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 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?
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.
From what I understand, it’s less about chasing a market than wanting to be perceived as correcting the previously highly male-dominated writing scene.
Subjectively, a little informal discussion among writer & fan groups to me suggests that men who read fantasy tend to slowly but steadily acquire new materials, often from word-of-mouth among dedicated communities; women, by contrast, tend to latch on to a particular breakout series or author, with awareness often propagated by social media such as “Booktok”. This means that while both groups purchase in similar volumes, a book whose audience favors women can experience surges of popularity which make for prominent best-sellers over limited timeframes.
Admittedly, though, this is informal - so take that with a grain of salt.