1 Introduction: (Re-)thinking “Difference”

The year 2019 was an unprecedented year for literary prizes. The Nobel Prize for Literature had not been awarded due to a scandal in the Swedish Academy and the Booker, a prize awarded to the allegedly best novel of the literary season, was split between two winners in a surprising and controversial decision. As mentioned on the Booker’s own website, not without spin and pathos, “Like a corpse in a zombie-flick, the old problem of split winners came back to life and an almighty ruckus ensued when Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo shared the prize.”Footnote ¹

The zombie-esque split of the award not only brought together two authors to share one of the most prestigious book prizes worldwide but also clearly juxtaposed the logics of the literary market. The Testaments had been pushed into the market with a mind-boggling first print run of 500,000 in the USA alone – and within the first six days after publication, the American publisher Doubleday was able to print a new edition.Footnote ² Part of the reason why The Testaments hit skyrocketing sales numbers was that it followed the serial adaptation of Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). The full-length film adaptation, released by MGM in 1990, had received mixed reviews. The series, available on Hulu since April 2017, found significant critical success and a wide reception in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as President of the USA. Sales of The Handmaid’s Tale reportedly increased by 60 percent in 2017 compared to the year prior.Footnote ³ Meanwhile, the marketing campaign for The Testaments was meticulously orchestrated and ran for almost a full year, from Margaret Atwood’s first tweet announcing the book to a midnight launch at Waterstone’s Piccadilly, London.Footnote ⁴ Due to the intense public interest in the forthcoming novel, the publishing house had even installed special anti-hacking measures to protect the unpublished manuscript.Footnote ⁵ No doubt, in a digital age and transmedia world, the marketing synergies between the serial adaptation and well-timed release of a sequel in novel form – and almost thirty-five years after the first installment – were also impressive.

The staggering sales numbers, however, did not destine Atwood to be a natural claimholder to the Booker, which market research by Nielsen recently confirmed as the “world’s most visible literary prize.”Footnote ⁶ She had, after all, already won the prize in 2000 with her historical novel The Blind Assassin.Footnote ⁷ In addition, with regard to literary merit, The Testaments was widely seen as less interesting than some of the other titles on the short list.Footnote ⁸ When Atwood received the prize, it was alongside a much less well-known though by no means less prolific author whose books had been produced with much smaller print runs and, above all, a smaller marketing budget and less visibility for decades: Bernardine Evaristo. The first printing of Girl, Woman, Other must have been small in comparison to The Testaments, though Evaristo had been an active and productive author for decades, too. When Girl, Woman, Other was longlisted for the Booker “it did not yet have an American publisher” and the book “did not receive a review by the London Sunday Times until just two weeks before the ceremony.”Footnote ⁹ Evaristo herself said that, before Girl, Woman, Other, she had “felt far removed from the literary mainstream and her books had yet to crack the bestseller lists.”Footnote ¹⁰ Publishers also continuously contended there was “no market” for her work.Footnote ¹¹ A changed media landscape, and shifts in the book industry regarding inclusion and (biblio)diversity may have helped pave the way for the Booker win, but the marketing campaign for Evaristo came after, not before. What happened after Evaristo’s win might be called a catch-up: the bulk of her eleven books have since been republished by Penguin with new eye-catching, “instagrammable” covers.Footnote ¹² Since the Booker award, accelerating the typical literary prize cascade that James F. English has observed,Footnote ¹³ Evaristo has received over thirty additional high-profile honors and prizes in the space of two years, which is more than she received before the Booker in her entire lifetime. The attention thus created by the Booker for Evaristo and her oeuvre – an attention bestowed on Atwood’s The Testaments by marketing campaigns and the Netflix series before the event – underscores the significance not only of literary prizes but also of particular literary prizes, given the attention economy that is twenty-first-century publishing. Indeed, directing and redirecting considerable attention to its nominees and award-holders, the Booker’s impact on public attention cycles is both slickly handled and enormous. It has perfected building a buzz around authors via an “elaborate selection process, which moves from a longlist (announced in July) to a shortlist (announced in September) to a gala dinner at Royal Albert Hall (in mid-October) when the winner is announced, closely accompanied by intensive media coverage, which ‘generates suspense while maximizing commercial appeal’”.Footnote ¹⁴

Given the select, heavy-handed marketing of one particular text and not another, preliminary questions we might ask are: Which writers and which books are boosted in this way? As Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado reminds us, bestsellers are “manufactured,” but which books are, and under whose auspices?Footnote ¹⁵ And how does the notion of books being “different” fit in with the hyper-commodification of certain “big books”Footnote ¹⁶ every season?

While the buzz-creation machine of the Booker and a select few similar literary prizes have been observed and analyzed by various scholars,Footnote ¹⁷ one particular aspect about Evaristo’s success that hit the headlines was the important fact that Evaristo was the first Black woman to win the prize, something that Evaristo, a longtime advocate of the voices of Black writers, built on during and after the buzz-creating Booker process. The 2019 shortlist was, in fact, the first-ever Booker shortlist without any white male authors on the list.Footnote ¹⁸ While the Booker has promoted postcolonial literatures in the past (with Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and J. M. Coetzee ranging among previous laureates),Footnote ¹⁹ Evaristo was the first female Black British author and, acutely aware of the unique position in which she found herself, she embarked on a series of awareness-raising (or attention-raising) activities especially designed to illuminate the lack of diversity in the publishing industry. Rather cynically, the need for such campaigning was underscored by none other than a BBC presenter glossing Evaristo as “another author” when describing her and Atwood’s shared win of the prize. This was instantly picked up on social media including by Evaristo herself who tweeted “Pls RT: The @BBC described me yesterday as ‘another author’ apropos @TheBookerPrizes 2019. How quickly & casually they have removed my name from history – the first black woman to win it. This is what we’ve always been up against, folks.”Footnote ²⁰ The tweet garnered a sizable 9,572 Retweets, 1,100 Quote Tweets and 13.3K Likes by February 2022. As this already indicates, the attention generated in the attention economy, just like the symbolic and monetary capitals into which attention can be trans-substantiated and vice versa, are usable to diverse ends: in Evaristo’s case, their energies have been aligned at least partially with diversifying efforts. And indeed, not only did Penguin start reprinting Evaristo’s works in the said format alongside other novels by Black writers and/or writers of African or Asian descent, Evaristo is also using her newfound acclaim for her latest project. She is now the “curator of Black Britain: Writing Back […, ] a series with my publisher, Hamish Hamilton at Penguin UK, whereby we reintroduce into circulation overlooked books from the past that deserve a new readership.”Footnote ²¹ The series has also focused on design, sporting individualized covers by handpicked illustrators and artists from diverse backgrounds.Footnote ²² Having arrived in the second decade of the twenty-first century, literature clearly can simultaneously be driven by the project of cultural participation and economic thinking – it is both culture and commodity.

While a growing chorus of scholars has pointed out different aspects of writers’ entanglement in economic activities and processes,Footnote ²³ in most spheres of society and in the academy, both books and literature continue to be assigned an exceptional status – a status that is fundamentally rooted in the notion of an essential difference of books from other market goods. This includes the legal framing, given that the “essential difference” of books has long been translated into hands-on legal regulations, whether active or passive, such as fixed book pricing or reduced VAT rates, which persist to date in many countries. The conditions in Germany (which is also the authors’ current place of primary residence), can serve as a preliminary example here: books are defined in the legal texts (The German Fixed Book Price Law, “Buchpreisbindungsgesetz,” established in 2002) as “cultural goods” (“Kulturgüter”) on the foundation that they radically differ from “economic goods” (“Wirtschaftsgüter”), though the exact content or meaning of this difference remains opaque.Footnote ²⁴ In 1993, with a nod toward the 1962 Restrictive Practices Court decision, Alison Baverstock asked “Are Books Different?” in her consideration of book marketing. Almost twenty years later, this Element seeks to explore the notion of books being “different” or “essential” products by focusing on two ultimately intertwined aspects: (a) the meaning of “difference” and (b) the manifold digitization processes that change how we encounter, and possibly how we perceive, literature and books. With a special focus on the sociopolitical, legal, economic, and cultural impacts of the notion “books are different,” we seek to trouble, extend, and update “difference,” our running hypothesis being that books might not need to be noneconomic or even anti-economic goods to prove themselves as media of particular social relevance. Instead, their potentially unique social role – fuzzy at the edges as we enter a digital age – might exactly depend on market economic mechanisms, most prominently prizes, marketing, and branding, to gain traction and unfold those socially valuable potentials that are often (if not always) also defined by a political component – such as rallying for more diversity in the publishing industry. Thus ultimately complicating current notions of “difference” in relation to “books,” we suggest that books and book culture might need to be diverse in order to legitimately count as different; that is, they might need to earn the kind of protection and surplus income that strengthens publishers’ and authors’ structural positions via a diversification of voices both published and in gatekeeping positions. In turn, we will discuss how the rise of the digital literary sphere has been impacting the nexus of commodification and diversification.

