Ubiquitäres Publizieren. Zur Theorie und Geschichte des Selbstveröffentlichens
Authors: Walzer Dorothea 
Published: July 2023

The article argues that today publishing is no longer solely an institutionally bound professional practice of so-called gatekeepers. Through self-publishing via digital infrastructures, it has become a format of action for both amateurs and professional authors alike. The widespread possibilities of self-publishing arise, on the one hand, from the establishment of self-publishing platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing, Lulu or Wattpad, the acceptance of which has increased significantly due to the development and successful marketing of reading apps such as Kindle or iPad. On the other hand, they arise from the omnipresent possibilities of interactive online media, i. e. through self-publishing on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Both forms of self-publishing are part of what has been referred to as the ›appification‹ and ›platformization‹ of knowledge economies. The determination of the relationship between publishing and posting remains a gap in self-publishing research, which this article seeks to address. The article defines ›ubiquitous publishing‹ as the sum of self-publishing practices that are situated within a continuum of publishing and posting and give rise to hybrid publication models. The concept of ubiquitous publishing is to be determined from the coexistence and linkage of everyday and professional self-publishing practices. The goal is to understand ubiquitous publishing as a platform-based modeling of self-publication that competes alongside institutionalized publishing landscapes, shapes them, and questions them. With the multiplication of self-publishing, an intertwining of literary production with its infrastructural conditions, of literature and its mediation, takes place.

In the first section, the text argues that self-publishing is an everyday competency or literacy, and that it is accompanied by new forms of professionalization and legitimization. The historical classification of self-publishing within the service economy is considered in the second section. This reveals a dependence of professional self-publishers on the audience’s needs, mediated by the market. New procedures for generating resonance and increasing publication frequency result from this dependence. Analyzing the self-publishing and subscription project Der Teutsche Merkur by Christoph Martin Wieland in the second section shows that these procedures were already essential for self-published journals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Through constellation with Rupi Kaur’s Instapoesie in the fourth section, common determining aspects of self-publishing emerge despite fundamental media-historical differences between analog and digital self-publishing. These include, above all, the procedures of serialization and (self-)commentary as well as the addressing of the audience. All of these procedures generate feedback between author and audience and allow mediation to become a constitutive component of the literary text. Against this background, self-publishing within digital infrastructures appears as a generally accessible social practice based on the socio-technical mechanisms of filtering and amplification. New procedures and standards for legitimizing literature and the literary are established.

The article concludes that the concept of ubiquitous publishing is a significant aspect of the current state of self-publishing. It demonstrates the intertwining of literary production with its infrastructural conditions and reveals new forms of professionalization and legitimization. And it shows that self-published literature is always literature in mediation. The article contributes to the ongoing debate on the definition and understanding of self-publishing.