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Marianne Martens
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA
Abstract
The internet offers teens (especially girls, who have embraced social aspects of the web) a voice in
the books they read, from reviewing, blogging, and creating fan sites, to actually collaborating on
books-in-progress such as The Amanda Project by writing portions of the book or suggesting
storylines. But while these new means of participation are seemingly empowering for teenage girls,
is this participation a form of empowerment, or is it merely a way for publishers to exploit teens
labor to create commodified cultural products which they in turn can sell back to the teens who
helped shape them? In an era of user-generated content, this article examines how teens affective
labor as peer-to-peer-marketers and content creators is changing the transmedia cultural products
created for them.
Keywords
affect, branding, convergence, labor, marketing, social media, transmedia, user-generated
content
Users of content and manufactured goods are increasingly involved in the production process, from
the Lolcats website (Lolcats, n.d.) where users upload images of cats and add their own intentionally misspelled captions, to Local Motors Rally Fighter car (Local Motors, n.d.) which was
designed completely by crowd-sourcing1 (Eyvazzadeh, 2009). Just as the foundations of book
publishing have been shaken by content moving from the codex to ebooks to transmedia (Jenkins,
2006), meaning content which exists simultaneously on multiple platforms, it is not surprising that
book publishers, too, are experimenting with user-generated content. Attracting and exploiting
such content within a social setting has particularly strong potential with teens, especially teenage
girls. According to Sady Doyle (2009), girls tend to share their interests socially, and a 2007 Pew
Internet and American Life Project study (Lenhart et al., 2007) shows that girls are more likely than
Corresponding author:
Marianne Martens, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, School of Communication and Information, 4 Huntington
Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Email: martens@rci.rutgers.edu
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(1)
boys to be online content creators. As a result, girls have become extremely valuable to publishers
as both marketers and content creators, as exhibited in a range of online activity surrounding books
in the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer, and a recently launched series called The Amanda
Project (2009). While the web activity surrounding Twilight grew as the books increased in popularity, The Amanda Project was fully-conceived as a multi-platform, web-integrated transmedia
product from its beginning. In terms of affective labor, defined here as labor done freely and willingly that produces value for the user (Cote and Pybus, 2007; Jarrett, 2003; Terranova, 2000), girls
labor: (1) as book reviewers on social sites such as weRead.com and Amazon.com and as advancecopy reviewers evaluating books ahead of their publication (and consequently, as peer-to-peer
marketers) on publisher-owned teen sites; (2) as content creators on fan sites and anti-fan sites; and
(3) as content creators on publishers proprietary interactive websites. In this last example, the line
between readers and writers is blurred, and users affective labor results in user-generated content
ripe for exploitation by publishers based on their end-user license agreements (EULAS), which
govern activity on the sites and give owners the right to use work posted by teens.
While teens are arguably empowered by participating in cultural products produced for them
when they create content or review books on publishers sites, their participation commodifies
and brands them. Commodification of teens occurs when teens are targeted as both consumers
and creators of the cultural products created for them, and branding occurs when, as Alissa Quart
(2003) describes, teens create identities for themselves around the brands they consume, while
marketers attempt to align teens with the brands they are pitching. In the case of books for teens,
such branding results in what Robert McChesney (1999) calls hypercommercialism, which is
evident in examples from several recently published books such as: (1) product placement in
books such as Cathys Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233 by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman
(2008) or the books in the Gossip Girls series by Cecily von Ziegesar (e.g. 2002); (2) the milieu
of licensed merchandise based on books in Stephenie Meyers Twilight series (2005); and (3) The
Amanda Projects (2009) book-based website which features a shopping tab where readers can
buy Amanda-related merchandise, or follow links to the types of stores where the fictional
Amanda might shop.
Teens are commodified by their labor on the sites. Girls affective online labor fits into specific
categories of gendered labor: affective labor refers to those forms which manipulate a feeling of
ease, well being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 108, in Cote and
Pybus, 2007: 90), and historically this labour has been unpaid and has been commonly regarded as
womens work (Cote and Pybus, 2007: 90). The participating girls work as publicists, marketers, and content creators and of course consumers all jobs that fit into traditionally female
categories of work, particularly within the fields of childrens publishing and librarianship where
jobs have historically been dominated by women.