2 What’s the “Difference”? “Difference” as Discourse, Policy, and Brand/ing

In 1993, considering Australian book policies and the global trend toward multimedia conglomeration, John Curtain observed that the book is seen as superior to other media and revered as a “sacred icon.”Footnote ⁷² Elsewhere, he argued similarly, stating that “the book sector is the enigma among media industries. Lacking the personalities and politics of television, radio and newspapers, the book is often neglected in any comparative review of contemporary media; yet the book, as a cultural icon, commands a prestige in society which is unique.”Footnote ⁷³ This mystification of the book, which can evoke associations with Walter Benjamin’s ideas of the “aura” of the book, coalesces in the argument that “books are different.” Curtain’s perceptive description still rings true, even thirty years later; as Ted Striphas notes in The Late Age of Print (Reference Striphas2009), “The notion that books belong at a significant remove from the realm of economic necessity is one of the most entrenched myths of contemporary book culture.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Tellingly, in central texts about the industry, John B. Thompson has termed booksellers and publishers as “merchants of culture,” and Laura J. Miller has offered the image of “reluctant capitalists” for booksellers.Footnote ⁷⁵ While it might seem that the book has seen its illustrious position partially eroded with the fall of the UK’s Net Book Agreement in 1997 or Switzerland’s fixed book price in 2011, supermarket sales, and the often-lamented rise of rival media (most recently, streaming media) or Amazon, it remains a fact that there are still countless ways in which books are protected through cultural policies and legal frameworks. Examples include lower postage for printed wares, lower VAT rates (or even zero VAT rates) for certain publications, government subsidies for books, translations, and publishers, or, in some Scandinavian markets, guaranteed print runs that are purchased by the government and distributed to public libraries.Footnote ⁷⁶

This section, then, will entangle the various forms in which the “difference” of books becomes apparent, starting with a brief analysis of “difference” as discourse, followed by observations on the implementation of “difference” in cultural policies, and then by considering “difference” as a performative branding strategy.

3 Are Books Still Different? “Difference” in a Digital Age

Even if we agree that books are “different” – and the preceding section has perhaps shown that this is not a straightforward discussion – the past twenty-odd years have wrought changes in the industry that raise the question of “difference” anew within a complex and radically converging media environment. In his recent book Bitstreams, Matthew Kirschenbaum writes that “books, by virtue of the bitstream, now share deep ontological commitments and compatibility with other media types, participating in the same technologies and infrastructures and economy.” As he continues, “Just as there is nothing unique about the ones and zeros in the bitstream of a book’s digital assets, there is also nothing very distinctive about books logistically.” He comes to the conclusion that “The air of exceptionalism that has animated so much of the history of the book in other eras vanishes now.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

Similarly, the definition of “book” has evolved significantly from the traditional codex format, from “tree flakes encased in dead cow.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The policymakers to whom we referred in Section 2 have already been grappling with the extension of their policies to e-books, and yet the book in the digital literary sphere significantly exceeds those .epub or .pdf versions of the printed book in the list of a traditional publisher. In his white paper “The Business of Books 2019. Publishing in the age of the attention economy,”Footnote ¹¹² Rüdiger Wischenbart observes that in examinations and aggregations of sales figures and authors, self-published books and e-books are often ignored. Most certainly, this will be the case for books sold via online subscription and distribution models, and those sold via Amazon Publishing or Kindle Direct. Leaving out these formats runs somewhat counter to the staggering numbers of these types of books sold online; after all, more than half of all e-books sold on Amazon are, in fact, self-published, and have proven to be quite lucrative for some authors.Footnote ¹¹³ The sidelining of subscription models is similarly surprising not least because book clubs, for example, fulfill a central curating function which “is key in an oversaturated market,” while they themselves compete in “the market for attention,” too.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Indeed, in an almost Hobbesian scenario, in the attention economy, different platforms, media, and contributors find themselves “competing against anything and everybody else that connects with the audience.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Today, this increasingly means the offerings of the internet and streaming portals as well as more traditional sources such as radio, television, or cinema;Footnote ¹¹⁶ Simone Murray circumscribes this complex market as the “contemporary mediasphere” in her book The Adaptation Industry,Footnote ¹¹⁷ and as Wischenbart concludes in his study, it is a highly “competitive environment in which […] reading must find its place or risk marginalisation.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Given these deep shifts in understanding books, creativity, and reading, it seems that the “rise of the novel,” erstwhile reduced by Ian Watt to the white, male circle of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, and later extended by heterodox scholars first to include women’s numerous, prolific, and often widely read works, and currently also those by writers of color, might yet again need to be rewritten: not only are online streaming formats serious competition for attention, they are also formally and aesthetically trespassing into novel (in both senses of the word) territory, given that such productions as The Wire (David Simon; 2002–2008) are apparently viewed to be “akin to a ‘60 hour novel’ (Griffin 2007) or the ‘contemporary equivalent of a Dickens novel’ (Mittell 2015: 323).”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Kyle Bishop goes as far as suggesting that “TV serials are novels”Footnote ¹²⁰ and Netflix’s successful political drama House of Cards (Beau Willimon; 2013–2018) “called its individual episodes ‘chapters;’ so does the same service’s 1980s-set nostalgia horror series Stranger Things” (The Duffer Brothers; 2016–).Footnote ¹²¹ As one might therefore argue, thinking of literature from the perspective of the attention economy means flattening literature’s/books’ supposed “difference,” even formally and aesthetically. In addition, it seems that the makers of nonliterary genres (“literary” understood in a narrow sense) seek to capitalize on the appropriation of literary markers, their unique formal qualities, and symbolic capital.

Befitting the shifting grounds of both publishing and form, John B. Thompson has framed digitization as a “revolution not in the product but rather in the process.”Footnote ¹²² In a particularly convincing take, he notes that “technologies never act on their own: […] they are resources that are developed and deployed by actors seeking to pursue their interests and aims in particular social contexts, actors who are using technologies and seizing the opportunities opened up by them to pursue or develop something that they value or deem worthwhile.”Footnote ¹²³ As such, he reasons: “The social reality of technological change in any industry – and especially an old media industry like book publishing – is a messy affair that is inseparably bound up with power and conflict, as the pursuit of new opportunities by some is often at someone else’s expense.”Footnote ¹²⁴

This power-ridden and conflicting nature of human interaction truly emerges in current debates surrounding fixed book pricing – often positioned as a bulwark against change, namely digitization and/or Amazon – just as much as it emerges in current debates surrounding the lack of diversity in the publishing industry. How books and literature are presented in the debate, whether it is series producers claiming their productions resemble novels or more traditional publishers pronouncing on the uniqueness of the (traditionally published) book and/or (brick-and-mortar) bookstores, it is clear that what is at stake is not only the potential loss of a cultural form of unique aesthetic features and haptic reading, kept in qualitative check by knowledgeable gatekeepers (“publishers are different”). It also becomes apparent that existing structures and institutions in publishing are the result of long-term processes of consolidation, of interests, privileges, and particular views, formed by convention, of what is valuable. Indeed, for anyone in literary studies schooled in the shifting views of what makes a culturally valuable “canon” (erstwhile all-white, predominantly male and originating in a particular class), it is out of the question that any form of public promotion or intervention might be neutral, or capable of selecting writers, topics, or genres in a “neutral” way. Judgment – and curation of content – simply is not assigned in a bias-free way. Anecdotal evidence of this from publishing includes instances in which white editors expect Black writers to treat Blackness as “issue-y” or “the problem,” as mentioned.Footnote ¹²⁵

To add an intersectional view, it is worthy of note that initiatives promoting diversification and unlearning racial bias in publishing are often woman-led, as emerged for example from a recent symposium hosted by the Centre for British Studies at HU Berlin.Footnote ¹²⁶ Not only is this an indicator for the gendered component of encouraging diversification in the publishing business (because gender privilege is real and yet often invisible to those privileged), it is also another context in which those who remain underrepresented (women) are expected to do the work of diversification.

