'Selling' Literature: The cultivation of book buzz in the digital literary sphere

How have book marketing, publicity, and retailing changed with the dominance of the internet? Clearly, e-commerce has altered who the major players are: battles between market-dominating Amazon and its various retail and publishing adversaries are well documented. But, more pervasively, how has the rise of the digital literary sphere changed the whole manner in which books are ‘sold’ to potential readers, not only in the sense of a commercial transaction, but in the broader sense of ‘selling’ readers on the idea of bookishness? Examining innovations in digital book marketing such as book trailers and blog tours, this article explores how the digital literary sphere is transforming notions of contemporary book community. It probes whether existing theories and methods for studying the contemporary literary ecosystem are adequate to account for these new realities.