The Brand

An ever-expanding interconnected entertainment media ecosystem affords book brands vast opportunity to execute synchronised, multi-touchpoint spectacles to promote new releases. Few authors of literary fiction and their publishers capitalise on this opportunity, however. Some may feel that the inherent “slowness” of literary fiction doesn’t gel with the primary visual and experiential qualities of our fast-paced attention economy. Or perhaps there’s a prevailing conservatism among key stakeholders, including authors themselves, who see the cynicism of marketing strategy as antithetical to their art. To be blunt, the most likely reason is that neither the budget nor the audience is there.

A recent exception is Sally Rooney’s 2021 book Beautiful World, Where Are You. Eagerly awaiting her live reading at the flagship Waterstones, a polite snake of eager readers wore consumer taste and attitudes on worker-jacket sleeves. They enjoyed an immersive pop-up shop that hosted a candle-making workshop, drank from cute Rooney-branded coffee trucks and were gifted playful bucket hats, T-shirts and tote-bags. The merchandise and experiential equities of the activation drew consumers into Rooney’s “bookverse”, a refuge from the anxious uncertainties of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The immersiveness of genre fiction, particularly fantasy, seems to lend itself naturally to the world- building aspirations of book-marketers. Brandon Sanderson, an enormously prolific writer and Mormon with near-zero recognition from the literary establishment, constructs detailed and magical alternate universes into which readers escape. He and his network of publishers marshal a media juggernaut that earned him over $50 million in 2022. Conventions dedicated to his bookverse are attended by thousands of self-identifying “Worldhoppers” decked out in Sand-brand swag: costumes, inflatable swords, beanies, caps, socks, pins, patches and badges. Sanderson’s authority is total; his personality abstracted by his readers into the status of godhead, generously bequeathing his worlds. While permitted the sacred privacy to create, he is also a director – coordinating the script, stagehands and props of his immersive extravaganza.

In fact, literary world-builders needn’t create anything at all. Public figures are lending their taste, curatorial instincts – as well as their name and brand – to book clubs and reading lists. Obama’s annual reading inventory inter- weaves the personal and the political into a message of shared hope, while Lex Fridman’s “one book a week” list helps eager young men recode their male intellectualism from the ground-up. With her production company Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon has built a media empire with a carefully curated book club at its heart. In this “literature-to-streaming” model, every title supports the brand vision of the company: “to change the narrative for women.” This noble goal does not inhibit a savvy awareness of her reader’s associated consumer preferences. Hello Sunshine gift boxes include a book pick alongside candles, silk pillowcases and body butter – cleverly interfacing with the lucrative self-care market. In her collaboration with Havenly, a concierge interior-design store, she has curated a collection of “shelf-care” soft furnishings that ensconce the reader in a bookverse that is cosy and personal (rather than spectacular and social).

Others are leveraging this architectural model, wherein multiple titles and authors nest within a broader publicity infrastructure. This year UK rapper Stormzy’s Penguin imprint #Merky hosted a literature festival, providing workshops, Q&As and networking sessions to help Black, queer and other marginalised groups to find their footing in the creative industries. This collaborative environment is expected to engender writers who are accountable to their nest but also granted a platform from which to gather clicks, followers – and hopefully, readers.

The social fabric surrounding book releases plays an increasingly important role for publishers and authors aiming to cultivate and defend microclimates of taste in the seeming absence, or at least rarity, of monocultural literary appetite. A fresh generation of independent bookshops host nearly always well-attended book clubs and augment their displays for #BookTok. Readers of niche or alt-lit tend to cloister themselves within tight networks of podcasts, Discord servers, newsletters and podcasts.