Are Books Still Different? Are publishers (still) different? Perhaps the right question would be: Are they already different enough, considering the extent of market privilege allocated to the book industry in so many countries? So far, at least to some extent, it seems that the digital literary sphere has capitalized on those aspects of orthodox publishing that make bringing to market a book a complicated, perhaps even exclusivist effort, one that is considerably easier for some authors than it is for others, with the argument that publishers curate quality only cutting so far: where “quality” or “talent” are pronounced on by a relatively homogenous group, the result will be less reflective of “quality across the board” than it might be. Queer persons who witnessed the rise of the internet in the 1990s and were lucky enough to have access to the infrastructure perhaps at some point read queer fanfiction online and found nooks and crannies bestowing visibility on queer lives; they might have had access to materials, including positive and thus empowering narratives, that were often absent from public discourse (not to mention your nearest brick-and-mortar village book-store). For sure, the queer digital literary sphere has thrived in the shadows of a publishing industry that was, and often continues to be, curated by the standards of heteronormativity and whiteness – and the digital literary sphere continues to play to its full potential in more intersectional configurations, such as in representing Black queer lives or Black women. This eventually will lead us back, in this Element, to Evaristo and what would appear to be her sudden, soaring rise to the skies of public attention and valuation – though this ultimately was, of course, a much longer process and the result of a long, hard campaign that she fought for herself and others.

There is, then, a political aspect to the rise of the digital literary sphere, closely linked to diversification – or: “difference” – that is worth telling and worth consulting. In particular, this political aspect challenges us into rethinking how the genealogy of digitization should be framed. One notable aspect to stress from the interdisciplinary book studies/literary studies perspective applied here is the fact that the onset of the digitization process overlapped with the rise of feminist, postcolonial, queer, and so forth critique from, roughly, the 1980s onwards. It is when these kinds of heterodox approaches began to gain traction in the 1990s, that the impact of digitization on publishing and the book trade also became palpable. Writers began to experiment with forms unique to this new technological apparatus, such as the hyperlink, in digital literatures from the 1980s, that is, even before the World Wide Web was launched in 1993.Footnote ¹²⁷ John Keene also refers to “a large and growing body of works that initially appeared as far back as the early 1970s, particularly in terms of the earliest cyber poetries, which saw their heyday during the 1990s and first decade of the twentieth century.”Footnote ¹²⁸ When it did arrive, the internet “allowed more authors the space to write, publish, and share their own work, to link externally to content, and to push the boundaries of the form.”Footnote ¹²⁹ We are now in a situation where “[o]n websites, blogs, newsfeeds, and media streams, a reading-literate culture has transitioned into a writing-dominant culture – and while most bloggers and posters achieve very little in the way of audience numbers, the costs of reaching them are so greatly diminished by digital tools that many have no need of a publisher to package their message.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Ranging from download flatrates for e-books to online book clubs, from self-publishing to readers-turned-authors and vice versa, the digital literary sphere is one that is rendering obsolete many of the erstwhile core mechanisms of both authorship and publishing. It does away, at least partially, with the symbolic capital consolidated in publishing. In Simone Murray’s words:

In a similar vein, Skains speaks of “the demotic author: one who is ‘of the people’” and “eschews the top-down communication flow of author → text → reader in favor of publishing platforms that permit and encourage feedback and conversation, such as blogs, fanfiction communities and social media.”Footnote ¹³² And for Ramdarshan Bold, “Despite many doomsayers predicting the demise of the book trade, […] the development of the media has created many new opportunities for, existing and emerging, authors and consumers of content.”Footnote ¹³³ In particular, Wattpad as a platform has been lauded for its inclusivity and the opportunities it affords. Yet it is also a platform in flux, and now offers a “Paid Stories” program as well as its own publishing imprint for printed books “Wattpad Books.” It remains to be seen how Wattpad will develop vis-à-vis questions of “demotic authorship,” if we remain in Skains’ parsing. Ultimately, despite the many opportunities to be an author on the World Wide Web, the terrain is highly contested. As Simone Murray wrote in her brief intervention on “10 Myths About Digital Literary Culture”: “Digital self-publishing platforms make it easier than ever to see your work in print, but the spoils of publishers’ shrinking marketing and publicity budgets fall to established celebrity authors.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Hence, while it is important to acknowledge the possibilities afforded by self-publishingFootnote ¹³⁵ and writing platforms, there are also sizable complications, both in terms of remaining bias (as mentioned) and regarding intersections between marketing and power.Footnote ¹³⁶

Murray’s observations already reveal the extent to which the digital literary sphere is heavily influenced by the logics of marketing.Footnote ¹³⁷ There are, admittedly, new opportunities afforded to marketing in the digital literary sphere. On the one hand, new avenues of contact with readers (and potential book-buyers) have opened up through Instagram, TikTok, Goodreads, and so on, and booksellers have proven adept at harnessing their “traditional skills” as “shop-floor booksellers into an online world.”Footnote ¹³⁸ On the other hand, marketing budgets are stretched thinner than ever and certain “big books” steal the spotlight and monopolize readers’ attention – and budgets. An example of a book which recently received a massive marketing campaign across all channels is Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? With exorbitantly high sales expectations, especially in the millennial age group, the book was published in multiple languages at the same time, the type of logistically challenging and expensive “product drop” or “rollout” one usually sees in other creative industries such as for Hollywood blockbusters. The book’s look was broadcast across social media and traditional media, leading Dan Sheehan in the Literary Hub to (semi-ironically) claim in September 2021 that “Sally Rooney’s new novel is now the most reviewed book of all time.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Without debating the merits of the book, it is nonetheless important to consider how these “big books” – we really should say “blockbuster books” – such as Rooney’s novel use up resources in the attention economy.

