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?

  • Vanth@reddthat.comEnglish
    6·
    8 hours ago

    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.

    • gramie@lemmy.ca
      2·
      2 hours ago

      But OP was speaking specifically about fantasy books, and not specifying only bestsellers.

      My guess, with no data to back it up, is that both men and women enjoy writing fantasy and science fiction, and many of them are good at it.

      But writing science fiction often requires a science background, and historically there are many more men than women who have that. It is certainly becoming more balanced, but the difference is still there.

      So women, who generally don’t have as scientific a background, turn to fantasy where they can create their own worlds.

      • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        38 minutes ago

        There’s also the fact that a lot of that fantasy is going to essentially be elf/vampire/etc smut. The fantasy-romance genre is surprisingly huge, but many of the books are just labeled as straight fantasy (and just happen to have really graphic sex scenes). Further confounding the issue, male writers will use female/androgynous pen names when writing smut, because female author names have been proven to boost smut sales; Women prefer reading smut if they believe it was written by a woman.

        So yeah, if you’ve been sucked into the fantasy-romance algorithm, I could 100% believe that the vast majority of fantasy books being shown are written by women, (or at least have traditionally female names on the covers.)