Publishers are learning how to augment key visual assets to appeal to generate brand loyalists. Fitzcarraldo’s ultramarine classicism declares a new seriousness in the act of reading, helping audiences to locate content of a shared tone and helping the press to generate a cult following. The stark, still-life of Faber’s Rachel Cusk covers presents bingeable but stylish comfort for a generation raised amid the vernacularism of Instagram’s aspect. The recent Fourth Estate reprint of Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black features an inflated Medievalist font and tarot cards, reskinning a literary classic in appeal to the aesthetic pretensions of #BookTok. If an AI digested Reese Witherspoon’s book club picks and spat out a generic approximation of their covers, it would likely feature a woman with long brown hair half in shadow and the title, written in dominating but sketchy cursive, would capture a voice defiantly emerging from everyday suburban horrors. Often it seems that ostensibly progressive books deploy visuals that affirm old, regressive tropes.

Most startling among the array of merchandise supporting the release of Beautiful World in 2021 was the sunshine-yellow bucket hat. This apparently incongruous collaboration between literary fiction and hypebeast fashion reified the open question both within the pages of the book and riven through the reviews and online squabbles that followed release day: to what extent is authentic political orientation possible in the dissolute malaise inculcated by platform capitalism? The publisher’s job is not to resolve that question, but to provide a totemic means for readers to declare themselves participants in that conversation – and only possibly, as fans. 

The Fandom

Communities have always existed around books and their authors. Before the internet, fandoms were widely dispersed, informal networks of devotees who communicated by means of mail lists, zines and conventions dedicated to the discussion of favourite fictional works. The contemporary -Tube, -gram and -Tok phenomenon marks a further evolution in fannish endeavours – their shared book prefix symbolic of a new lifestyle category as much as a printed publication. In this context, readers emerge as performers, patrons, and prosumers, fanatically engaged in affirmative modes of annotation.

The passage of sub-genre to mainstream cultural code can be tracked in the ascent of Dark Academia. Believed to have been instigated on Tumblr in around 2015 and citing Donna Tartt’s 1992 book The Secret History as its original inspiration, the gothic-tinged aesthetic is now a table-top feature in some branches of Waterstones. Its rise can be partly rationalised as a response to school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic and the switch to social platforms as auto-didactic resource. The sudden absence of IRL institutional realities made space for the class fantasies of Dark Academia to flourish. Like a love child of Blair Waldorf and Max Fischer, adjacent analogue signifiers have added fashionable contours to this pseudo-adult imagination of studentship; the aloof glamour of privilege lending the romantic cosplay of bookishness a self-aware and gently sinister flair.

The current of subversion that runs through literary fandom is also cutting a course through production protocols in the Web3 era. Online publishing and crowdfunding platforms offer writers an alternative journey to success. Reader likes, follows, upvotes, subscriptions and tokens become instruments of creative investment. Patronage models also offset marketing costs, guaranteeing a ready and willing audience, rather than a room of empty chairs. Emily Segal, a writer and artist, has funded her second novel on crypto-backed publishing platform Mirror. Serialisation – of the kind famously advanced by Charles Dickens’s comic novel The Pickwick Papers nearly two centuries ago – is also experiencing a digital renaissance: Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Greener Pastures was recently presented in 52 chunks on Substack. Across the eras, stories told in a steady flow of instalments have fostered uniquely collaborative writing and reading experiences, with fan feedback often seeping into plot and character development.

Contemporary fandoms seem particularly captivated by characters and their love interests. Of the expansive glossary of acronyms and abbreviations originating in “fanfic” forums, “shipping” has quickly been assimilated into pop-culture vocabulary. Describing the act of a slightly organised group of fans supporting or wishing for a particular relationship to exist, being a “shipper” involves the active interpretation of origin texts to generate romantic stories that can be as vivid and valid as the author’s intentions. In these fictional fantasies, it’s possible that we are witnessing something of what Roland Barthes was arguing about the “birth of the reader”. This theory proposed that readers are active participants in creating meaning, rather than passive recipients of an author’s intended message. The meaning of a text is not determined by the writer’s intentions or background, but by the reader’s interpretation, freed from authorial ownership. As the progeny of the chaste-tween vampire romance Twilight, the couple at the centre of Fifty Shades of Grey have made E.L. James the most commercially successful fanfiction author of all time. To the untrained eye, the sadomasochistic proclivities of her characters obscure the oft-repeated fanfiction trope of One True Pairing (OTP), suggesting that reader prosumption is, perhaps surprisingly, a conservative endeavour at heart.

