ABSTRACT
The citizen author’s role in the digital communities they inhabit enables us to understand the real and potential relationships that exist between them, the readers, and the wider industry. The relationships may not always develop into fruitful publishing deals or reader feedback that generates new elements in the citizen author’s work, but they open up spaces within the discourse that require the connectivity developed by the interaction of the citizen author and reader on a social platform to be acknowledged by those involved in the industry. In this chapter, the focus is on the role and makeup of the digital communities based around the relationships between the citizen authors and the readers. Defining the communities within the study in relation to their malleable boundaries, different relationships, and the context and collapse, allows for the sites of interest to include surveys, interviews, data mining, and content from social platforms, all of which provide different platforms for defining a book. Those citizen authors, readers, and publishers all have the authority to define a book, and in doing so new definitions are developed as they overlap within the wider discourse, creating new strategies of power.