First this article will examine how girls labor is changing how books are created for young
adults by reviewing the historical context in which American librarian-led programs have included
American teens in reviewing and selecting young adult (YA) books since the inception of the
genre. Through their work as book reviewers, awarders, and collection development specialists,
librarians have traditionally been responsible for serving as taste-making gatekeepers operating
between publishers and teens, and introducing teens to a range of books. Next, this article will
review how mergers and acquisitions of publishing companies during the 1980s and 1990s created
an economic need to publish transmedia products, which have potential to sell to the widest possible audience. This research will analyze how the combination of transmedia products and the rise
of the internet has resulted in an interest in creating multi-platform books, and has enabled a direct
Martens
51
communication between publishers and teen consumers which circumnavigates the gatekeepers of
YA literature. Finally the article will review what teens are creating on publishers proprietary
social sites, and how this participation serves: (1) as peer-to-peer marketing in which teens recommend books to other teens; (2) as a free source for consumer research about teens tastes and interests which publishers can use to create new products for this market; and (3) as a source for content
which can be mined and appropriated by publishers in new transmedia products.
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(1)
Reflecting the protectionist tradition established by the early childrens librarians (who aimed to
improve childrens minds through books), literature for the young is mediated by multiple levels of
adult gatekeepers, from librarians, to educators, to parents. As Marc Aronson writes: YA literature
is the product of this difficult blend of adult judgment on behalf of teenagers and the preferences
teenagers manifest and the books they talk about, take out of the library, and even buy (Aronson,
1999). In order to sell more books, publishers sought to build relationships with these gatekeepers
(especially librarians and teachers). According to library marketing expert Mimi Kayden, starting
in the 1950s and 1960s, the librarians who worked with children were often actively involved in
reviewing books in trade journals, and most of them had personally read the books on their shelves
(Kayden, 2009). In addition, librarians were responsible for collection development, so economically it was important for YA publishers to focus their marketing strategies on young adult
librarians. Librarians represent an expert readership of YA literature, and prior to the internet,
publishers relationships with librarians, and to a lesser extent with teachers and parents, represented the primary method of disseminating books to teens. If publishers had a major author,
occasionally they would advertise in teen magazines, such as Seventeen, Mademoiselle or Boys
Life, but generally advertising in these magazines was considered too expensive for childrens
publishers. By the 1980s, publishers prepared biographical sheets for authors to mail to fans when
they got fan letters, and then authors started doing school visits. According to Kayden, school visits
were successful in making kids realize that all authors were not dead (Kayden, 2009). Yet despite
the access to authors provided by visits, publishers relationships with librarians always came first.
Figure 1, loosely modeled on Robert Darntons (1989) Communication Circuit represents this
traditional flow of information about YA books between publishers, the gatekeepers, and the teen
consumers. In contrast, Figure 2 demonstrates that the internet enables direct communication
between teens and publishers. The traditional gatekeepers are certainly still part of the model, but
their influence is reduced.
While there has been a history of teen participation in the books created for them, prior to the
internet such participation was predominantly via the library. Ironically, while the internet serves
as an intermediary between publishers and teens, it also provides disintermediation (Terranova,
2000: 34) by removing the adult gatekeepers. The direct communication between teens and
publishers allows publishers a view of the discourse between teens, and thereby an understanding
of teen taste, which in turn allows them to publish products that correspond to the discourse, all
without the intervention of the gatekeepers. On publishers teen-specific websites, viral marketing,
which Jarrett (2003) defines as marketing that is spread by users and not producers, serves as an
effective, and virtually free-of-charge, marketing campaign directed by teens for teens. As a result,
librarians role as arbiters of taste is diminished. Writing about book marketing, Squires (2008)
describes how publishers understand that books, as commodities infused with cultural capital, can
be used to translate Bourdieus cultural capital into economic capital, and naturally multinational corporations must focus on the economic capital that can be gained from the sale of transmedia properties. But what happens to this cultural capital when it is much easier for highly
commercial books with large marketing budgets and entertaining websites to reach teens than
it is for quieter works of literary fiction? Perhaps the concept of cultural capital in books needs
to be redefined. As Jack Zipes writes, for anything to become a phenomenon in Western society,
it must become conventional . . . it must conform to the standards of exception set by the mass
media and promoted by the culture industry in general (Zipes, 2001: 175). In theory, while having
their voices heard by publishers is empowering to teens, it is also disempowering, because teens are
not necessarily aware that the publishers proprietary sites are far from neutral, and that publishers
Martens
Figure 2. How information about books reaches teens in the era of the internet
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(1)
are able to shape or censor content to best suit their marketing strategy. Teens have agency as
reviewers and creators on sites they create as long as their views suit the overall goals of the site.
