YouTubers-turned-authors and the problematic practice of authenticity

ABSTRACT

This article starts out from the observation that YouTube personalities who publish bestselling books and subsequently attempt to establish themselves as creditable authors engage in digital practices of authenticity. Considering the specific cases of three high-profile YouTubers publishing their first books in the second phase of the so-called ‘YouTuber Book Boom’ (DeSimone 2015), this article reads the event of the performatively authentic YouTube-to-print transition as necessitating a disruption of the norms of field migration. Examining the simultaneous enhancement and limitation of the creative role of the YouTuber-turned-author moving across fields alongside that of the viewer-turned-reader – who engages in a concomitant migratory process – it discusses strategies deployed by YouTubers in both the original (digital) and target (literary) fields to legitimise their creative labour, and attempt to maintain audience engagement, knowledge, and agency. Finding that the most successful instances of what I term ‘dual migration’ are those in which the influence and responsiveness of viewers-turned-readers is equally privileged in original and target fields, it is argued that it is only through the full recognition and textual incorporation of the creative power of such readers that YouTube-to-print transitions might be fully authenticated.

KEYWORDS:

• YouTube
• authorship
• readership
• authenticity
• field migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. DeSimone (2015) does, in fact, anticipate forthcoming releases of books by prominent YouTube stars, and stresses that any drops in sales are currently marginal, despite potential ‘fan fatigue’ due to the volume of book releases.

2. To give just one example, numerous such hints are included in Howell’s 2016 video ‘Dan’s Diss Track – ROAST YOURSELF CHALLENGE’ (Howell and Lester 2016), which adopts a tone of light-hearted self-scrutiny, and in which he repeatedly references both the ambiguous nature of his performance of his sexuality online, and the experience of being shipped with Lester by fans.

3. For a full and compelling account of such parallels, see Raun (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison Lutton

Alison Lutton is Lecturer in English at Somerville College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on contemporary (predominantly American) literature and questions of intermediality, celebrity, and literary value, and she is currently working on a monograph project considering how such questions are negotiated in the work and public profiles of JT LeRoy and Bret Easton Ellis, amongst others.