Why do so many women write fantasy novels?
Why do so many women write fantasy novels?
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?
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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.)
Following on what you said, it's also true that for a long time it was difficult for women to get published in the science fiction genre. Many of them relied on male pseudonyms (i.e. Andre Norton, James Tiptree Jr.).
If you put add SciFi into the bag and remove a huge part of the books, keeping only the bestsellers, no wonder the statistics are so different.
I'd say that it's you who has skewed the comparison here.
Yeah, because it's generally one genre, with fantasy > romantic fantasy > horny fairy romantic fantasy > horny polyamorous fairy romantic fantasy becoming increasingly niche sub-genres.
And I do think comparing "best-sellers" versus open Amazon search is important to point out. "Best-sellers" are generally going to be released through a publishing house with the resources and recognition that comes with it. An Amazon search might kick up a lot of self-published books, especially if OPs algorithm is sending them that way. And one very sensible explanation why women would be over-represented among self-published fantasy books... because historically men got more of the "best sellers" / publishing house backed.
You mentioned tons of fantasy subgenres, but the one I was singling out is sci-fi, which is not something classical fantasy fans are usually fans of.
I'm saying the industry generally bundles them together as the top level genre. So awards and funding is first considered at the sci-fi/fantasy combined level.
Again, the point was to note the difference between the major genre level where the money and awards are (sci-fi/fantasy, dominated by men) versus the possibility that OP is seeing a sample influenced by The Algorithm (potentially niche sub-genres, potentially more self-published books).
Not trying to make some political comment here, just pointing out some reasons OP might be seeing demographics they didn't expect.