The idea of a resistant audience, coming from a position of externality, a being-against (Bratich,
2008: 43), is simply not possible on publishers carefully controlled proprietary sites, as the sites
would remove subversive voices that interfere with their marketing plans.
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55
create new programs), and his model translates easily to teens comments on publisher-owned
participatory websites which provide the same type of consumer feedback to publishers.
Most of the transnational publishing conglomerates including Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon
& Schuster, Scholastic, Penguin, and Macmillan have teen-specific sites, offering a range of ways
to participate, from sending postcards featuring book covers of forthcoming titles to up to 10
friends, to posting pictures, instant messaging friends, writing on message boards, answering surveys and taking quizzes. Random Houses Random Buzzers site allows members to earn Buzz
Bucks for their participation, which can then be used for merchandise on the site (Random House,
n.d.). While future research could confirm exactly how many Random Buzzers self-identify as
male compared to those who self-identify as female, a quick scan of user profiles on the Buzz
Boards indicates that nearly all members self-identify as female, confirming girls strong participation. Terranova (2000) refers to this unpaid labor in the digital economy as working for a social
factory (Terranova, 2000: 33) that employs NetSlaves, and while the Random House site may be
the only one that pays its workers, wages are meager. For example, users taking a quiz earn about
100 Buzz Bucks, and that currency can only be spent on the Random House site where books cost
between 15,000 and 35,000 Buzz Bucks (Random House, n.d.).
This language permits Random House to use any content posted by users however it chooses.
HarperCollins, the publisher of The Amanda Project, has similar rights to user-generated content
posted on the site. While participation on these sites is arguably entertaining, the entertainment
comes at a price.
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(1)
Readers questions
Authors answers
Random Houses Sisterhood Central Interview with Ann Brashares, bestselling author of
the Sisterhood series (Random Buzzers, n.d.)
Describe your favorite pair of pants. What At the moment, my favorite pair of pants are bright red.
makes them your favorite?
They are cropped, slightly flared summer pants. Like a good
friend, they are flexible, forgiving, and boost my confidence
even on really off days . . . And these pants manage to make
me feel loved even through major body transitions
(like having a baby!).
As the mother of three young children, do Even though Im closer to the age of the mothers, I related
more to the daughters. I think thats because I wrote the
you find that you relate more to the
book from the girls points of view. Although I tried really
girls or their mothers?
hard to imagine how the mothers would feel, I didnt actually
spend my days thinking their thoughts the way I do when Im
writing in a characters point of view.
Questions posted for Stephenie Meyer on Little, Browns Twilight Saga website (Twilight
Saga, n.d.)
Hi Stephenie What is your favourite scene I cant really choose just one. I love so many things. Bellas
in New Moon the movie? Laure
and Edwards first conversation in the parking lot . . . the
painting . . . Jessicas monologue . . . the scenes in Jacobs
garage . . . the first time you see the werewolves!! . . . Jacob
in Bellas room (thanks, Chris!) . . . the underwater moment
. . . what you see while Thom Yorkes amazing song is
playing . . . everything in Italy . . . and I could go on. Its all
so good.
You have such a great taste in music.
What would be your ultimate karaoke
song? Justina
The Twilight series provides a rich resource for studying user participation, not only because
of the enormous international success of the series, but also because its fans are enthusiastic
participants in online discourse about the series. Twi-hards (Twilight fans) publish their own
user-generated fan sites (and those who love to hate the series create anti-fan sites), write reviews
on weRead.com and Amazon.com, and participate in the Publishers Twilight Saga.com website
(2010). The Amanda Project website seeks to mine such participation by establishing a forum for
engagement on its site, encouraging users to participate in the book series by acting as
co-contributors of text and ideas for future books in the series. Yet while girls may choose to
participate out of a sense of empowerment and certainly the idea of being able to write reviews
of books you love (or hate) and to have a voice in creating a literary work is appealing in reality,
the participants are branded and commodified by these companies that produce products for their
consumption, from music, to movies, to books:
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57
Teen girls have the power to shape the market because they dont have financial responsibilities, tend
to be passionate about their interests, and share those interests socially. If a girl likes something, shes
liable to recommend it to her friends; a shared enthusiasm for Edward [one of two romantic heroes from
Twilight], or the Jonas Brothers, or anything else, becomes part of their bond. Marketers prize teenage
girls, even as the media scoff at them. (Doyle, 2009, para. 14)
Teens review books on sites such as Amazon.com and weRead.com, and their affective labor as
reviewers serves as peer-to-peer marketing, much as one friend recommending a book to another.
