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Date of Graduation

5-2026

Description

In giving over literature wholly to the market, collapsing as far as possible the distance between literature’s residually sacral significance as a repository of higher values and its everyday function as a commodity, Amazon in one sense intensifies a phenomenon occasioned by the consolidation of publishing in recent decades into immense multinational media conglomerates,” writes professor Mark McGurl in his book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021). McGurl’s research on Amazon’s role in the literary industry created a baseline for my research on the use of algorithms in digital marketplaces as they relate to literary sales, particularly in trending fiction titles. My research on algorithms exposes a greater link between popular fiction and social media algorithms, as the digital age changes the fundamentals of storytelling, authorship, and distribution of media. My paper will explore shifts in design, content, and marketing of popular contemporary fiction novels as a result of the literature industry’s increasing reliance upon social media and digital marketplace algorithms. Further, I will draw into question how algorithms and social media use have changed what the novel represents to readers, writers, and corporations. In three chapters I analyze a best-selling text from three of the most popular fiction genres: thriller, romance, and fantasy. The novels I focused my analysis on were Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid (2022), Colleen Hoover’s Ugly Love (2014), and Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015). Through these popular texts and others in each genre I have discovered trends across the genres in tropes, character archetypes, and title and cover design, increasing in homogeneity as the industry further relies on social media for marketing and distribution of popular texts. This research is my first project in a continued academic interest in contemporary literature’s relationship to developments in digital media, and my aim to increase consciousness among readers, social media users, and shoppers about what they are consuming, how it reached them, and what, above all, its purpose is.

Publication Date

2026

Document Type

Book

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts in English

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

English

Advisor/Mentor

Hinrichsen, Lisa

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Keywords

Humanities

“The Influence of Social Media and Algorithmic Capitalism on Popular Fiction”

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