The Content Machines and Hidden Labour Transforming Publishing

This story was originally published in the 2026 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Review.

English professor Dr. Sarah Brouillette studies the contemporary publishing industry as a space where cultural, economic, and technological transformations are unfolding in real time.

Her research spans contemporary literature and culture, cultural theory, the sociology of culture, creative industries, and Marxist analysis, and she’s long been interested in how capitalist pressures shape literary production.

In recent years, social media and online writing platforms have opened a new frontier.

Brouillette’s newest project, a forthcoming book from Duke University Press titled Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era, was prompted by conversations with her students about what they were reading.

Curiosity led to research, and Brouillette says what she found was fascinating.

She explains that Wattpad, a social storytelling platform that users can read, write, and share original stories on, once promoted the idea of automating storytelling through massive datasets—a precursor to today’s AI buzz.

“One of the first things that people said about it was that they had this plan to automate the production of narrative by gathering so much data that they could produce the ideal text with a computer rather than with human writers.”

But the reality of the platform was the opposite.

“The vast majority of the content on Wattpad is offered by amateurs who are completely unpaid,” Brouillette says. “I couldn’t really see why they would have any incentive to automate human writers out of existence, because they basically do all of this for free, out of fun and love and passion.”

That realization opened up a much larger set of questions about creativity, labour, and the digital economy.

Brouillette began examining what sociologists call immaterial or affective compensation—emotional rewards like community, feedback, or recognition—which often stand in for real pay.

On Wattpad, writers develop their skills, share work, and build audiences, while the platform mines this activity to scout for talent, publish successful authors, and option stories to film and TV.

“They’re ultimately a corporate enterprise,” she says. “And the more I looked into it, the more I saw this as a really fundamental transformation.”

Her research shows that this shift extends far beyond a single platform. Across the publishing chain, gig-based, freelance, and platform-mediated work is becoming the norm.

“All aspects of book production have become very gig based,” she says. “People are working freelance and taking short-term jobs for very little pay.”

On platforms like Wattpad and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), writers are encouraged to churn out rapid content to stay visible in algorithm-driven marketplaces. At the same time, on gig-work sites like Reedsy and Fiverr, editors, book designers, and marketers are selling their services on a project-by-project basis.

Brouillette says even audiobook production is being reshaped by the demands of platform listening.

“You have to use certain narrative arcs to keep people’s attention and refer back to character names and aspects of the story that you might forget about, because there’s a real understanding that people listen to audiobooks when they’re doing other things at the same time,” Brouillette explains. “It’s become a background sound which is a very different way of consuming content than sitting with a book and focusing on every word.”

Another strand of her work explores online communities like BookTok and the rising tradwife phenomenon on TikTok.

Despite their differences, she sees structural similarities: both are dominated by young women, both involve creating content that is typically poorly compensated, and both rely on performances of authenticity—even when the content is strategically crafted.

“There’s a shared interest for me,” she says, in how these creators navigate a system where “a lot of people are vying for attention and most of them are getting very, very little pay for it.”

At the same time, many of these platforms market themselves through the language of inclusivity and representation.

Wattpad, for example, positions itself in contrast to “traditional publishing,” which Brouillette notes is often accurately criticized as white, middle-class, and homogeneous. The platform promises to democratize creativity.

While she acknowledges that this is partly a business strategy—eliciting free contributions from users—it is also genuinely appealing to readers seeking community and representation.

“I think the narratives they highlight tend to have thematics that match Wattpad’s own embrace of difference and diversity,” she says. “It was very notable to me how much that came up—this effort to make people feel represented, seen, and included.”

Across all these cases, Brouillette sees a consistent thread: the hidden labour behind the appearance of free or cheap cultural consumption.

Whether it’s fanfiction, TikTok videos, Kindle serials, or audiobooks, someone is producing that content—often quickly, with little compensation, and under platform-driven constraints.

“Honestly, the primary thing is that all of this content involves work,” she says.

Brouillette says one message she hopes readers take from her forthcoming book is that the shift toward platform-based cultural consumption brings profound consequences for how creative labour is valued.

“Cheap and free content has a cost,” she says. “There’s a whole world of creative production behind the scenes that we don’t think about that is being cheapened and, in some cases, de-skilled or automated, in order to provide us with that experience.”

Her research, in many ways, asks us to look differently at the stories we consume—and at the unseen labour that brings them into being.