So... sexism in publishing is a pretty well-established, well-documented fact. I won't even attempt to dispute it. But the facts as presented here (and in the Jezebel piece it's taken from) don't jibe with my experience. 1) "Chick lit" is a category most represented amongst agents. There are more agents looking for "women's fiction" than most anything else. 2) According to Sol Stein, 80% of the market for hardcover fiction is female. So "literature?" Sure, there's a problem. "Fiction?" Well, the audience is certainly there. 3) I did a systematic, thorough beatdown of Publisher's Marketplace in my quest for representation while me and my agent (a woman) were on the outs. Even pushing things to ridiculous extremes, I was only able to come up with 19 names that were even vaguely worth bothering with. Sixteen of those nineteen were women, by the way, and two of them responded with something other than a form letter. The rest of the field - and it's a big one - was so not targeted to what I write (and we're talking "thriller" generic) and so not relevant to my publication that it wasn't worth bothering with. Those responses, by the way, took anywhere from two to eight weeks, with fully a quarter of the agents posting on their sites "if you don't hear from me in six months, consider it a no." 4) Catherine Nichols sent out a total of 100 queries, according to the article, and got nineteen requests for her manuscript. That's roughly 10X the industry-wide response rate; if you get one request out of 50 you're kicking ass. It kinda makes me wonder, again, as to who she's querying.
Since you know way more about this than me I wonder if you can answer a question I have. What percentage of 'chick lit' is written by male authors? I'm curious because it doesn't seem to me that a woman has to write a book that's aimed at women (or vice versa). For example John Green is a super popular YA author and mostly girls read his books. I'm not really familiar with the genre though.
I can't speak authoritatively. My sense in observing writing in general is that you are at a disadvantage if you use a male name to write distinctly female genres. I have a friend who writes a bunch of KindleSmut and all of the pen names they use are female (having wargamed no less than 50 different names). That said, I had an author tell me once about someone he knew who analyzed the best seller's market for segments to see what was lacking and he discovered "romantic dramas for women written by men" and set out to write those. His name is Nicholas Sparks, and I'll bet he's long since left Danielle Steele's revenue in the dust. A man can be assumed to write for men and women unless proven otherwise. Women are assumed to write only for women unless proven otherwise. It's pretty shitty. I think a lot of it is that to make it truly big, you need a movie... and movies are aimed at 15-25YO boys. BUT Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins Harry Potter - Joan "JK" Rowling Twilight - Stephanie Meyer Divergent - Veronica Roth Yeah, Hugh Howie and yeah, James Dashner but right now the phat stax belong to the girls.
Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about smut -- intuitively it does seem like that would be almost exclusively female writers, and your friend's experience confirms that. And it's true that the hugest YA authors right now are women. I wish there were big databases on novels with metadata about author/genre/etc, it would be really interesting to look at.
As a male high school student with an interest in writing, I see another side too this. Growing up, writer, author, or poet, are all fine things for a girl to be. The modern sense of writing and gender norms though means it is generally seen as too emotional for guys to want a career in. I am very careful in who I admit my writing aims to. Only my family and a few select friends know the full extent. When doing a career interest survey one time, I chose writer to look at deeper, and the counselor thought I was fooling around and having a joke. (I also noticed all the examples of writers the site had were women.) Anyways, to some friends I put it off as blogging or journalism because those are seen differently than just "I want to be an author." For me, sure, I'd like too, but I've never seen that as an acceptable career choice. Looking at writing today too, based just on a cursory glance in my mind, it strikes me that there seems to be a lot more women writing mass-consumer type books: mysteries, romances, even adventure novels. Men seem to dominate in genres like sci-fi and fantasy, as well as what tends to be considered more high-brow literature. Except poetry. Seems like there are a lot more women there too. I never say I'm a poet. At my age, for a guy, that more likely means rapper than a literary poet (well, that's a hard distinction to make, and I don't know the words for it this late at night, but I'm sure the gist is there). So, sure, there was obviously some bias here, but that's not the only gender problem the literary world has.
Writing, unless you target journalism and then move on, isn't something that career counselors take seriously in general as far as I know. You have to be really good, really lucky, or really original to do well and make it exclusively as a writer. I don't think anyone buys poetry these days. My take is that writing seems "for girls" because stereotypical careers "for girls" are undervalued already, and the traditional career of being the full time parent isn't compensated at all. Writing while you're stuck with part time low wage jobs or raising kids seems like a step up, not a step down. Besides, writing is considered so "for girls" that they are even recognized far less. Going through lists of recipients for the international awards listed here and looking at just the last 10 recipients, 3/10 nobel laurates in literature have been women, 1/10 Golden Wreath of Struga Poetry Evenings recipients, 3/10 of Neustadt International Prize for Literature recipients, 0/10 America Award in Literature recipients, 0/10 of Franz Kafka Prize recipients, 2/6 of Man Booker International Prize recipients. I can't say I see any of the mass consumer writers anywhere in there. So hey, when you do become a writer, you'll get to use your real full name, get better responses from publishers (and won't have to submit to anywhere near as many), get paid better, and have a better chance of winning awards. And unless you for some reason choose to write smutty unhealthy romances for mills and boon, or supernatural abusive teenager relationships, or porny fanfic about emotionally manipulative BDSM afficianado millionaires, you'll even be considered "high-brow".