The second issue is more complex, and entangled with exclusionary tendencies already in existence in publishing and the wider media landscape that do not just disappear when media transition into digital formats. As digital race scholars observe, the white power structures invested in (and profiting from) the technologies and marketing structures remain a central caveat in any positive notion of the digital sphere.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Regarding racism and systemic exclusion in the industry, there is an obvious example of a “blockbuster book” that not only used up valuable resources in the attention economy but also triggered viral discussions about problematic books and cultural appropriation: Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt (published in early 2020). The dramatic story of publishing, power, and prejudice has been untangled in several places, most recently and expertly by Sánchez PradoFootnote ¹⁴¹ and by Paisley Rekdal in her book Appropriate.Footnote ¹⁴² Suffice it to say here that this highly anticipated book which was originally seen as giving a voice to underrepresented minorities, and originally marketed as having been written by an author with (partial) Latinx heritage, experienced an unprecedented downfall from critical favor. In an odd twist, it seems that many readers were confronted with publishing’s marketing strategies for the first time. As Daniel Hernandez underscores, readers were aggrieved when they saw through the hyper-commodification of “blockbuster books” and realized that American Dirt “was poised to be a blockbuster long before copies arrived in bookstores.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Even if readers were disappointed to see that literature was treated more like a commodity than culture, the book still, unwittingly, achieved bestseller status.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ There is, anecdotally speaking, no such thing as bad publicity when only considering sales figures, at least not for the big conglomerate publishers who can weather a social media storm, though even large publishers have recently had their hands forced by social media discussions.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Blockbuster marketing is something that only big conglomerate publishers can afford, and only very irregularly at that. Smaller and mid-size publishers have to find other avenues and be more creative to achieve visibility and reach readers. Claire Squires and Beth Driscoll recently analyzed the ecologies of neoliberal publishing by focusing on the differences between large and small publishers and their visibility at Frankfurt Book Fair, using the terms “megativity” and “miniaturization” to grasp the differences between conglomerate publishing and micropublishing. Anecdotally, even successful small publishers like Galley Beggar Press cannot afford a booth at Frankfurt Book Fair, so they buy a trade visitor ticket and find spaces and places to hold meetings in communal fair areas.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Nonetheless, it seems that some micro-, small, and mid-size publishers have found ways to carve out their niche, and serve previously underserved readers. As Ann Steiner recently observed, the book industry today is a “polarized market, where the largest publishing houses dominate, but it has simultaneously made space for micropublishers, self-publishing, small independent presses, and the like, whose titles cross borders in ways that owe little to traditional, national, book market patterns.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In some ways, the new affordances of the digital era have made publishing a less insecure business venture, or at least entrepreneurship in publishing a more feasible prospect, since the start-up costs have decreased.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Developments like easier e-book production, digital printing, print-on-demand, or crowdfunding platforms like Publishizer.comFootnote ¹⁴⁹ have opened up possibilities to reach and serve niche readers.

As Jenni Ramone has shown, the bonuses of the digital literary sphere can be spread far and wide. For instance, thanks to the global marketplace created (and controlledFootnote ¹⁵⁰) by Amazon, small Nigerian presses such as “Cassava Republic and Parresia are able to compete with global publishers online, meaning that alongside the celebrated migrant Nigerian authors writing for a global audience, more ‘locally’ inflected Nigerian literary texts are finding a route to a broader literary market.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Of course, there are promising examples like these which offer a “silver lining” view of the market dominance of Amazon and major conglomerates. But in comparison to corporate publishing, the potential for large-scale success is limited. As Simone Murray states, even in the digital literary sphere, “some authors are more equal than others.”Footnote ¹⁵² As Rachel Noorda details in her recent Cambridge Element in this series on entrepreneurial identity in US publishing,

Noorda emphasizes, “Publishers and booksellers also act as gatekeepers and legitimizing forces in the industry, where getting a publishing contract with a publisher or seeing their book in a bookstore is often sought by the author as a means of legitimizing their work.”Footnote ¹⁵³

Besides the replication of existing inequalities in the digital sphere, digital spaces also, unfortunately, offer spaces for new forms of harassment and bullying, also known as trolling.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Mark Davis goes so far as to speak of an “online ‘anti-public sphere’” – spaces in which tone “routinely and radically flouts the ethical and rational norms of democratic discourse.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ These have burgeoned and become more visible in the digital era. Research has shown that women, especially women of color, are at a particular risk of being targeted. At a workshop in Münster, Germany, a social media manager for a major conglomerate-owned German trade publisher disclosed, for instance, that certain authors in their list have chosen to abstain from social media because they feel that the Internet is not a safe space for women of color.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ This indicates that the idea of “putting yourself out there” as an author does not mean the same thing for every author, depending on profile and identity. Certain types of texts are also more likely to draw criticism and trolling than authors. A German author of color who has repeatedly pointed out how difficult this balancing act is for women on the Internet is Jasmina Kuhnke, who also highlighted discussions about right-wing radicalism at Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2021.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Literature “is not created equal” in the digital sphere, just as it is not in more traditional publishing. As the literary agent Cherise Fisher illustrates, “There is an engine in publishing houses. Not every book gets the same amount of gas. Some books get premium. Some get regular.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Corinna Norrick-Rühl has outlined elsewhere that “some novels [for example] are connected more firmly to central actors and institutions in the marketplace, and thus, their success is often predetermined by and through their level of networkedness.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Ultimately this Element is not the place to either analyze or decide the true levels of participatory potential of the digital literary sphere, not least because different platforms are run by different groups who have different scopes for engaging heterodox writers and audiences. And yet, while the digital literary sphere retains the possibility to confer space and availability on heterodox cultural productions and formats of exchange, those readers who remain wary of the limitations of publishing’s heading of majority culture can and will move their buyer’s power online because they can, thereby putting pressure on the less diverse mainstream.

The intense industry discussions following the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter protests across the globe in 2020 provide an excellent example of the realignment of value categories in publishing through hashtag activism and internet movements. Seemingly overnight, the digital literary sphere was awash with discussions, recommendations, and comments about the lack of diversity in publishing. The lack of diversity had been acknowledged and measured for years, but the merging of activism and urgency led to new action being taken. For instance, during the following weeks, the hashtag #publishingpaidme highlighted the discrepancies between advances for white authors and advances for BIPOC authors.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Amistad Press launched the hashtag #BlackOutBestsellerList to challenge readers to buy any two Black-authored books during a specific week in June 2020, with the goal of demonstrating “our power and clout in the publishing industry.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ New hires in publishing were widely reported, and media outlets disproportionately shone light on the issue (after years of ignoring and perpetuating the exclusionary practices).Footnote ¹⁶² New imprints were founded as well, to highlight marginalized voices; one example is Hachette US with Legacy Lit,Footnote ¹⁶³ another is Hachette UK with Dialogue Books.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Without elaborating much further here, it could be argued that the names of these imprints hint at the difficulties of trying to solve the diversity problem without creating more spaces for pigeonholing. Simon & Schuster has closed their imprint for Black voices, 37 Ink for this reason. As the incoming editor Dana Canedy (the first Black person to lead Simon & Schuster’s signature imprint) explained, “the imprint’s existence allowed people to say, ‘Oh, that’s a 37 Ink book’” when a book by a person of color was pitched. Canedy emphasized that instead of being relegated to one particular imprint “all of the books we acquire by and about people of color should be Simon & Schuster books.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ There are, predictably, other opinions in the industry which emphasize the value of new imprints for marginalized voices. As the editor of Legacy Lit, Krishan Trotman, explains, trends in the industry can be short-lived: “There will be a huge boom of books – all of a sudden Black women are hot or urban fiction is hot – and then there will be a backslide.” She considers the establishment of imprints like Legacy Lit as more lasting: “we need these imprints. They’ll be here even after all the hoopla dies down.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶

It remains to be seen how these new imprints develop and whether they last. In any case, there have been visible and momentous shifts in the publishing industry – one could even say, an “industry reckoning”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ in 2020 (and not without backlash, as the New York Times discussed in 2021Footnote ¹⁶⁸). These developments and the media attention they received show how today, wider societal movements, perpetuated through the flattened hierarchies and shifted attention logics in the digital sphere, influence the (digital) literary sphere directly. As we transition to the next section, a case study of Bernardine Evaristo’s post-Booker activities, it is central to note that Evaristo herself believes that the recent shifts in publishing, caused by #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, provided fertile ground for her Booker win. She has, in the past, effectively used the internet and social media to further her cultural agenda, as she describes in regard to the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, which she founded: “I set up a website, called in favours […], and marketed it via social media.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The next section will provide insights into Evaristo’s effective handling of literature as culture and commodity in a digital age, and will help us conclude (Section 5) with final remarks on whether and how books, today, are still “different.”

