As I said in my previous blog about getting shit done when life drops a big ‘hold your horses’ on you, I have been trying my best to get as much done on my research as possible while still doing the whole job hunt thing. Last week I managed to finish my chapter on the Rise of the Citizen Author, a term coined by Leader Reeves (of magazine and hyperreallity fame).
Essentially, the citizen author is an author who embraces the use of technology and digitally social platforms to write and share their work, sometimes for monetary gain, sometimes for recognition, and sometimes for simply sharing a work. Now, you might think that there is no difference in the citizen author and the self-publishing author of the current day, but there are a few differences. The demographics of those who uptake and use the technology is higher among citizen authors and the ages are a bit younger. There are similarities though in income levels, educational backgrounds, and sex – meaning that though men take up new technology more, women are more likely to use social media and to self-publish works.
The key here isn’t that there is a difference between the self-publishing authors and the citizen authors, it is the way that the very existence and rise of the citizen author is forcing a change in the culture of the industry in a way that really hasn’t been seen much over time. Yes, these things altered publishing: the invention of the printing press, the rise of steam and power printing, litho plates, etc., the development of the agency model in the late nineteenth century was also a huge deal. Then we have the digital shifts from computers, to POD, to authors being able to print and sell their own works (either through an intermediary like Amazon or Smashwords), to the current shift we are facing: the rise of the citizen author who actively forgoes the traditional publishing model which looks as the diagram below:
Now, the power has altered. Social media platforms are becoming a place to write, test, and share works, fiction repositories like Medium, Wattpad, and Fanfiction.net are HUGE networks of writing that highlight that the citizen author is ignoring the traditional route to publication. In fact, in this shift, publishers and agents are now beginning to actively seek out writers, a change from the exclusive author-agent-publisher-reader model that has dominated the industry for over 100 years. This is a huge shift. The writer now has the power to command attention from the industry while sharing their work, and interacting directly with, the reader.
This is a big deal. Publishers and agents are trawling the web to locate authors that will sell well. While on the one hand, this does help remove the guesswork on the part of the publisher as to what will sell, but it brings into play a different power dynamic, one where the social platform is brokering the deal. Will this alter the way the citizen author works? Or are the digitally social platforms simply becoming the modern agent for the digital age?