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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
I’m not exactly opposed to romantasy as a concept. I like that it has brought a lot of women to fantasy genre as readers and authors. Also, maybe this would lead to more interesting takes on romance and sexuality in fantasy literature, because, suffice to say, that could use some improvements.
But I’m kinda worried about the current situation where romantasy is basically just the marketing hype thing. The Popular Thing Right Now. A lot of the stuff doesn’t get written because the authors like to enrich fantasy literature, it gets written because they realised can make money off of the TikTok crowd.
…I mean, I guess it’s not a new problem, the same thing happened with horror when Twilight was big.
I can appreciate what you’re saying, but it’s kind of like action adventure films. They mix the genres because the audience they’re targeting wants that. So, if women are interested in romance, they can expand the fantasy readership by putting that in there. I’ve read some that aren’t bad and some that are pretty tiring, but Allen Dean Foster wove a romance element into the Flinx series now and then, and it was a key part of the Spellsinger series. So not really just a women-only thing, and likely for the same reasons - expanding the market for the books.
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
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.
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.
