The growth and adoption of social media has significantly impacted the writing and publishing landscape, challenging traditional concepts of authorship and prompting a re-evaluation of how authors present themselves in digitally social spaces. This book explores how authors navigate the performance of their authorship in the digital age, focusing on the development of author identity, its relationship to performance, the value of authenticity, and how authors may self-censor based on who they think their audiences are. Drawing on qualitative surveys and interviews, and quantitative data scraping and mining for sentiment analysis, this research explores how authors project their identities within the consumer's cultural landscape. By investigating the performative nature of authorship in digitally social spaces, this study aims to deepen our understanding of the evolving dynamics between authors, their works, and readers in the digital era.

Miriam J Johnson teaches Marketing, Creative industries, Brand Management and Digital Strategy at Oxford Brookes , and is the author of two monographs: Books and Social Media: How the Digital Age is Shaping the Printed Word (Routledge 2021) and Social Media Marketing for Book Publishers (Routledge 2022).