Inequalities of Platform Publishing
Inequalities of Platform Publishing
The Promise and Peril of Self-Publishing in the Digital Book Era
Uncovering race, gender, and sexual biases in popular self-publishing platforms
The average reader need not go far in a bookstore before, knowingly or not, they encounter authors who started their careers by self-publishing prior to achieving commercial success. Examples include Margaret Atwood, Andy Weir, Colleen Hoover, Anna Todd, E. L. James, Scarlett St. Clair, and many more. Such stories of self-made writers are compelling and seem more attainable to others with the accessibility of modern publishing platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Wattpad, Webtoon, Radish, Inkitt, Qidian, Tapas, and Swoon Reads. However, as Claire Parnell uncovers in her examination of the two most popular—Amazon and Wattpad—these services in fact perpetuate systemic racial, gender, and sexual bias against authors of color and queer authors through their technological, economic, social, and cultural structures.
At a time when there is a real reckoning with the discrimination that has resulted in publishing opportunities for only relatively few privileged authors—who are often white, upper class, and male—self-publishing presents itself as an equalizer of sorts. Exploring that idea, Parnell shows that these platforms are not just intermediaries for information; they structure content and users in multiple, often inequitable, ways through their ability to set market conditions and apply algorithmic sorting. Combining original interviews, walkthrough method, metadata analysis, and more, Parnell finds that self-publishing platforms reproduce challenges for authors from marginalized communities. Far from equalizing the market, the new platforms instead frequently perpetuate the stubborn barriers to mainstream success for BIPOC and queer authors.
‘Parnell shows that two self-publishing platforms—Amazon and Wattpad—are not the democratizing utopian platforms they would like to be known as, and through interviews and case studies the author shows that these platforms tend to replicate the inequalities found offline in the traditional industry. This book adds a new, necessary depth of research into the world of publishing on platforms that were supposed to bring equality, but, in fact, exacerbates inequalities in the name of monetization.’—Miriam Johnson, author of Books and Social Media: How the Digital Age is Shaping the Printed Word‘This delightfully detailed book exposes these platforms’ techno-cultural and socioeconomic infrastructures that promise a democratization of cultural production, but that perpetuate and add to power hierarchies inherent in traditional publishing practices informed by conglomerate and platform capitalism. Through meticulous and effective argumentation via findings and individual stories, the author successfully convinced this reader that new technologies don’t create new realities for marginalized writers.’—DeNel Rehberg Soto, coauthor of Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture
CLAIRE PARNELL is lecturer in Digital Publishing at the University of Melbourne. Her research has appeared in Media, Culture & Society, Publishing Research Quarterly, Creative Industries Journal,and more.
Genre Worlds
Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture
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