"A book is not like any other commodity" : A qualitative study on Swedish bookfluencers, labour, and aspirations.

Abstract: The thesis focuses on bookfluencers – content creators that create content about books and reading. The study explores how they perceive the gifted books they receive from book publishers and other actors, which they are expected to create content about – often unpaid. The aim of the thesis is to investigate the aspirations behind bookfluencers’ content about gifted books and their experiences of reading them. Furthermore, it explores unpaid labour on social media platforms and attachment to art as an aspiration. How do bookfluencers on social media differ from literary critics in traditional media? The study’s methodology is semi-structured interviews with 10 Swedish bookfluencers. The theoretical framework consists of the concepts of “affective labor” (Hardt, 1999, p. 89; Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 108), “aspirational labour” (Duffy, 2015, p. 443), “attunement” (Felski, 2020, p. 41) and “work-net” (Felski, 2020, p. 144). The analysis emphasizes on the labour behind creating content about gifted books, how bookfluencers position themselves and their content in relation to literary criticism, and the processes of attunement to books that they are gifted. Main findings are that seeing reading as an aspiration behind content gives bookfluencers a certain power to negotiate, despite collaborators’ demands. Defining themselves as book recommenders rather than literary critics may imply other expectations on their labour. Further, expectations from collaborators can affect bookfluencers’ reading experiences: the need to adapt their content to the book market can be seen as a form of affective labour. In the last section, the thesis discusses different processes that affect the reading experience of a gifted book, and how bookfluencers imagine getting paid for their work in the future. It problematizes how social media platforms do not pay their content creators. Thus, possible future research topics can explore bookfluencers’ relations to social media platforms and book streaming platforms further.