Inequalities of Platform Publishing: The Promise and Peril of Self-Publishing in the Digital Book Era (Page and Screen) (Paperback)

Description

By Claire Parnell

$32.95

Description

Uncovering race, gender, and sexual biases in popular self-publishing platforms

The average reader need not go far in a bookstore before, knowingly or not, they encounter authors who started their careers by self-publishing prior to achieving commercial success. Examples include Margaret Atwood, Andy Weir, Colleen Hoover, Anna Todd, E. L. James, Scarlett St. Clair, and many more. Such stories of self-made writers are compelling and seem more attainable to others with the accessibility of modern publishing platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Wattpad, Webtoon, Radish, Inkitt, Qidian, Tapas, and Swoon Reads. However, as Claire Parnell uncovers in her examination of the two most popular—Amazon and Wattpad—these services in fact perpetuate systemic racial, gender, and sexual bias against authors of color and queer authors through their technological, economic, social, and cultural structures.

At a time when there is a real reckoning with the discrimination that has resulted in publishing opportunities for only relatively few privileged authors—who are often White, upper class, and male—self-publishing presents itself as an equalizer of sorts. Exploring that idea, Parnell shows that these platforms are not just intermediaries for information; they structure content and users in multiple, often inequitable, ways through their ability to set market conditions and apply algorithmic sorting. Combining original interviews, walkthrough method, metadata analysis, and more, Parnell finds that self-publishing platforms reproduce challenges for authors from marginalized communities. Far from equalizing the market, the new platforms instead frequently perpetuate the stubborn barriers to mainstream success for BIPOC and queer authors.

About the Author

CLAIRE PARNELL is lecturer in Digital Publishing at the University of Melbourne. Her research has appeared in Media, Culture & Society, Publishing Research Quarterly, Creative Industries Journal,and more.

Praise For…

“Parnell exposes the gap between rhetoric and reality in contemporary digital publishing ecosystems. . . . A significant contribution to platform studies and publishing studies research.”—Rachel Noorda, Convergence

“This book exposes how the same tired structures of exclusion and inequity are recreated by publishing platforms under yet another promise of creative freedom and opportunity. If you like reading books, particularly genre fiction, this book is extremely relevant to your interests.”—Sarah Wendell, cofounder of Smart Bitches Trashy Books

“Parnell deftly zooms in to the human impacts of platform-based publishing as well as zooming out to the broader implications on the publishing industry. It brings together publishing and platform studies in an accessible manner and offers a valuable contribution to both fields.”—Simon Rowberry, author of Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform

“Though often sneered at, the romance genre is the canary in the coal mine for new ideas in publishing, and the exploitation of these authors by entities only concerned with data is a warning that should resonate far beyond the genre.”—Steve Ammidown, romance genre historian co-host, Black Romance Has A History podcast

“Parnell shows that two self-publishing platforms—Amazon and Wattpad—are not the democratizing utopian platforms they would like to be known as, and through interviews and case studies the author shows that these platforms tend to replicate the inequalities found offline in the traditional industry. This book adds a new, necessary depth of research into the world of publishing on platforms that were supposed to bring equality, but, in fact, exacerbates inequalities in the name of monetization.”—Miriam Johnson, author of Books and Social Media: How the Digital Age is Shaping the Printed Word

“This delightfully detailed book exposes these platforms’ techno-cultural and socioeconomic infrastructures that promise a democratization of cultural production, but that perpetuate and add to power hierarchies inherent in traditional publishing practices informed by conglomerate and platform capitalism. Through meticulous and effective argumentation via findings and individual stories, the author successfully convinced this reader that new technologies don’t create new realities for marginalized writers.”—DeNel Rehberg Sedo, coauthor of Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture

“A timely investigation into the operation of online publishing platforms as they relate to romance fiction and a broader media ecology. Parnell’s inquiry is especially valuable for its inclusion of the voices of marginalized authors and how algorithms, deep learning software, and technological redlining affects their autonomy and reach. Through a mixed methodology drawing on platform and publishing studies, library and information science terminology, as well as interviews with romance writers (spanning the globe), Parnell uncovers the workings and capitalist logics of the e-book marketplace. A welcome and necessary addition to popular culture scholarship and the digital humanities as well as an accessible read for anyone curious about who profits from online media.”—Jayashree Kamblé, author of Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-PresentationProduct Details
ISBN: 9781625349057
ISBN-10: 162534905X
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Publication Date: October 28th, 2025
Pages: 240
Language: English
Series: Page and Screen