I recently overheard another customer in a local indie bookshop conclude their transaction with the statement: “I’m part of BookTok.” It’s a shame that I didn’t earwig the preceding conversation, but the closing line caught my attention. The enthusiastic and assertive tone was insurgent, as though this shopper were an emissary sent from the virtual book-sphere to explore unfamiliar territory. As an organic evocation of fandom, the phrase signalled the status and solidarity afforded by collective identity. A hint of “don’t you know who I am?” was left hanging in the air.

The Discourse

It’s 9pm and I turn on Love Island. My wife Rosie spends one week every month away, managing her time between work and caring for a family member. Our realities fork for these seven days and Love Island is a way for us to stay connected. As the Geordie narrator’s voice screeches through my living room and taut flesh emerges from a swimming pool, I open my apps. Twitter has turned on one of the boys; he says all the right things to his girl, but his body language is hostile. I switch my attention back to the TV and he is teaching her how to make an omelette, patronisingly. Looool, I text Rosie. She says her stream is five minutes behind mine, no spoilers please. There’s a video on a regional newspaper’s Twitter feed of an Islander in a drunken fight a few years ago. I watch it a few times and strain to hear if he’s yelling something racist in the vid and share it with Rosie. At 10pm I text her goodnight, take 150 milligrams of magnesium and drink 3 cups of chamomile tea to drown out the Greek chorus bouncing around my head.

A Substack bro-scientist recommended “low dopamine mornings” to regulate my cortisol levels during the day. With a decaf tea in one hand, I switch on my Kindle with the other and notice I only have 3% battery, making me feel a little anxious. I’m reading a dense novel about a whale. I begin swiping and clicking at the pages. I’m distracted by a phrase that Amazon says 1,780 other readers have highlighted. I read it a few times, hoping it’ll stick. I recognise it from elsewhere, probably because this book is a classic that has shaped how our culture thinks and talks, maybe in ways we can’t fully perceive.

I give myself 30 minutes to play around on the internet before starting work at 9am. I open the Wikipedia page for the dense classic about a whale to read the author’s biography. I discover that he had a poor education and was somewhat of an autodidact. I switch to Twitter. People are beefing about the latest release of the it-lit “Millennial author”. I scan a 5,000-word essay in a literary magazine that says the author’s politics are merely gestural. Back on Twitter someone’s written an acerbic thread in response to the essay. I type out a reply on my anonymous account and feel my heart rate spike, I begin to sweat. I quickly backspace, delete it, close Twitter, and my heart settles. I make a note to read the book to see which side of the intra-Millennial squabble to pick. Just before I start work, I notice that the Love Island contestant with the fight vid has been kicked off the show.

At midday I put on my running shoes and find a podcast that’s exactly one hour long, the time it will take me to do two loops of the local park. They have a couple of guests on this episode, one is known for having a Twitter account she’s recently been booted off. She says The Internet Full Stop is a deep state psy-op. The wind is strong so I can’t hear clearly, but I think she has a sly dig at a peer who achieved some success at a now defunct new-media outlet. I push harder up a slope and feel my tendon injury strain. The other guest says we live in a “scripturient society”. I guess he means that we’re compulsively posting online without really thinking things through. Idk. 

After finishing work at 5.30pm I get in the car to go and buy some milk. I turn on 5Live, they’re interviewing a junior doctor on a picket line. The next segment is about the revision and republishing of a dead author’s children’s books to remove outdated, offensive language. An elderly caller says kids are being taught at school that there are 72 genders and isn’t that dreadful? The presenter questions the relevance of this to the debate at hand, but says that yeah, lots of people have deeply held beliefs on gender. A representative of the publishing house points out that the author himself revised his own books many times when he was alive, and that after all, it’s not like they’re taking the “originals” off the shelf.

