Okay, when I first caught wind of the This is Chick Lit vs. This is Not Chick Lit controversy, I thought it was a matter of highbrow vs. lowbrow novels. Obviously I was wrong. It’s about who’s being the better feminist.
What Elizabeth Merrick’s anti-chick lit camp argues is that serious female writers are getting shorted. Their books don’t receive equal attention by the [presumably — I’m restating what I gather is the argument here, haven’t fact-checked] male-dominated publishing industry and [presumably] male-dominated book-review industry (limited, for the purpose of this battle, to the venues that most matter in the literary world, e.g. The NYT Book Review).
And now, into this sad situation, introduce a glut of lite novels with pink covers that quickly begin sucking the air out of bookstores and the dollars out of female readers’ purses.
So what does Merrick want for her writers?
Money?
According to a citation of The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash (found originally on The University of Michigan’s Internet Public Library but page now deep-sixed), of the top ten bestselling books of all time, only one is a novel: The Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann, comes in at #9.
Of the thirteen other novels Ash lists as having sold at least 10,000,000 copies worldwide, another four are by women (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds, Grace Metalious, Peyton Place, Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind). Granted, five out of 14 isn’t quite 50 percent, but the list cited by the (now defunct) website is also nearly 10 years old — it predates J.K. Rowling, for instance.
According to Guinness World Records, the best-selling fiction writer of all time is Agatha Christie.
A quick peruse of author names on the the top selling books by year linked here suggests that men have edged out women by about 2:1 over the past several years. But this seeming disparity may have an innocuous explanation: it may be that the pool of male readers concentrates on fewer novels. From Writers Digest:
The books men do purchase tend to be purchased on brand. Brand loyalty, [Pages editor John] Hogan says, is especially important to the male book buyer — the brand being a recognizable name like Harlan Coben or Scott Turow. This makes it more difficult for an unknown author geared toward a male audience to get recognized.
So maybe the only thing hindering woman from achieving parity on the yearly bestseller lists is the reading inclinations of men — something that also makes it hard for aspiring male writers to dislodge a Grisham or Turow. This may also explain why men perhaps read fewer female writers than vice versa, as well as why bestseller lists skew toward male novelists, even though the majority of novel readers are probably female.
Women are simply more adventurous book buyers ;-)
That’s commercial fiction. But what about literary fiction?
Or put another way: if money isn’t the problem, what is?
Recognition?
I dunno. If that were the case, then the issue must be that women writers aren’t being taken seriously by (for the sake of simplification) male reviewers.
So what?
A good friend of mine who acts as an occasional reader of my manuscripts declined to read my last one. The premise didn’t grab her — it wasn’t a match for her sensibilities.
That’s not a problem. I don’t expect everyone to get excited by my books’ premises. I certainly don’t expect many men to! lol
So what?
So what?
And who are you writing for, btw?
Update: none of the best-selling books by women made the Snarkling Reading List, for what that’s worth…
