Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

See the chapter on "Generic Love, or, The Realism of Romance" but romance is also discussed elsewhere in the book, including the chapters on "World-Scaling: Literary Fiction in the Genre System" and "Unspeakable Conventionality: The Perversity of the Kindle," the latter of which mentions the "#Cockygate scandal" (185). The name of that chapter is identical to a paper by McGurl published the same year in American Literary History.

Here's part of the abstract:

Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The “Everything Store” has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorized as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction.

Charting a course spanning from Henry James to E. L. James, McGurl shows that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution. This consumerist logic—if you like this, you might also like ...—has reorganized the  fiction universe so that literary prize-winners sit alongside fantasy, romance, fan fiction, and the infinite list of hybrid genres and self-published works.

This is an innovation to be cautiously celebrated. Amazon’s platform is not just a retail juggernaut but an aesthetic experiment driven by an unseen algorithm rivaling in the depths of its effects any major cultural shift in history. Here all fiction is genre fiction, and the niches range from the categories of crime and science fiction to the more refined interests of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica.

Here's a quote from the beginning of chapter 3, on "Generic Love, or, The Realism of Romance":

has the consumerist ethos embodied in Amazon’s commercial practices been internalized in the novel’s form? The previous two chapters of this book asked a similar question mainly from the side of literary production, tracing the penetration of an entrepreneurial ideal—the author as self-publishing “start-up,” or corporate CEO—in the popular literature of an economy increasingly defined by the conscripted provision of services rather than the industrial production of durable goods. In this and in the following chapter of this book, that perspective will be flipped, allegories of supply giving way to those of demand as we focus on the novel as something, one kind of thing, a person might want to buy, simply, but as it happens not so simply.

and here's another, from a few pages later:

What do we see when we center our view of the literary field on romance rather than on literary fiction? We see the inescapable identity of the novel as a generic commodity, to be sure, but also some of the surprising complexity of its engagement with the realities of consumer culture. While the characters and events of romance are not always “realistic” on the level of representational verisimilitude, they, by their nature, continually reflect upon the economic and otherwise crudely material bases of modern love and life in general, the world not as it might be built anew in some science fiction novel but as it already impinges on everything. In relation to these bases, romance instances what we might call a “functional” or “therapeutic” realism.

One review, by Casey Brienza, in Publishing Research Quarterly, can be found here.