Interesting post about why women are doing so well at self-publishing. Hint: apparently we should be spending our time writing, not marketing!
According to the recent Taleist survey of self-published writers, women authors are more successful than men.
Does this fact surprise you? It surprised me – not because I lack faith in my female counterparts (far from it), but because when you compare it to the traditional book publishing industry, it’s the men who dominate.
A good example of the situation women face in the traditional publishing world is documented by VIDA. They decided to count the reviews in a number of important literary publications and it revealed that male writers were up to 413% more likely to be reviewed than female writers in publications like The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Paris Review, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine.
Forget publishers, I’m going it alone…
Before you make any final decisions, you may want to consider the cold, hard facts. While the traditional publishing world may not be the…
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Michelle Proulx - Author 
Interesting. I’ve wondered if female authors are becoming more popular too. Look at the big series that people talk about. Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, True Blood, Beautiful Creatures, etc. The male authors that are popular nowadays all seem to be from the old guard. By the way, not saying this is a bad thing.
Thanks for the reblog, Michelle.
My pleasure 🙂 It was a great post!
Anecdotally, it seems like most of the writers I meet on WordPress are women, now that I think about it.
Hmmm … a large percentage, yes. I do think it has a lot to do with the whole romance novel thing, because that’s a huge market and it’s mostly female writers. That being said, I believe the people I interact with the most on WordPress are pretty evenly divided betwixt men and women.
Interesting. Someone did a breakdown recently on ratings by genre, and noticed that there is a distinct skew in the ratings based on the gender of the audience. Hard scifi has comparatively low ratings cause its cynical primarily male audience rates harder, and they read wanting to be critical. By contrast, books aimed at teen girls and young women (eg. your paranormal romances and other romances) have higher ratings because this audience will give high ratings for books they love, and they read wanting to fall in love. I wonder if it’s not being a female author that gives you an advantage, but that women are more likely to write for that more supportive female audience?
I hadn’t thought of that — but yeah, that makes total sense! I know that just in my own house, I can read a book and tell everyone I adored it, and then my brother will read the same book and say “Meh. It was fine.” I think that might absolutely be the case!