Whoa whoa, cut the snark there at the end. Are you being serious right now? jleopold can't control that there are problems for women in publishing. He can't. His first comment really just seems like he's expressing frustration for not being taken seriously by peers and teachers. This isn't a pissing contest about who can make less money and be less successful. I'm a woman in STEM and I know that I will probably be paid and appreciated less than my male peers when I'm on the job market. That doesn't mean I go up to male grad students and be like "HAVE FUN MAKING MORE MONEY THAN ME ASSHOLE".
Hey now, lets not bring out the tone police. If jleopold is seriously worried, those are reasons he shouldn't be. I could pretend he won't get those benefits and let him continue being worried so I don't go sounding mean to your ears but that's not going to help him. Though, I reserve the right to snark at unhealthy representations of relationships in all media forms because they literally cause people in real life to be seriously hurt and sometimes killed. I'll even pick on Ms Piggy when the topic arises. Last I heard though, men don't worry that they are underrepresented in STEM. If they did, then your approach would probably be worthwhile since they would actually be assholes.
Sorry I overreacted a bit there (well, probably more than a bit). It just seemed to me that his first post was more about feeling, as an individual, that people don't take him seriously for wanting to be a writer and just expressing his frustration with that.
I agree there is for sure an oversight on the part of counselors when it comes to writing. Sure, there is the trade side, but then there is also careers like copywriting that have practically identical school plans. Copywriting is probably one of the more secure and easily hireable careers at the moment, and is definitely growing career choice. With poetry though, I've noticed an upswing over the past five to ten years. Even beyond just the rapidly growing market for spoken-word, there's been an influx of literary magazines that cater to very specific styles and formats of poetry. There's also been a renewed interest in poetry as a form for marginalized people to voice themselves. Larger magazines and publishers are picking up on this, from the New Yorker to Agni. I can't speak towards the mass-consumption of poetry, but there are obviously people stilled buying poems. I also agree as to there being highly troubling statistics regarding awards. Also, thank you for going through an pulling those stats. It confuses me as to why you didn't include Rubery, KONS, or Windham-Campbell. Are they just too new? I think that the purpose of these awards tends to be to honor those who have made advances in literature, who are changing the effect and status of the written word. I don't think that anything one would find in an airport bookstore would do that. These awards are in a way, compensation for writers with such a limited market. Thank you for the vote of confidence towards my future career. The study though doesn't say female writers get paid less, but rather just refers to overall earnings. In light of the article here, if the experience is in anyway average, then women must actually getting paid more per piece, which isn't how the business of writing works at all. You should also note that as of 2014, the gender gap has reversed for writers overall, with men earning about 75% of what female authors do. Finally, being male does not in any way immediately put one in high brow. Look at Brown or Paterson. They are two of the most successful authors today, but it definitely isn't literature.
James Patterson has been the top earning author for quite a while. Shades and Hunger Games etc are effectively blips to his streak as I understand it. Most of his income is from books while theirs is from movies. He, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King (who seems to be on the downhill, health maybe?) are more successful than Dan Brown. My mother has been reading all of their books for as long as I can remember, and I'm in my thirties. Danielle Steele is the only woman author she reads as much as best I can recall. Besides, E.L. James is a masculine pen name, and look, Rowling decided it was going to be better to publish under a very male pseudonym after being successful with the pseudo-real masculine name "J.K. Rowling". Sure she got pigeonholed, but she also didn't choose a female pen name for good reason. J.K. Rowling didn't used to have a middle name. She adopted the second letter because her agent wanted her to sound more masculine so boys would read her boy-focused kids series because boys don't like reading women's writing. But sure, we can consider the earnings as "for women" rather than "for male pseudonyms" if you really want to ignore that bias. You shouldn't, it's basically supporting the assertion that you'll do fine as a man. You want to believe. Being male doesn't automatically make one's work high-brow, no. Hence my last line in the previous comment. On the other hand, selling unhealthy relationships seems to be a recipe for a one-hit wonder series that's not actually sustainable for individual authors. Except for the mills and boon type authors. I think most of those authors are moving to self-publishing on kindle now to get more than 2k a book.
