“Also Now at Costco”: Visibility and Discoverability in Contemporary Publishing

In the summer of 2024, Irish writer Colm Tóibín appeared in a series of posts on TikTok and Instagram boasting about “the amount of chickeness in the chicken” available at Costco, extolling the store’s many other virtues along the way, including jewelry and barbecues. The tone is that of good‑natured ethnology. “Also now at Costco,” prompted one of his TikTok videos, the discerning shopper might find his latest novel, Long Island. There are a number of remarkable things about this promotional exercise. That a writer uses social media networks in addition to more traditional promotional outlets is not new. Yet something about the contrast between Tóibín’s relatively high‑minded literary output and the demotic force of Instagram and TikTok, where more popular genres dominate, stands out. This could be seen as an attempt (successful or not) to rejuvenate his readership, or at the very least to target one that doesn’t shop in independent bookshops—those who buy their chicken and their books at the same register. What is more likely, however, is that Tóibín’s PR team at Scribner thought to market his new work—and in turn their whole imprint—to readers who might be amused by the idea of him shopping at Costco; not that his audience might buy their books there, but because they would be amused by the conflation of a new literary novel and a Costco chicken. “How funny to see an august figure like Tóibín in a Costco! That will surely garner some attention.” And it did. We understand the marketing of Tóibín’s novel as a phenomenon of publishing in the age of discoverability, as visibility is sought and negotiated through the intercession of social media platforms. New promotional practices—authorial and corporate, amateur and professional—are arising to manage the challenge of finding readers in a noisy media environment. The injunction to be visible is everywhere in the publishing industry today, propelled by the risks involved in publishing and bookselling, and by the precarity of writing for a living. Visibility designates a work regime, a set of signs of social distinction in the literary field, and a hierarchy of values. Discoverability, on the other hand, is the capacity of cultural content to be discovered by consumers who search for it—on search engines, on platforms, in bookshops—and to become noticeable even to those unaware of it. Visibility and discoverability are two sides of the same coin, the form taken by a growing number of interactions across the field of contemporary publishing. Writers face increasing pressure to build online personae and reputations that will ensure potential readers can easily locate their writing when it reaches the market. Online book influencers use what they know about algorithms to make their bookish content go viral. In pursuit of likes and views, fans on BookTok and Bookstagram repeat popular scripts, such as “fancast” videos that imagine famous actors in the roles of favourite characters or ranked lists of their top reads in a given genre. Publishers are strategizing to shape disparate online activities into a consistent marketing message, while trying to avoid the fallout if a book becomes the “cancellable” target of the wrong kind of attention. One consequence of these myriad and multiplying pressures of visibility is the algorithmic invisibilization that reflects and contributes to existing forms of marginalization in publishing work. People working across the publishing sector are sensitive to these mutations, as they mark changes in cultural consumption and content creation. Indeed, mastering discoverability may be the key skillset for those who want to succeed in publishing today—more important even than learning to write well or to nurture and support good …