4 Marketing “Difference” in a Network of Networks: Bernardine Evaristo

In keeping with the ideas developed in our previous section about a broad understanding of the digital literary sphere, we open our case study with a quote from Bernardine Evaristo: “Society operates via powerful & often impenetrable networks that uphold its tribal hierarchies, so we must establish our own systems as countermeasure.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ The idea of establishing a counternetwork to equalize literary hierarchies and counteract exclusionary practices not only chimes with the “novel as network” metaphor that we have flagged throughout this Element, but also coincides with the “diverse networks of dissent” that have been propagated by scholars concerned with hashtag activism.Footnote ¹⁷¹ It further resonates with the kind of affective, transatlantic networkFootnote ¹⁷² that Evaristo envisages as part of her own influences as a writer: women of color, writing from different sides of the Atlantic:

This is an “authorial act of pulling together – across the Atlantic – an empowering and growing archive of black female voices”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ on the part of Evaristo – a heterodox network that goes back to, as well as diversifies, the Atlantic’s own deep archives of forced migration and disenfranchisement. It is a network that extends into the present, conveying to the young Evaristo a sense of voice and “permission”; and eventually, it extends into a range of other networks that have emerged with the internet and are therefore unique to the twenty-first century: the digital literary sphere and social media – Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Evaristo has expertly used these networks of the present to push her anti-racist and queer/trans*-inclusive agenda as well as promote her own works and those of fellow writers. A recent example: in 2020 she foreworded a new edition of Beryl Gilroy’s Black Teacher, a novel she writes “has been overlooked, that’s the truth of it, barely making the timelines of black British literary history”Footnote ¹⁷⁵; Evaristo is also keenly aware of the extent to which the Windrush writers, from E.R. Braithwaite to Sam Selvon, were able to grab the spotlight in a way that was not possible for Gilroy – who appears to have been the sole female writer among them. Gilroy’s “rare perspective of a black woman transported to the colonial motherland”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ is part of the network that Evaristo is contributing to curate and shape. Her recent book series “Black Britain: Writing Back,” published by Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Random House), with thirteen books to date, is another prominent example of this kind of advocacy.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Evaristo’s Booker win is part of the cascade effects that are unfolding in the wake of these converging networks, long in the making, and yet in many ways, it was an event of unprecedented significance. As mentioned, Evaristo was the first Black woman to be awarded the prize – the first to emerge from a long archive and a group that had previously often been overlooked both in the industry generally and in prize culture more specifically. According to a Guardian study from 2021, “black authors made up 6% of shortlisted authors in the UK’s top literary prizes in the past 25 years. Over the same 25-year period, black Britons made up 3.1% of shortlisted nominees”; in addition, “The percentage of black and minority ethnic (BAME) authors increased from 4.65% in 1996 to 34.25% in 2020,” though in “the years 1996, 2001, 2002 and 2009 there were no black authors shortlisted across any of the prizes.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Along with the Booker prize, the study included “Women’s prize for fiction, Folio prize, Orwell book prize, Baillie Gifford, International Dylan Thomas prize, Carnegie medal, and Costa book awards (encompassing Costa first novel award, Costa novel award, Costa biography award, Costa poetry award and Costa children’s award).”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize in 1993, is an important predecessor, of course, though her example is also eye-opening regarding the fierce policing forces emanating from hegemonic whiteness, given that she would be asked for decades to come when she would finally start addressing topics beyond the “niche” world of Black lives.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ These are paradoxical expectations, of course, given that BIPOC writers so often also have been under pressure to reinvoke white fantasies about Black lives, such as those centered on crime, social issues, and so forth, as already mentioned. This brings us back to the “nonthreatening” ways in which Black lives have been allowed, if at all, to emerge into the white-hegemonic sphere of public attention. Morrison’s early insistence on their validity, particularly depicting also the suffering that Black people have endured at the hands of whites, was a marked exception.

As Catherine Knight Steele writes in Digital Black Feminism, “Dual subordination based on both race and gender prohibits full access to the process of self-naming for Black women”;Footnote ¹⁸¹ however – and this is of particular significance for this Element – “the digital environment provides an opportunity to resist external naming structures and controlling images of Black women.”Footnote ¹⁸² This is partially because of how digital networks work themselves, that is, because “Socially mediated environments require acts of naming for participation.”Footnote ¹⁸³ In this context, Steele perceives a clear, at times problematic proximity between “naming as a liberatory practice” and “branding as a financial necessity for Black women” which she terms “a relatively short walk”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ though there is a clear sense in her own work and that of others that the empowering potentials of the digital sphere for heterodox voices, and their overlaps with self-branding, are undeniable, given that “digital Black feminists demonstrate their skill in designing brands for themselves online.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Illuminating yet another direction in which the circuits of Black dissent potentially extend, Anna Everett perceives a “short walk” of another kind, one that extends historically: drawing on scholars of the Black Atlantic from Braithwaite to Paul Gilroy, Everett has focused on technological aspects of Black resistance since the plantationocene, tying this in with the notion of “virtual communities”:

Twenty years later, Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam reinstate this proximity, even convergence, between these much older virtual forms and current digital activism, emphasizing the longue durée of technophilic Black resistance: “Black people have always been intimately familiar with technologies, both repressive and emancipatory – whether the ship, musical instruments, games, social media, or algorithms.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In this context, it is important to acknowledge particularly the role that Black women have played. For example, it is one of Steele’s pronounced goals in Digital Black Feminism to “reposition Black women online as purveyors of digital skill and expertise, not deficient or in need of new skills to survive a changing digital landscape”; to give examples that highlight Black women who “without extensive programming experience have maximized platform affordances, built transmedia platforms, led platform migrations, pushed platform policy changes regarding hate speech and content moderation, and introduced us to new pay structures as precursors to influencer culture.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Her positive and agency-focused treatment of Black women’s usage and transformation of digital technology also extends to this usage’s overlaps with branding, just as it overlaps with the sense that Black labor deserves valuation and financial compensation, particularly given that “Black women are ignored as intellectuals and experts.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ “[T]hey reclaim self-branding as an agentic practice,” Steele writes, not least because many “are naming themselves through their brand and relying on Black oral traditions like signifyin’ to deploy a Black feminist brand online intentionally.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ While Steele does signal concern about the limited transgressiveness of “[c]lickable and hashtaggable Black feminism,”Footnote ¹⁹¹ she refuses to undermine digital Black feminism’s empowering potential, including where its overlaps with branding and self-branding become entirely overt. The two simply are not mutually exclusive.

It is possible to situate Evaristo’s authorship-cum-activism – online and offline, current and historical – and the events of 2019 against this backdrop of converging networks. The Booker prize 2019 was not only bestowed on a novel that celebrates a large variety of Black female (including nonbinary) voices and their diverse links with Atlantic displacements and/or journeys – Girl, Woman, Other; it also was an event that was shared with readers in the digital sphere more widely than in previous years. Integrating announcements posted on YouTube on the Booker’s dedicated channel, TheBookerPrizes,Footnote ¹⁹² Evaristo’s win was advertised widely across social media. A closer look at the Booker videos in January 2022 shows that the YouTube announcements did not garner much attention in 2019 – for instance, the longlist video announcement has only tallied just under 4,000 views to date (posted in July 2019),Footnote ¹⁹³ and the prize announcement also only has approximately 4,000 views (posted in October 2019).Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Evaristo’s shortlist video has only received 2,035 views (posted in October 2019)Footnote ¹⁹⁵ – though this is significantly higher than Atwood’s shortlist video, which has only tallied 733 views to date.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Compared to these numbers, the more recent videos, posted in 2020 and 2021, have garnered much more attention. Of course, this is only anecdotal evidence and should not be overinterpreted. However, one possible interpretation could be that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way the Booker used their own channel (established in 2008, currently at 6.72K subscribers and 908K views overallFootnote ¹⁹⁷), driving more traffic there. It may also be indicative of a heightened awareness of the digital literary sphere among readers in the pandemic era, due to the lack of in-person alternatives.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ For comparison, the 2020 longlist announcement (posted in July 2020), has over 10,000 views;Footnote ¹⁹⁹ and the 2021 longlist announcement (posted in July 2021) has just over 5,000 views.Footnote ²⁰⁰ The Booker Prize YouTube channel has become more central to the prize’s branding, due to pandemic-induced contact regulations and lockdowns, but this has also brought the Booker closer to a wider and perhaps, following Evaristo’s win, also more inclusive and diverse readership, which might be one reason for the significantly higher numbers, though it is too soon to tell in earnest where the prize is heading. Certainly, until 2018, the Booker still was very much in a mode of gatekeeping, celebrating its own “exclusionary, inequitable” approach with exclusive, ticketed events, as criticized for instance by Stevie Marsden in her Medium article “Why I’m done with the Man Booker and you should be too.”Footnote ²⁰¹ As such, Evaristo’s Booker win might be considered not only a watershed moment for her own career and Black women writers more generally, but also for the Booker as a gatekeeping institution – time will tell.

