Digital Authorship

This Element looks at contemporary authorship via three key authorial roles: indie publisher hybrid author and fanfiction writer. The twenty-first century''s digital and networked media allows writers to disintermediate the established structures of royalty publishing and to distribute their work directly to - and often in collaboration with - their readers. This demotic author one who is ''of the people'' often works in genres considered ''popular'' or ''derivative''. The demotic author eschews the top-down communication flow of author > text > reader in favor of publishing platforms that generate attention capital such as blogs fanfiction communities and social media.