The digital literary sphere : reading, writing, and selling books in the Internet era

252 Pages·2018·2.446 MB·English

by  Simone Murray

The Digital Literary Sphere
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THE DIGITAL LITERARY SPHERE
Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era
Simone Murray
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Baltimore
© 2018 Simone Murray
All rights reserved. Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-2609-9 (hc)
ISBN-10: 1-4214-2609-9 (hc)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-2610-5 (electronic)
ISBN-10: 1-4214-2610-2 (electronic)
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected].
Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials,
including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-
consumer waste, whenever possible.
This book belongs to
Elliot
Thus the act of recognising literature is not constrained by something in the text,
nor does it issue from an independent and arbitrary will; rather, it proceeds from a
collective decision as to what will count as literature, a decision that will be in force
only so long as a community of readers or believers continues to abide by it.
Stanley Fish (1980: 11)
So, does this mean that literature is dying on the Web? On the contrary. If anything,
true to the nature of silver ages, we are into a miniboom as electronic magazines
and prizes proliferate, new electronic publishers emerge, organizations spring up
to develop online readerships and bring them into contact with the new writers. No
. . . the new literary mainstream is being carved here.
Robert Coover (1999)
Exploring how these connections [between book, reader, and other readers] are
formed and what readers draw from them is crucial to the future of literary culture,
particularly as literature itself increasingly becomes part of the mediated world
from which it historically held itself apart.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2012: 202)
Contents
List of Figures and Table ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Charting the Digital Literary Sphere 1
1 Performing Authorship in the Digital Literary Sphere 22
2 “Selling” Literature: Cultivating Community in the
Digital Literary Sphere 53
3 Curating the Public Life of Literature: Literary Festivals Online 81
4 Consecrating the Literary: Book Review Culture and the
Digital Literary Sphere 111
5 Entering Literary Discussion: Fiction Reading Online 141
Conclusion: Accounting for Digital Paratext 168
Notes 181
References 201
Index 229
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Figures and table
Figures
W. H. Chong’s cover design for Paul Ewen’s Francis Plug: How to Be a Public Au-
thor (Text Publishing, 2014): multiply-signed title page as front cover 23
Cover of the 2008 US paperback edition of John Green’s An Abundance of Kath-
erines (2006), designed by then seventeen-year-old competition winner Sarah
Turbin 39
YA author John Green accepting the MTV Movie Awards Best Movie statuette for
The Fault in Our Stars (2014), accompanied by the cast of the film, as chronicled
on his vlogbrothers YouTube channel (2015) 40
Margaret Atwood demonstrates her jointly designed remote book-signing device,
The LongPen (2006) 41
The character of psychoanalyst “Dr. Franzen” tweets distractedly mid-consultation
in the book trailer for Gary Shteyngart’s memoir, Little Failure (2013) 46
Hollywood star James Franco appears as Gary Shteyngart’s husband in the book
trailer for Shteyngart’s Little Failure (2013) 66
Amazon as cheetah, complete with familiar swoosh logo, in Dan Turk’s illustra-
tions for Inside Digital Book World 2014: News and Highlights 74
Independent publishers, depicted as a wounded gazelle with reading glasses,
broken horn, and circling flies, attempt to evade Amazon’s cheetah 75
Table of optimal social media channels for publicizing books as classified by
genre, accompanying John Parsons’s article “The Social Publisher” in Book Busi-
ness (2013) 79
Home page of the Word Alliance, an invitation-only club comprising eight of the
world’s leading literature festivals 89
Poster for the Sydney Writers’ Festival’s inaugural 2015 “Live and Local” live
streaming program to regional New South Wales locations, including the city
of Wollongong in the Illawarra region, about one and a half hours south of
Sydney 95
Logo of the 2014 Digital Writers’ Festival, its first year as a stand-alone event 107