Evaristo’s diversifying, multidirectional approach and its convergence with the publishing and prizing industry can serve to clarify further how literature functions both as culture and commodity in the digital age and if, or to what extent, books might (still) count as different today or not; indeed if the question still matters at all or, if so, in what ways and for whom. In either case, it becomes tantamount that the “digital literary sphere” be understood as an integrated sphere in the widest sense. Not only do we suggest to situate digitally created or sold literature, and the internet’s own unique platforms (Wattpad, Publishizer, etc.), as part of the digital literary sphere, but also to conceptually converge the digital literary sphere with a kind of transmediality that further links up to other types of social media, branding, and more traditional cultural practices. These can then be understood as interconnected avenues of influence, narrative, and practice: in a network of networks. In turn, we suggest that it is in variously sourcing and interlinking these, from hashtag activism to novel-writing to website creation, that individual authors shape images of themselves and their work, or push particular narratives and stories that transcend any single medium, in particular that of the traditional “book.” Emerging as they do in a symbolic economy of discourse, authors wittingly and unwittingly actualize aspects of performative branding that will interact with and intervene in existing networks and circuits of valuation. In addition, there is no doubt that usage of social media and direct interaction with the digital literary sphere can be a means of pushing particular (brand) narratives that potentially very much correspond to core beliefs held by their authors.

The Booker is not only a cultural institution for anglophone literature but it is also itself highly commercialized, something that is underlined, for example, by the fact that the publishers of shortlisted books are required to contribute substantial amounts to offset the marketing costs for the Booker.Footnote ²⁰² In particular, though, books that are not highly anticipated to actually win the prize do profit from the attention that the Booker bestows on them – and directs at them. For Evaristo, commercial success did not materialize until after her Booker win. Before, Girl, Woman, Other had been in UK bookstores for five months and had only sold a few thousand copies. Despite the usual difficulties in quantifying the sales success triggered by a literary prize,Footnote ²⁰³ the numbers are striking: “Five days after her victory for Girl, Woman, Other – her radiant novel about 12 mostly black, mostly female, Britons – […] total sales of the book, which had been in bookshops for five months, […] more than doubled from 4,391 copies sold to 10,371” – an increase of 1,340 percent.Footnote ²⁰⁴ To date (February 2022), the book “has sold more than a million copies in English, with deals in thirty-five territories and twenty-nine languages.”Footnote ²⁰⁵ In several interviews, Evaristo emphasized that she would now finally be making money for her publisher as well. In a Vanity Fair interview, she sums up the importance of both her activism and her commercial success succinctly: “I think the way in which the publishing industry changes is through lobbying and activism, something that I’ve been involved in for many years. I think that books that become an economic success open doors for other writers because publishers are businesses and need to make money.”Footnote ²⁰⁶ The trailblazing effects of commercially successful pioneers can be beneficial for others, both financially as well as culturally and politically; they lay paths in new directions into which a heterodox network may extend further.

Evaristo thus has clearly been very aware of the commercial pressures in the industry, and also of the necessity of self-marketing, self-branding, and of positioning her books as an attractive commodity, from the beginnings of her writing career onwards. In her memoir-meets-manifesto, she describes her efforts to market her first books on her own, without the financial support of the small press that published her first two books. The book industry, back then, she maintains, was very different than it is now: “Nobody was waiting for my manuscripts, agents weren’t seeking out new black talent the way they do now on social media.”Footnote ²⁰⁷ But instead of resigning herself and her works to a small audience, she actively marketed the books, despite the fact that she hadn’t even received advance payments for her books and was reliant solely on royalties for income: “I hustled,” she writes, “I paid to print up thousands of leaflets advertising it [Lara], which I posted via the mail-outs of arts and literature organizations, who charged a fee for the service.”Footnote ²⁰⁸ This self-marketing paid off. While her first two books were hardly noticed by national media, her third book, The Emperor’s Babe (2001), garnered significantly more attention.Footnote ²⁰⁹ She not only marketed her texts, but she also positioned herself within a globally networked literary field, with self-applications to the British Council’s foreign literary tours programs, because she felt that she was being excluded from British-based literary festivals.Footnote ²¹⁰ Even now, with a widely publicized three-book deal under her beltFootnote ²¹¹ post-Booker, Evaristo is not relying on the automatic dynamic that might bring to public attention her following works or those that preceded Girl, Woman, Other. First launched at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre on October 3, 2021, in conversation with Afua Hirsch, Evaristo has toured the United Kingdom to promote Manifesto. On Never Giving Up in a series of twelve in-person interviews.Footnote ²¹² Similarly, for the US rollout of the book in early 2022, Evaristo’s publisher (Grove Atlantic, an independent publisher) planned a virtual tour across the continental USA, with a focus on independent bookstores as hosts.Footnote ²¹³

Summing up, then, it seems that Evaristo’s understanding of economic success in the literary marketplace as trailblazing somewhat resonates with the positions and practices of other Black writers, and Toni Morrison would be a prominent example, though this is not always appreciated. White left-leaning academics have regularly signaled their skepticism of the extent to which market practice might facilitate empowerment.Footnote ²¹⁴ Though there can be no doubt that BIPOC writers have faced multiple challenges and pressures to cater to marketized white expectations, we would like to stress that the inverse dynamic remains a possibility. Depending on an individual’s practice and possibly leverage, commerce and culture do not have to be considered as binarily opposed; in some cases, apt navigation of publishing/commerce and indeed usage of its very own avenues and mechanisms (“publishers need to make money”) can enable a diversification of given market conditions, not least because market systems themselves tend to rely on the principle of innovation,Footnote ²¹⁵ which also means avoiding such gatekeeping that hampers (marketable) progress.

As our previous reference to Steele’s book already indicates, Evaristo’s growing online presence and long-term apt internet usage for activist pursuits can be framed as hashtag activism and as such “a networked activity” and “counterpublic” approach “whereby individual tweets coalesce into a larger collective storytelling.”Footnote ²¹⁶ For sure, the wave of appreciation and urgency surrounding Black Lives Matter also contributed substantially to eventually raising Evaristo to the top of the Booker shortlist. Not only had Evaristo herself been a long-term advocate of the movement, her book and success also began trending under the Black Lives Matter hashtag. A week after the Booker announcement, Evaristo took to Twitter, her main social media go-to,Footnote ²¹⁷ first thanking her editor Simon Prosser, with whom she has had a long and fruitful working relationship, and, second, her followers. (“Thank you for all your support on social media before and after the @TheBookerPrizes.”) In her statement, the unwaning, long-term support of her (digital) fans and followers evoked a sense of consistent commitment – a long-established though growing network – that sharply contrasted with the rapidly increasing attention that the Booker machinery now afforded and which propelled, not least, her followers from a couple of thousand to 69K+ now. She uses Twitter in ways that align with Michael Warner’s analysis of public speech; her Twitter communication combines, in his words, “great urgency and intimate import”;Footnote ²¹⁸ this offers a particular sense of authenticity to readers and followers. In line with Black digital feminism’s tendency for enthusiastic and occasionally cautionary notes on self-branding,Footnote ²¹⁹ Evaristo has used Twitter in particular for her own ends that, as she readily admits, are not mutually exclusive with those of her publisher’s commercial success; neither has she voiced any skepticism as to her and Atwood sharing the Booker, which was criticized by others as an only partial embrace of Evaristo’s brilliant storytelling and heterodox position. In addition, since winning the Booker, Evaristo has actively leveraged her new status to powerfully further an agenda that is larger than her own. As aforementioned, she has launched her own book series within the Hamish Hamilton imprint at Penguin Random House. She has also continued to use her voice to lend support for initiatives such as Re:Thinking Diversity, the study we have quoted throughout this Element, and “Lit in Colour,” a campaign to diversify school curricula.Footnote ²²⁰ These steps are logical, given her long-standing commitment to the diversification of the industry and industry-adjacent sectors, broadly understood. In a landmark decision, the Royal Society of Literature named Evaristo their next President – only the second woman writer in 200 years, and the first-ever writer of color.Footnote ²²¹

