Notebook: Alpha and Omega (Part Two)

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Members of the Banned Book Club organized by teens in the Firefly Bookstore in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. “I love to read, so it’s kind of frustrating to see the bans, especially because a lot of adults are banning it, but they’re not asking teenagers our opinion on these books,” the book club’s fourteen-year-old founder Joslyn Diffenbaugh (rear, right) told The Guardian. Sixteen-year-old member Jesse Hastings (rear, center) said she thinks removing books from library shelves “leads to a lot of kids being a lot more closed-minded.” Photo by Hannah Yoon

(Read Part One of this post here!)

I wonder how large the overlap is between the avid readers who participate in self-publishing platforms, many of them nourished by active and synergistic presence on social media, especially the unexpected bookselling juggernaut, TikTok (Barnes and Noble CEO James Daunt said a few weeks ago that BookTok is giving bookselling a boost not seen since Harry Potter), and the traditional book world. Successful self-published authors move into traditional publishing, and writers of serialized work on platforms like Vello (and Substack: See Salman Rushdie and Chuck Palahniuk) envision their work as an eventual traditionally published book, but how much are those books tapping the same readership rather than existing in these distinct worlds at once? E-book buying by the measures of traditional publishing has plateaued: falling or rising somewhat, depending on whom you ask. But John B. Thompson, in Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing, argues that the largely uncharted world of digital self-publishing may make up for and surpass the growth in traditionally published e-books that flattened around 2012. (The scale of digital self-publishing is cloaked by the invisibility of sales figures for its major player, Amazon, which siphons may self-published books on its platform directly into its proprietary reader, the Kindle, which does not report disaggregated earnings nor assign one of the ISBN numbers that tracks books in the general market.) Some small publishers believe e-books could be priced more affordably, and become more popular, though others fear a devaluation in all the intangible elements—editing, marketing, design—that go into a book if e-books are priced too low. A recent report showed that committed readers are reading less—as in fewer books—but are they reading in other ways? To cite another reading variant, the story-sharing app WattPad, which has become an incubator for TV and movies and in 2019 developed a book publishing arm of its own, has eighty million users world-wide, most of them, like Colleen Hoover’s readers, young women, many of them reading teen fiction, fanfiction, and (as in the lion’s share of self publishing) romance. WattPad writers describe the interchange with readers as they write to have become a necessary part of their process.