With falling revenues from book sales, industry-wide and publishing house restructurings, declining marketing budgets, and the affordances of digital media, the promotional labor associated with books is increasingly being shifted onto individual authors, and usually on an unpaid basis. This article discusses the findings of an all gender online survey of Australian authors conducted in early 2025—the first stage of a larger project on Australian women writers and digital media. We examine the gendered and genre differences in authors’ use of digital media for their careers, including preferred platforms, time spent using digital media, the rationale for using it, the support available, and attitudes towards this work. In addition, we detail respondents’ reported experiences of online harassment and misogyny and how self-censorship becomes a way of negotiating such limitations. Our findings suggest that digital media is an unquestioned, if not necessarily effective, part of the field of literary production, and that its use is highly gendered. Moreover, the early promises of digital media as an expanded and liberated form of public sphere are shown to be hollow, instead subjecting authors to more unpaid work and limiting the types of public conversations in which they can participate.
The development of copyright law and moral rights law were influenced by the romantic ideal of the author in which literary and creative outputs are conceived as works of individual genius (Hook 2023). In contrast, book history, in particular Darnton’s field-defining communications circuit (Darnton 1982) and more recent updates (Ray Murray and Squires 2013), emphasize that authorship is situated within a broader collaborative process that takes the book from author to reader. These conflicting ideas about bookmaking are indicative of one way in which copyright law and moral rights are out of step with creative practice in Australia. Drawing upon book history and copyright law, in this article I examine ideas about authorship which have been enshrined within the Australian legal system and conduct a comparative analysis with Darnton’s communication circuit and prominent theoretical understandings of book creation. I find that while contemporary copyright and moral rights law draw upon the romantic ideal of authorship to assign particular rights to the author, not only do these not accord with contemporary understandings of the process of bookmaking, but they do not provide effective protection to the authors in whom it endows them.
This article explores the role of social media in supporting Australian young adult (YA) fiction in contemporary book cultures. Previous research has mapped contemporary book cultures in digital media and demonstrated the value of spaces such as Bookstagram to industry, authors, and readers (Martens et al. 2022; Reddan et al. 2024). While contemporary YA fiction is a thriving industry in Australia, supported by social media and industry networks in digital spaces, there is concern about declining readership among young adults both nationally (Rutherford et al. 2024) and internationally (Cremin and Scholes 2024). With the recent social media ban in Australia (December 2025) (eSafety Commission 2025), it is important to highlight the role of social media in the YA industry and to potential young adult readers who use social media to identify reading material, keep up with authors and connect to other readers (Rutherford et al. 2024; Schoonens and Dezuanni 2026). As such, this article takes an exploratory approach to examining social media platforms and content that connects the book industry and readers to Australian YA content.