While her ascent to the pinnacle of British literary culture has been widely acknowledged as overdue, there have been critical voices as well. True to her branding strategy, Evaristo has leveraged these critical voices to underline the biases prevalent in the media. In October 2021, cartoonist Kipper Williams, for instance, published a cartoon in which a radio listener, tuning in to BBC Radio 4, is exclaiming to his partner, “Quick! Bernardine Evaristo isn’t on!,” signaling the feeling that Evaristo has been granted too much media attention. Evaristo tweeted the cartoon, acknowledging that while she understood the humor, she had recently spent 2.5 hours on BBC Radio 4 out of 1,000s of broadcast hours per annum. In her tweet, she suggested the cartoon was indicative of the backlash Black women meet for “claiming a little space.”Footnote ²²²

The question of space also extends to the 2019 Booker prize. While the Booker was a windfall for Evaristo, it also bestowed visibility on the often biased workings of the attention economy and the literary field today, as we have already suggested in the Introduction (Section 1) to this Element. While, in her Manifesto, Evaristo describes her joint Booker win with Margaret Atwood as a “landmark historical moment for literature and for the sisterhood,”Footnote ²²³ reviewers were not as magnanimous. For instance, Justine Jordan in the Guardian called the decision a “fudge,” saying: “To honour Evaristo’s novel, which intertwines 12 narratives about black women in Britain, is to shine a much-deserved spotlight on an author who has blazed a trail in subject matter and style for a quarter of a century,” commenting in passing that Atwood’s book was “a huge event novel” and “global bestseller,” “sprinkling some much-needed publishing glitz” as a much-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.Footnote ²²⁴ Whether Evaristo finally received the attention and accolade she long deserved, or whether the committee’s decision to have her share the prize with Atwood was actually scandalous, continues to be a matter of debate, though Evaristo herself has shown nothing but appreciation in the face of the events. Considering the range of awards and honorary positions she has received since, the Booker itself might have been crucial at the time, but retrospectively is one award of many honors she has since received, turning Evaristo into one of Britain’s currently most influential writers.

Evaristo’s online and offline advocacy continues to culminate in her book publications, which have a lasting impact on the industry and will certainly be canonized in the near future, if the works of other authors who have received prizes are any indication.Footnote ²²⁵ One final aspect that we would like to address here is gatekeeping, and the interesting fact that Evaristo clearly views her connection to editor Simon Prosser – a white male gatekeeper at a major conglomerate-owned publishing house – as central to her success, despite her otherwise countless activities and far-flung, often alternative networks. Evaristo emphasizes his role in her career repeatedly in interviews, on Twitter, as well as in her Manifesto. She has also commented on the central role of editors, such as that “we need the editors who will […] help us craft our work. […] You know, writers, we get so much attention, right? (Hopefully!) But actually, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing without the editors behind us.”Footnote ²²⁶ Prosser has undoubtedly been a positive, formative influence on Evaristo’s oeuvre – which speaks to the potentially productive aspects of gatekeeping in the sense of an alliance beyond the ties of discrimination and bias. Yet this relationship also needs to be seen in relation to a much larger system of gatekeeping that has had and still has the clear tendency to systematically disadvantage minority writers. We have tried to sketch this system out in the following way (Figure 1), seeking to show the multiple obstacles that writers face: from having the opportunity to write, and feeling that their voices matter, to multiple steps in between. As emerges, there are substantial gates to pass through which particularly call into question the oft-repeated meritocratic illusion that only the “best” books make it in the business (and “best” according to whom, anyway). Clearly, there are books that pass through these numerous gates with more ease than others, and usually (statistically speaking) they are the ones written by white, male authors.

Figure 1 Gatekeeping in publishing. The successive “gates” represent the various stages of the publishing process, each of which presents its own set of obstacles to the writer

We offer this sketch as a way of visualizing these obstacles and thinking them through, though this certainly is not a complete representation. As books pass through the gates, it is also important to keep in mind that, again, statistically speaking, the people who make the decisions are disproportionately white, male, cisgendered, heterosexual, and able-bodied, as studies such as the aforementioned Lee and Low Diversity Baseline Survey have illustrated. The gates, then, are still kept closed to a wide range of authors and texts. One could say that, instead of facilitating “difference” and diversity in the book world, the keys to the gates ultimately remain out of reach for many, implicitly or explicitly policing the boundaries of “difference.” As we have intimated here, this is of course part of the reason why the digital literary sphere has thrived, and often in the sections of so-called minority authors or niche writing. To bring in Wattpad and similar platforms once more, it is not without reason that Black and LGBTQIA+ novels, as well as crossovers between the two (e.g., #BlackLGBTQ literature) draw large audiences there, some of the texts garnering millions of readers.

5 Conclusion: The Book as Affect and the Novel as Network

Seventy years ago, the notion that “books are different” – a notion with ample historical precursors – was employed in a UK court setting where industry actors bartered for policy exemptions and a continuation of the Net Book Agreement. Even after the demise of the Net Book Agreement in 1997, however, the notion is perpetuated. This Element started out from the question “Are Books Still Different?” and has explored concepts of “difference” in the book trade and how difference might be understood in relation to literature as culture and commodity in an (increasingly) digital age. From a distinctly interdisciplinary perspective, interweaving book studies and literary studies, we have attempted to tease apart the concept of “difference”: as a popular discourse within the industry and beyond, as a branding strategy, and as a focal point of cultural policy. On a metalevel, this interdisciplinary work has been very productive for us as writers, both fruitfully intertwining the commonalities between the two disciplines and illuminating relevant differences in method, research, writing styles, and traditions – these differences themselves emerging as instrumental in tackling the question of: “Are Books Still Different?”

Many of the points that we have touched upon beg a question that we have avoided thus far: What are books today, anyway? What does it mean to engage with books? While literary studies tend to focus on plot features and different possible readings as well as aesthetic and formal properties of books (which is where the preferred brand “literature” comes in), book studies offer models of thinking about the different roles that books potentially fulfill. In a wide-ranging and integrated perspective, Leslie Howsam, for example, differentiates between the book as a text, as a material object, as a cultural transaction, and as an experience.Footnote ²²⁷ Amaranth Borsuk similarly offers four vantage points in her The Book: the book as object, the book as content, the book as idea, and the book as interface.Footnote ²²⁸ Tellingly, both authors offer distinct insights into the ways in which books are currently fetishized as objects, something that Jessica Pressman has termed “bookishness”;Footnote ²²⁹ Borsuk prefers “bookness.”Footnote ²³⁰ In any case, bookishness combines, unapologetically even, the cultural and commodified angle on literature that we have discussed and ultimately integrated in this Element. When visiting the Penguin Shop or the British Library Shop, one will encounter book jewelry, book Christmas tree ornaments, book paraphernalia for any walk of life from the beach to the boudoir (towels, scarves, bags, mugs, etc.). These products certainly play with (and on) the idea of books being “different” and “special,” not least in the traditionally hard-copy format. Borsuk suggests that, “When the aesthetic of bookness itself is fetishized to such a degree that it can be bought and sold (as cell phone cases, home safes, and printed sportswear, for example), we’ve come full circle to the commodification of the book object.”Footnote ²³¹ What is more, this indicates a kind of cultural meta-textuality that not only becomes readable as text but also comes with its own aesthetic features and affective components. As Sydney Shep writes, books are “cultural metaphors” which “provoke affective experiences.”Footnote ²³² As such, while bookishness and corresponding marketing campaigns might be understood as post-digital or post-capitalist posturing, they do also signal Western culture’s continuing, if not intensifying, sustained affective investment in the very idea of “the book.” As we might therefore conclude, the book has become an affect – not overnight, but as the result of a long-standing process of conjoint valuation, branding, and mythification.

