This project is designed to understand how published authors perform the role of authorship in online spaces. This comes out of my PhD at Brookes where an author I interviewed about her social media use said that she used different platforms for different things and was her most ‘authorial’ on Twitter and more personal on ‘Instagram’. There has been work done on how users perform themselves in online social spaces (Litt & Hargittai 2016; Gatson 2011; Van Dijck 2013; and Osborne 2012), but much less related research into how this performativity manifests itself in the field of publishing studies. This research will provide insight into how authors use these platforms to perform their roles, paying particular attention to their interactions in relation to their writing genres, and gender. This is important to understand how their performance(s) as authors can relate to reach and how it drives book sales and other tangible author opportunities – such as an author on Twitter being DMed to be invited to speak on a panel, etc.
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