YouTubers-turned-authors and the problematic practice of authenticity

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.