Back at home I drain off a batch of kefir, put the grains back in the jar and add fresh milk. It’s particularly creamy and delicious today so I take a few photos of my set up, post them to the 13.1k members of the r/kefir subreddit and summarise my production process. Within a few minutes I have 12 upvotes. u/fermentboss comments saying I’m an idiot for using a metal lid, it will rust in no time. Users chime in and argue saying metal is fine – no, plastic is safer – just use muslin cloth. u/ringoforever tells everyone to calm down. It can only be a good thing for humanity that more people are making their own kefir, however they do it. Apparently scientists have been unable to replicate this complex cluster of bacteria from scratch or grow it in a lab. Its mysterious origins are unknown, but it survived for millennia passed from generation to generation in sacks of animal hide. So it would probably be OK if I use a metal lid.

Autership

Contemporary Künstlerromans tell stories of creative self-realisation set within societies scrambled by the demise of grand narratives. In this secular environment, writerly investigations of artist individuality and generative ability are often clustered under the umbrella of “auto-fiction”. The label collides two distinct forms into what literary critic Christian Lorentzen has described as an “unstable compound”. The intricate self-analyses produced might be dismissed as navel gazing, but turning inward can be grounding in chaotic times – the literary equivalent of putting your head between your knees during a dizzy spell.

Main character energy pulses through novel alt-lit hits such as Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi, its titular provocation luring all sorts to absorb the identity work it contains. The lead character, also a writer named Sean, is in meandering pursuit of “That Art Life”. Though he asserts: “I’m tryna write for people who don’t read. Who don’t give a shit about books.” However, the frequent references to, and conversations (literal and figurative) with his idols Sheila Heti, Tao Lin, and Karl Ove Knausgaard would suggest otherwise. Conroe’s subjectivity reminds us that writers are readers, too.

Books about books can give audiences an insight into the authorial experience. Jordan Castro’s The Novelist: A Novel captures a concise slice of the artistic process including but not limited to: time spent on the toilet scrolling Twitter, messing about with pets, gazing at a Google Doc, and compulsively checking emails. A substantial portion of Ruth Ozeki’s 2021 bestseller The Book of Form and Emptiness takes place in a library and features a book as both narrator and character. Translated from Japanese into English last year, Mieko Kawakami’s introspective fiction All the Lovers in the Night tracks the plodding progress of a lonely freelance proofreader who finds a happy ending as a fledgling writer. HBO’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels will soon conclude with a season based on the fourth part of series wherein its narrator, author Elena Greco, relies on writing a book to contain her best friend Lila in a “form whose boundaries won’t dissolve”.

Observation is inherent to art life, and recent accounts from the cultural fringes offer bracing visions of an increasingly sick, sorrowful and scary world. Our aforementioned fuccboi endures a debilitating skin condition that may or may not have a socio-spiritual cause. The ennui of so-called “sad girl lit” like Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh makes female abjection its central focus. Dark vibes intensify in Moshfegh’s newest novel Lapvona in which surreal depravity exposes callous human sensibilities. The brutal clarity of Alison Rumfitt’s debut book, Tell Me I’m Worthless, deftly uses horror to examine the haunting spectre of trauma, malignant right-wing politics and the violent hostilities endured by queer people in the UK today. We could read these stories as metaphors, but they are also documents of the real morbid effects that modern life is wreaking on our minds and bodies.

For some though, the self is not an end. Literary attempts to evade or escape the fate of the suffering artist seek to give shape to what one might do next. Post-authenticity might be defined as the acceptance of endless transition, and the care – from, for and with others – we need to cope with it. Maggie Nelson’s 2015 memoir The Argonauts deals with this in a valuable work of auto-theory that feels forever new. Her smooth integration of scholarly quotations read like an epic conversation unfolding across time with the implication being that art lives are necessarily a collective pursuit. A similar kind of dialogue is explored in Leave Society wherein Tao Lin’s avatar, Li, zones in and out of sincere ponderings about ancient communities, natural health, familial dynamics, and the “mystery” that exists beyond culture and technology. The title is playfully misleading given the book’s conscientious analysis of compassion and human capacity for change.

Fuccboi

(Hachette, 2022)