating their online access and activities. This book complements existing quantitative examinations of cyberbullying assessing its extent and frequency, but also aims to critique and extend knowledge of how cyber-risks such as cyberbullying are perceived and responded to. Following a discussion of their methodology and their experiences of conducting research with teens, the authors discuss the social network services that teens are using and what they find appealing about them, and address teens’ experiences with and views towards parental and school-based surveillance. The authors then turn directly to areas of concern expressed by their participants, such as relational aggression, cyberhacking, privacy, and privacy management, as well as sexting. The authors conclude by making recommendations for policy makers, educators and teens – not only by drawing from their own theoretical and sociological interpretations of their findings, but also from the responses and recommendations given by their participants about going online and tackling cyber-risk. One of the first texts to explore how young people respond to attempts to regulate online activity, this book will be key reading for those involved in research and study surrounding youth crime, cybercrime, youth culture, media and crime, and victimology – and will inform those interested in addressing youth safety online how to best approach what is often perceived as a sensitive and volatile social problem.

A package lost in the mail since 1940 brings a modern couple together in a miraculous way. Bestselling author VIOLET PEARL lives a perfectly content life: she helps run The Texas Pearl, her family’s inn, lives with her sister and grandmother, and attends a great church just a block from home. She has never left her little corner of Texas and has no desire to do so now. In her spare time, Violet mentally travels to far off New York City, 1944, to solve crimes as the widow Mandalynn Clementine, the savvy sleuth in her murder mystery novels. US Army First Lieutenant CHASE ANDERSON feels like he needs a change. From his duty station in Hawaii, he receives a job offer in the civilian market at the same time he’s asked to coach a pee wee football camp hosted by his alma mater, Texas A&M. Chase decides to take leave and coach the summer camp, intending to also check out the job offer. He has no idea God has other plans for him. When a time-worn postal package arrives at the inn addressed to Chase Anderson with a 1940 postmark, Violet and Chase discover that his great-grandfather had also visited the inn as a guest all those years before. The box brings them together in a miraculous way, and their feelings for each other begin to grow. Will Chase resign his commission and live out his days in College Station? Or is Violet willing to break out of her perfectly contented shell and experience life beyond her little corner of Texas?