I thought this all through high school too. Then I went to college and my poetry creative writing classes were actually more guys than gals. And once you immerse in the genre, you realize there are actually a lot more popular men poets than women. However I think your peers and your current vantage point can really make it seem otherwise. I remember thinking that poetry was not a form of writing that one could do "seriously," as in, that one would be taken as a serious writer if one wrote poems. Quite the contrary in fact. I never thought literature was a male dominated field until I got really, really involved in it. You should check out the VIDA count. It tracks women in literature, especially publication rates for women vs. men in magazines. Of course, it doesn't look at the rates for all magazines ever, just what I suppose are considered "major" ones. I'm all for anything near parity, even 40/60, especially with fluctuations. But the ones that are consistently publishing women in a marked minority bother me. Except poetry. Seems like there are a lot more women there too.
That's a neat study, and I will definetly have to look at their other literature, but I think that 6 out of 21 not being close to parity isn't terrible. With three (probably four this year) having more women writers than men. I would like to know gender stats in regards to submissions too. If a magazine doesn't get as many submissions from women, for what ever reason, saying they aren't near parity would be rather unfair. There's always something to want to know about a study. Besides that though, I realize 'famous' poets are overwhelmingly male, it still seems to me that most poetry books being published these days are written by women. Especially in local and self-publishing spheres, with books stocked in local libraries, bookstores, and coffee shops. Like the study tla mentioned, I think there is a huge difference between 'professional authors' and all writers, which would be much harder to find data on.
I certainly spend a lot of money each year on poetry books, not to mention significant manhours on at least a biweekly basis reading most semi-popular literary magazines that are hosted online. I don't have the impression that you do of prevalence of female poets over men. I guess I'll take this time to point out that Agni and the New Yorker have always published poetry. Fuck, Dorothy Parker helped make the New Yorker what it is. However, there's no real way to prove our perceptions one way or another without extensive, and ultimately not-really-that-rewarding, data mining. My time is better spent. At the risk of sounding like a snob, though, as a decently published poet applying to MFA programs this year who has managed to establish herself in a friendly crowd of similarly passionate poetry-writing individuals, I think there might be more breadth and depth to the trends I believe I see in the poetry world. I do edit a literary magazine to boot. I certainly do not believe that women represent an overwhelming majority, or "most," of current poetry book publications. But listing all the male poets currently publishing that I can off the top of my head really isn't valid evidence of that - so like I said, we can agree to disagree, but I'm gonna say I got a bit more in the way of current credentials. Also, 6/21 is more than a third. I mean, six is a small number. But so is 21. I don't know, it feels like saying that $.77 on every dollar isn't that big of a difference. Shit adds up, mang.
Something I forgot to think of is location. I'm in a hot bed of aging hippies and yuppie hipsters, and there are at least three explicitly feminist publishing houses in town, so that is sure to be affecting my experience some. As an unpublished poet, trying to get a start before graduating, with a small group of semi-literary friends, I have to ask: what lit mag? I'll have you know, my list of rejection e-mails is getting pretty impressive. Also, it's a good thing your aiming to write, because 7/21 is a third. Yeah, it adds up, but the overall trend seems to be positive.
I'm sure you can, but I just really couldn't resist that little opening. Besides, for all I know, that could mean a 600 on Math. It's a shame your closing down. I like a lot of the stuff on your website, more than pretty much any other magazine I've found. Beloit Poetry Journal may win, but not by much. I really liked that Mandel piece. Even the website looks sharp and works well. You guys have a good eye.
Thanks. I'm pretty flattered by that. It has been really hard work to keep it going, unfortunately a big hurdle is that no one is very tech savvy and also our most influential editor has basically no time. Plus sometimes messes up our submissions manager. I do like our layout though. I just wish Wordpress in general was easier to wrangle. I love and admire Beloit. I have a few other personal favorites; Neon, Radar, FLAPPERHOUSE (disclaimer: they did take some poetry so I have a bias, but they're probably my favorite magazine I've been published in, or among them), Blackbird which is run out of VCU, trying to remember what else but running dry off the top of my head. If you don't use/aren't aware of the website Duotrope, I recommend you check it out. Yes, you have to pay, but I consider it worth it. Well worth it. Duotrope is the website I think of whenever discussions about "Should hubski charge/have a fee/whatever" come up, because in my mind Duotrope provides an amazing, comprehensive service I can't get anywhere else and I pay gladly every month with no problem. Hell, check out the free trial and if you like it, I'll buy you a month. It's a great resource for finding lit mags to read and submit to and also really helps just - the pain of the submissions process.
Whether naturally gifted of not, you guys have managed to put together a more navigstable website than some big journals (I hate the Poetry site) and most of the colleges I've been looking at lately. WordPress seems to work better for blogs, when they tried to expand and make it work for full sites, they lost some usability. I will have to look at those magazines. I enjoy Blackbird, and I've submitted there before. Thanks a lot for the offer and all the suggestions and advice, I've seen Duotrope mentioned before, and it seems like a great resource. I may be remembering wrong, but I think I've used a list of magazines they put out for free before.