The-book-as-affect is intimately tied to the book’s “different” or “special” nature that continues to excite and enthuse the masses, the branders, and the policymakers. The-book-as-affect presents a constant feedback loop to book discourse; it energizes a circuit of investment (financial; affective) and attention that is inextricably related with the branding of literature/books as culture and commodity in a digital age. It is also because of this that “literature” and “book” ultimately become collapsible into one another. Literature is sold in book form; it enters the public sphere in the form of books. At the same time, the aura of “literature” as well as individual periods, authors, texts, etc. directly informs – helps to energize, drive, code the meaning of – “the book.” There is a constant, reciprocal feedback loop here, too. It is only because we can narrate the social meaning of books in particular ways that literature emerges as a valuable (read: “different”) cultural good in fetishized book form, and vice versa. Affective currents, charging back and forth across the lines of discursive categorization, continue to permeate and blur the difference between the book and literature just as they blur the difference between literature as culture and commodity – particularly in a digital age.

Indeed, the-book-as-affect’s reciprocal dynamics are only accelerated by recent digital technologies such as Instagram (subsumed under the #bookstagram hashtag) or TikTok (summarized as #BookTok). These dynamics hint at the enormous potential of digitally driven bookishness that all but abrogates the very differences between literature/the book as culture and literature/the book as commodity. Just as affective currents crisscross assumed forms of categorization and compartmentalization, in a similarly momentous development, #BookTok activities have been seen to drive younger consumers into brick-and-mortar bookshops in numbers not seen since the Harry Potter books were first published.Footnote ²³³ Thus, while we clearly can speak of a digital literary sphere, these developments indicate the extent to which that sphere ultimately remains interlinked with the physical modes of bookselling and distribution – just as the cultural status of literature/books remains intimately entangled with commoditization and, as one might add, self-branding with activism (and vice versa). Amazon’s move towards brick-and-mortar locations, which raised concern in the traditional publishing industry, is another manifestation of such entanglement, though in early 2022 Amazon announced that they were closing all their brick-and-mortar locations.Footnote ²³⁴ Wherever the assumed signatory differences between literature as culture and commodity crumble; where the lines between traditional and digital publishing are redrawn, and where a post-capitalist bookishness reveals an affective investment in the book as a fetishized object that might have been with us for hundreds of years – in all these cases myriad outcomes arise to the advantage of different interest groups. These can redistribute authority and privilege just as much as profits, in various directions. Culture or commodity? Rather than a natural phenomenon, this difference is perhaps best understood as the long-term effect of normalized branding and valuation patterns – patterns that have produced the meaningfulness of such a difference in the first place (occasionally bordering on fetishism). The-book-as-affect is, as we might say, the commerce-positive, inverse mirror-function of branding books as “different,” sneakily signaling the amount of labor and energy that goes into establishing the naturalness of the assumption of the book’s “essential difference.”

Throughout the course of this Element we have frequently taken recourse to the network approach, which we believe can help us frame and understand literature and its underlying circuits ranging from cultural to commercial. By focusing not only on the text itself but seeking to understand any text’s connections to other textual forms, institutions, and actors in the novel network, we can gain a deeper understanding of the place(s) and platform(s) that literature inhabits today. There are, in our view, several advantages to the network approach. In regards to our title and question “Are Books Still Different?” the network approach firmly discounts the idea that books might be either: culture or commodity. Instead, as we have argued, the two are interconnected and rely on each other. Any book’s appearance in what Judith Butler calls “the sphere of appearance,”Footnote ²³⁵ that is, any book that gains attention and traction does so because it has been marketed, promoted, branded, and so on, by those who wish to see it thrive – which includes gatekeepers of different kinds. Similarly, books are not naturally “different”; instead, we might prefer to think of them as different (or of literature as “singular”) because of how “the book” and “literature” (sometimes with a capital L) are narrated and valorized. Indeed, in the book trade, difference has long been a brand narrative imbued with valorization. One could say that “books are different” itself is one of the oldest stories in the book – a self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling narrative (permeated by affective investment) that is continually driven by those who have stakes in the notion of books as different. As already indicated, this does not necessarily mean that we should abolish the notion of “difference” in relation to books or that it is wrong that “difference” is a brand; neither does bookishness equal a capitalist sellout. Instead, as we have suggested throughout, it might be important to rethink the premises and cornerstones upon which notions of difference are built in the first place. It is in further networking these (alleged) differences and their shared underpinnings that we might gain a deeper understanding of both culture and commodities in a digital age.

In rethinking “difference” in relation to literature/books, the network approach might encourage societies and their book industries to live up more fully to the brief of “bibliodiversity.” Connections are necessary to establishing one’s place in the literary sphere, and networks are central in gatekeeping processes. Networks not only give authors “permission to write,” to quote again Evaristo’s formative influences of Black female writers that she pulls together across the Atlantic as a young writer; networks can also, as we have seen, place authors in a position to be published and heard, blazing a trail for others. As such, any book that attains visibility in the public sphere – and the digital sphere increasingly plays a central part in this – potentially works like a promise, creating a space in which similar writers and stories might be heard. In this way, networks can open up new spaces and voices, and these, in turn, potentially give rise to new paths and networks, particularly if the social conditions are favorable. It is at these points that “networked counterpublics” or “diverse networks of dissent” (concepts that stem from research on internet activism), might be interlinked into more mainstream networks (as in Evaristo’s case), by which orthodox circuits of valorization and attention might be changed. In turn, any such incorporation can of course also lead to forms of de-radicalization of activist practice and ideas which can ultimately harness heterodox movements – this, of course, is always the risk of absorption into the mainstream.

Given the limitations of the Element format, we have not been able to analyze in detail the changes wrought by self-publishing and platforms like Wattpad. Further research is needed to grasp these developments more fully, and – as they are “moving targets” – the research on them will have to be continuous and comparative in nature. Claire Parnell’s forthcoming PhD research on Amazon and Wattpad and marginalized authors of romance points towards the potentials and challenges in this area.Footnote ²³⁶ As Layla Mohamed has also recently shown, there needs to be further discussion of the process of diversifying the industry; in her parsing, the industry needs to decolonize instead of diversify.Footnote ²³⁷ We hope that future research can profit from our observations on the network approach as well as on concepts of “difference” and diversity vis-à-vis literature as culture and (not or!) commodity in the digital age.

6 Coda

Reading the proofs of our Element alongside nearly daily news about Elon Musk’s changes to Twitter has prompted us to add this Coda to the manuscript. The situation at Twitter is driving home the malleability, and fragility, of the digital sphere at a new scale. While Twitter is not mentioned in these pages as the only social media platform with diversifying potentials, its function as part of the digital literary sphere cannot be underestimated. Twitter has been particularly conducive to the type of activism exhibited by Bernardine Evaristo and analyzed here. It is too soon to tell conclusively what will become of the platform, but it seems safe to say that the space has already irrevocably changed. Certainly, other platforms are in the wings. Most publishers have already been connecting with readers via Instagram. BookTok, which has mostly been a space inhabited by younger readers, might also find new popularity with an older demographic. Numerous major publishers, especially university presses, have established Mastodon accounts. For the foreseeable future, activities that were once centralized on Twitter might take on more networked forms across different platforms and outputs.

One takeaway from our Element, then, is that doing twenty-first-century book and literary studies means dealing with uncertainties. Our research focuses on moving targets, and this can generate interesting and surprising results. The printed word (when and if it is still printed) is deeply enmeshed within platforms, and susceptible to change in ways that it may not have been in the twentieth century. In light of this, and coming full circle, we are even more grateful for the platform that Cambridge Elements has offered us through its Publishing and Book Culture series. With a quick turnaround from submission to publication, though by nature still not quick enough to keep entirely apace with digital dynamics, we hope our Element will be read as a testament to what Ted Striphas has called “the late age of print”.