I was going through “fantasy books” on amazon and was surprised to see that most of them are written by women, and the ratio is not even close. I was kind of expecting the opposite.
Does anyone know why this might be the case?
I suspect your algorithm has offered you a biased sampling.
As of the 2010’s, 79% of Fantasy/Sci-Fi genres bestselling books were written by men.
Source, also contains other interesting author demographics.
Youre better off asking why women overall are more likely to read. It follows that more women would be authors. And it gets even worse if you’re looking at book club participation where women are much more likely to participate ime as the frequent only man at book clubs.
For your fantasy book authors, you probably were expecting the opposite because society historically pushed male authors to the forefront and you can still see this today where many people will list their top fantasy books and not a single woman author can be found. This is either inadvertent or intentional sexism.
I don’t have a problem with women writing fantasy books. I just wish the fantasy market wasn’t glutted with ‘romantasy’ novels. I really, really dislike those.
Anne McCaffrey probably inspired a lot of women. Ditto Diana Gabaldon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_McCaffrey
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Gabaldon
Now that I think about it, Margaret Weis too…
I also don’t think you can talk about fantasy authors without mentioning Ursula K. Le Guin as well. Her work is brilliant.
The last few times this was brought up for discussion, one thing that many people mentioned - including quite a few who had interacted with publishers - was that publishers were strongly selecting for female authors. Some of this may have been in an effort to correct for lack of female presence in what was perceived as a male-dominated genre, some may have been trying to find the next wildly successful Rowling / Suzanne Collins / Sarah Maas / etc.
Several expressed that it was actually difficult to get a response as a male fantasy author, so this well-intentioned drive may have resulted now in some over correction bringing us to our current place.
I’ve heard the same. Women are the majority of readers these days, so they’re just chasing the market.
I would imagine a lot of males ghost write with a female name.
I’ve heard that the authors using 2 initials + family name are usually women. As women used to struggle to get published if their name was obviously female.
It’s evolved over time, females used to ghost write with male names for scifi. They all have their “biases”. But that’s also public perception as well, if that’s what sells shrug.
Obviously you can’t know for sure, but it might be a mixture of toxic patriarchy making it seem feminine to write stories (making it so men don’t want to try writing stories and sharing them, even though they are already creative and could absolutely do so) and maybe AI generated books choosing female author names because it generates 2% more sales or something
I wonder if there is any public opinion polls on the topic to use as a source