As an extreme example of teens reviewing a bestselling novel, as of 30 June 2010 there were
25,004 reader reviews on weRead.com (weRead, n.d.) of Twilight, the first book in Meyers
Twilight Saga which represents a substantial amount of online discourse. On the same date,
Amazon.com featured 4,843 reviews of the same book. Both Amazon.com and weRead display
positive and negative reviews by readers, which indicates a free and open environment. In addition,
discussion also serves to attract readers to the site.
Teens also participate in literature created for them via fan sites on the internet. As of 1 July
2010, Stephenie Meyers webpage (Stephenie Meyer.com, n.d.) listed 377 Twilight-related fan
sites, from sites with names such as Obsessive Edward Cullen Disorder (Obsessive Edward
Cullen Disorder, n.d.) created by individuals using online software such as freewebs.com or
weebly.com, to Little, Browns proprietary site The Twilight Saga.com (The Twilight Saga.com,
n.d.) which duplicates much of the fans efforts on the web within a proprietary site. The internet
has created a whole new venue for reaching teens and, at the same time, a way to exploit their
affective labor. Already in 2005, writing about television audiences, Shawn Shimpach (2005)
describes John Wells, a former Senior Vice President for communication at CBS, as being aware of
fan sites on the internet and praising them for their market research value.
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(1)
brand names as cultural referents is the most obvious example of von Ziegesars prose (Pattee,
2006: 166). Like teenage versions of the women in Candace Bushnells Sex and the City television
show (Bushnell and King, 1993), von Ziegesars teens wear the latest and most expensive brands,
from Columbia jackets, to Manolo Blahnik shoes.
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Bobbsey Twins series published by the Stratemeyer syndicate. Book packagers, such as Alloy,
creator of the Gossip Girls series, handle each step of book production, from writing (which is
generally by work-for-hire authors who do not get authorship credit), to editing and design, which
is done either by employees of Alloy or by their freelance editors and designers, and then nearlyfinished camera-ready text and art is sold to a publisher. The assumption of single authorship is an
illusion fostered by . . . Alloy to affect what Eagleton would call the social relationship of the
author to his or her readers (Pattee, 2006: 162). Publishers internet sites for teens also exploit this
social relationship, as shown in the examples of Stephenie Meyer and Ann Brashares. This relationship will be explored later in the context of The Amanda Project.
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launch The 39 Clues. In addition, the series has the benefit of appealing to multiple audiences:
readers and gamers, boys and girls. The final book in the series is scheduled for release in August
2010.
Like The 39 Clues, Harpers The Amanda Project is a multi-platform, transmedia book series
with an accompanying website, but unlike The 39 Clues, in this series readers are encouraged not
only to be consumers, but also producers of content. The first book, The Amanda Project: invisible
i, launches what is planned as an eight-book series about a high-school girl named Amanda who
has gone missing. Before she disappears, she leaves a series of clues for three previously unconnected students, Callie, Hal, and Nia, who become friends through their mutual quest. The Amanda
Project website provides some of the clues left by Amanda in the book, and asks readers to use the
clues to help find Amanda. In the case of The Amanda Project, which has been marketed to an older
audience than that of The 39 Clues and also an audience that is primarily female, users can play
games, shop, post, or chat. The paratext of the first book quite clearly targets girls, from the hot pink
cover with a long-haired girl in the center (Figure 4), to what resembles a female readers marginalia
of penciled doodles of birds, decorative scrolls, and flowers printed on the interior pages.
