Market-enabled Consumer Creativity

In the last decades, digital platforms have allowed millions of self-publishing authors to reach their audiences and the publishing market, simplifying distribution and offering a significant degree of freedom in personalizing their approach. We argue that consumer creativity changes as a result. This study investigates how hobbyist consumers have taken advantage of the resources, knowledge and legitimation provided by the networked sociality and the market in these platforms to navigate the traditional publishing industry. Building on the sociology of creativity as our theoretical lens, we draw from an eight-year ethnographic study within the Italian publishing sector to explore the transition from consumers to creators. Our findings introduce a marketization process of consumer creativity comprised of four phases: instinctive, rookie, constrained, and market-enabled consumer creativity. Through each phase, consumers transition from being hobbyist writers towards professional creators. Our contributions emphasize the role of digital platform markets as intermediary between personal creative aspirations and market standards leading to the development of a market-enabled consumer creativity. We contribute to literature on consumer creativity, advancing understanding of the genesis and legitimization of consumer creativity within the marketplace.