Fantasy-Faction is lucky enough to have a good number of talented published authors – especially female authors – posting in our forums. Perhaps I am being presumptuous, but I’d like to think that each of these wonderful ladies are friends of mine and so am very interested in their opinions and experiences revolving around the issue of how books by men and women authors are displayed differently in bookshops. To catch you up, evidence suggests that SFF books written by women are nearly all displayed spine out, whereas those written by men have an increased chance of being displayed cover out.
Well, the latest SFF author to lend their opinion to this perceived SFF sexism by bookshops is Elspeth Cooper. Elspeth has been publishing books since 2011, so isn’t a newly published author (such as Jennifer Williams, whose views we were able to publish yesterday); it’s nice to have opinions from a variety of authors in different stages of their career. We’ve perviously described Elspeth as ‘likeable, quirky, and having a lot to say about the genre’, and that in terms of writing, her voice is ‘fresh, new and alluring’. As for the content of her novels, The Wild Hunt trilogy is an epic fantasy series with great characters, a setting that mimics Medieval Europe, and a well-thought-out political backdrop. What I’m trying to say is that she isn’t a writer of paranormal romance and she writes books that are as epic, complex and as gritty as any male author – so there’s no reason she shouldn’t be favoured by reviewers or bookshops… right?
Well, here’s Elspeth’s experience spanning over the last 3 years of being a published author:
I’ve been following this issue quite closely, being a female fantasy writer an’ all.
Someone further up asked whether the problem was with agents or publishers not picking up female writers, rather than booksellers. In my experience, that’s not the case (male agent, Big 5 publisher and published under my own non-ambiguous first name).
As I see it, there’s no single root cause of this lack of level playing field. The preponderance of reviews that male writers get, and the way they are promoted in bookstores, undoubtedly plays a big part. It means they’re more visible, which means they get recommended more often (have you looked at the recommendation threads on Reddit fantasy, frinstance? Overwhelmingly men, and you really have to prod them to get a few more women than Robin Hob, Ursula Le Guin, and Lois McMaster Bujold).
Plus, there’s still guys out there who won’t read women authors because they’ve been burned: picked up something marketed as UF, and it’s wall-to-wall sexytimes. Some guys who think women will only write about feelings and soppy relationship stuff, or only have female protagonists that they think they won’t be able to relate to. So there’s marketing and perception problems too.
The other side to the perception problem, which goes back to my first point, is that the adult fantasy market, to an outsider, looks very much like a boys’ club, which deters some women from submitting their books for publication. This may have some bearing on why Tor UK’s slushpile stat for female-authored epic fantasy is at about 30%.
Some guys also still like to maintain that women don’t write the kind of stuff they want to read (I submit they’ve not looked very hard, m’lud) or even that maybe women genre writers don’t get reviewed and recommended as often because, well, not to put too fine a point on it, they’re not as good.
Yeah, someone actually went there in a conversation with me.
I read a stat in a ‘Women in Genre’ type post on Fantasy Book Café that said over 70% of adult-oriented fantasy in Australia was written by women. I found another stat somewhere (forgive me, my bookmarks are on the other computer) that said women write upwards of 40% of adult fantasy in general. Come on, they can’t all be crap.
Having read and enjoyed Elspeth’s books (I even gave them to an editor friend who asked for a great example of epic fantasy and had her come back to me and say they contained some of the most beautiful writing she’d ever experienced), I can’t help but be a little upset – again – that she isn’t getting as much recognition as male authors writing the same kind of thing. Even worse, and something that has already been highlighted this week, that she feels that review sites and the online community are contributing to this problem.
Again, this is something Fantasy-Faction is really trying hard to put right (on our part). Certainly, in the case of Jennifer Williams, who we featured yesterday, it seems there has been progress – there is a real buzz about her books and we now need to work together with the community and with other blog sites to ensure that this isn’t an anomaly – that we continue to read, support and recommend – where warranted – the talented pool of female authors that represent a far larger percentage of SFF writers than many of us realise.