The first book is narrated primarily by Callie, who is on the fringe of belonging to a clique of
popular girls who call themselves the I-Girls, comprising Heidi, Kelli, Traci, and herself. Callie is
neither as pretty as the other girls in the group, nor as wealthy, but because of her relationship with
Heidi, she is included. The I-Girls identity is closely related to their clothing choices, and they
dress to avoid being what Callie calls a neutral (Kantor, 2009: 105) someone who is neither
among the most popular nor a fashion disaster (Kantor, 2009: 105). As with branding in books
described earlier, at Endeavor High, clothing determines status, and clothing brands are used as
social anchors to describe characters. Callie describes her boyfriend not by his height nor the color
of his eyes, but by the brands he wears: Lee had on this Abercrombie jacket he likes a lot that looks
really good on him . . . Sometimes I worried that, with his designer clothes and perfect body, Lees
totally out of my league and it was only a matter of time before he realized it (Kantor, 2009: 91).
Aside from her tenuous affiliation with the I-Girls, Callie is friends with Amanda and, in contrast to
the fashionably-branded I-Girls, Amanda is a non-conformist, described as wearing non-branded, vintage clothing. Amandas frequently changing and decidedly alternative styles range from American
pioneer girl: [Amanda] was wearing something in her hair that made it look as if shed grown a
waist-length ponytail overnight, and her dress, with its puffy sleeves and lace edging, definitely looked
like it was out of another century (Kantor, 2009: 60), to punk rocker: . . . her big eyes, heavily outlined in black to match the rest of her Patti Smith punk-rocker look . . . (2009: 85), to hippie: Amandas hair was long and straight, parted in the middle, and she was wearing a headband with a peace
symbol in the center of it around her forehead, and a long-fringed, beaded shirt (2009: 181).
The website design (see Figure 5) echoes elements of the book design, with a photograph that
features a girl with her face obscured on the front page. A YouTube video on the site with female
voiceovers interpellates prospective readers, encouraging them to read the books, learn more about
the characters on the website, and even write a story which, if it is good enough, will be published.
By participating on the site, teens can acquire cultural capital by posting smart, clever, or snarky
comments read by other members of The Amanda Project community. Readers can contribute their
own stories, plotlines, and artwork, and discuss (and create) potential fates for Amanda, and
HarperCollins plans to publish storylines contributed by readers (Deahl, 2009). Aside from
posting Amanda-related drawings and poems and posting answers to book-related clues on the site,
the site has a significant focus on consumption and branding. Users can enter the Amanda brand,
by participating in a competition to design an outfit for Amanda (see Figure 6) by using new
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61
Figure 4. Front cover of the first book in The Amanda Project series: The Amanda Project: Invisible i. (Reproduced with kind permission of Fourth Story Media)
clothing from a vintage-inspired store called Modcloth, almost like dressing a virtual paper doll.
Crossing boundaries between fiction and reality, the image in Figure 6 was allegedly posted by a
character from the book, Cornelia, who is little sister to Hal, and the alleged creator of The Amanda
Project website.
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(1)
Figure 5. The Amanda Project website (The Amanda Project, n.d. Reproduced with kind permission of Fourth
Story Media)
As with the extensive Twilight licensing, this series offers an identity that is available for
purchase. Users can buy accessories inspired by Amanda, such as a wallet, headband,
eye-glasses, gloves, a scarf, and jewelry. There is a link to the Modcloth store (in case users want to
conform to Amandas non-conformist style) and an iMix playlist with the kind of music Amanda
might enjoy. A closer look at Figure 6 shows that Cornelia is a daring shopper, freely mixing
clothing from mass-market retailers like H&M with designer logos like Emilio Pucci, while at the
same time helping to market these brands to readers.
The hypercommercialism in and around the series is evident to at least one adult reviewer in Kirkus
Reviews: The ending has no resolutions for any of the story lines, which bodes well for the series but
not for frustrated readers who have sat through 300 pages to get there . . . A baldly predatory attempt to
get into teens wallets (Kirkus review at B&N.com, n.d.). According to the website, this series is aimed
at girls ages 13-and-up, and the terms of use for the Amanda Project are very clearly stated:
You continue to own all rights to the material which you upload yourself to TAP, provided that, by
uploading any content to TAP, you automatically grant us a perpetual license to use, redact, republish,
copy, perform, sublicense, and distribute your content, including any intellectual property contained
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Figure 6. Amandas perfect outfit. (Reproduced with kind permission of Fourth Story Media)
therein, in any medium now known or hereinafter developed without payment or compensation to you
and without seeking any further approval from you. (The Amanda Project.com, n.d. Emphasis is mine)
In other words, HarperCollins is free to profit from books containing user-generated content that is
contributed by readers without offering them any compensation, and is able to extract economic value
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(1)
What is involved:
Our Stories
Clues
Users create and upload their own Amanda-style clues to which other
readers respond.
Debate Club
Gallery
Shop
from teenage girls surplus labor in a way that is entertaining and seemingly empowering to the teen
contributor-readers, while at the same time commodifying these teens and the cultural products created
for them. Publishers direct communication with teens afforded by the internet is seductive and empowering to the teens. The online labor by the teens (primarily girls) is veiled in activities that are appealing, social, and fun. Examples of the types of participation users can engage in are shown in Figure 7.
In addition to the activities shown in Figure 7, readers can take quizzes (as on the Random
House site, demonstrating their expertise about the book, although unlike at Random House, here
participants do not earn anything), and enter contests. While arguably teens can find agency in
participating in various online book-related activities, when they enter publisher-owned sites, such
as The Amanda Project, such agency is limited, as any user-generated content posted in the site is
restricted to that which serves the best interest of the publisher. Rebellious voices such as those that
created the antifan site Twilight Sucks! (Twilight sucks, n.d.), which ridicules the Twilight Saga,
will not appear on a publishers site. Unlike books in The 39 Clues series, The Amanda Project
has (so far) not used best-selling authors, and instead is using work-for-hire authors as evidenced
by lack of copyright credit to the author. This decision may affect the eventual success of the series.
Conclusion
During approximately 40 years of YA literature, teen participation in the books created for them
has evolved from readers participating in physical, library-based programs mediated by gatekeeping arbiters of taste (such as YA librarians), to a virtual disintermediated discourse between teens
and publishers on the internet.
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Arguably, the activities on sites such as The Amanda Project are carefully researched to appeal
to their target users, and as such are immensely entertaining. But as Geer (2007) writes: If we are
uneasy about the effects of corporate influence on childrens culture and the tone of current
scholarship on this subject generally ranges from uneasy to appalled we would do well, I think, to
resist the interpretive paradigms these corporations offer (2007: 194). Unfortunately, it is virtually
impossible to resist these paradigms, as producers of transmedia continue to blur the line between
product and advertising, creator and consumer, while these products become embedded in our lives
in new and unexpected ways. While teens can certainly enjoy participating on corporate-owned
websites, teens agency is not a consideration here, as the sites are censored and manipulated in
order to achieve the best possible marketing and branding. This raises the question of who is getting more value: teens who are using the sites, or publishers who are getting free consumer
research, peer-to-peer marketing, and user-generated content? Perhaps there could be a way to
bring back the idea of Ruth Hill Viguers Not Recommended list, possibly through
non-commercial, library-based programs with teen participation, to educate teens about the commercialization of certain books, and perhaps, with teens involvement, to expand the selection of
literature from the loud books fueled by marketing money and elaborate websites pushed by
publishers for their earning potential, to quieter books, giving a voice to other authors who are
currently finding it challenging to find a niche in the literary marketplace. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, after the 2010 Best Books for Young Adults (BBYA) list was published on the Young
Adult Library Services Association site, a decision was made to change the BBYA list to a Best
Fiction for Young Adults list (YALSA, n.d.) which to many in the industry signals a reduced presence for the list, and a reduced role for those gatekeeping librarians dedicated to sorting the literary
from the mediocre.
Notes
1. The Local Motor scheme involved 2,000 community members in more than 100 countries who created
over 35,000 designs for the Rally Fighter car, which represents the first car completely designed by
crowd-sourced user-generated content.
2. Books Are Fun is a display marketer that sells highly-discounted books via sales representatives in corporations, schools, and other institutions.
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Biography
Marianne Martens is a doctoral candidate in Library and Information Science at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. With a background in publishing, she is interested in literary prizes and reviews as the
intersection between publishing and librarianship for young adults, focusing on issues of commodification
of books for teens, consumption, teens participation in the creation of such literature via online review sites
(publisher-owned and independent), and fan sites, as well as issues of transnationalism.