Author sends out her novel's opening pages under a male name. Guess what happens...

[SouthoftheAndes]

Three of the top five are written by women(and are complete shit) Harry Potter, Twilight, and 50 shades.

You have to look at their qualities though, there's more women than men, more women read novels than men, and the stories are all simple enough for a retard to follow.

If I were a publisher I'd be printing every crap series like maze runner, hunger games(might be in the top 5 as well) and shit like that to make money. I doubt there's any truth to the article given the direction literature is going. Even these sexist publishers want to make money.

Lol

 

[JDragon]

True enough. My mistake.
Doesn't change much, though. Not a large enough sample size, and there are too many variables at play for this one anecdote to be anything more than an anecdote.

But it is still a pretty strong anecdote. I see no reason not to believe her. The only question is: what does it tell us? Literature agents really have no interest in being sexist as they typically will be driven by money. If they believe something sells, they will try to get the stuff published.

In this case, as I said before, my guess would be that the gender / genre combination seemed wrong or difficult to place. Like a male 50 Shades of Grey. Yes, that is also a sexist way of looking at things, but it would not be inherently sexism but money that is the driving factor.

 

[SouthoftheAndes]

How is that an indictment of the book? Its like blaming Frozen for mainly appealing to prepubescent girls.

I think what people appreciated about HP is the fact that it was so overwhelmingly appreciated by such a young audience. As kids are reading less and less, or at least it seems like it to some, it was neat to see so many young people pick up a 300+ page book and read it cover to cover and get excited for the next one.

You're probably too old to be reading HP. If you're over 17 it probably won't be very appealing

That's an interesting point, I would've never thought of that. Given that women dominate the industry would you say there is an advantage there for male writers or is that mainly in certain genres like romance?

Another interesting point and it goes back to your earlier point; if an author can bridge the gap it can help them immensely. JK Rowling was able to write fairly decent male characters for her target demographic. Harry was hardly a man's man, he was a bit of a wimp, but he was likeable and had enough redeeming qualities to work and Dumbledore was great mentor to him.

Id fall in the age range of Harry Potter thing growing up but I don't know any boys growing up who liked Harry. I never read the books but he is a complete wimp. No guy respects that

Hell i've even heard girls who read the book that they think Harry is a wimp and not great character.

 

[Harmonica]

See, knowing old myths helps you understand e.g. what JKR's sources and inspirations were. I'm not against reading Greek myths and high literature, but there's a lot of awesome stuff on "consumer level".

Many writers look to borrow certain aspects of myths to spice up their stories but importing a talking snake or murderous half man - half animal creatures is not going to exalt them to the level of ancient scriptures. As I have already said, the thing that makes the myths so awesome is the fact their characters are an embodiment of the primal in men. As Jung would say, it was not the writer talking through their characters but it was the characters talking through the writer being that the characters were simply the materialization of integral human drives. Like Prometheus being the pride and vanity incarnate.

I agree that there's good stuff for the wider audience, however, the first thing I am reading to my kids are ancient myths. :icon_chee

 

[Ruprecht]

But it is still a pretty strong anecdote. I see no reason not to believe her. The only question is: what does it tell us? Literature agents really have no interest in being sexist as they typically will be driven by money. If they believe something sells, they will try to get the stuff published.

In this case, as I said before, my guess would be that the gender / genre combination seemed wrong or difficult to place. Like a male 50 Shades of Grey. Yes, that is also a sexist way of looking at things, but it would not be inherently sexism but money that is the driving factor.

Even with the genre stuff I'd be sceptical.
Like I said, the most male dominated fiction sub-genre's I could think of were military fiction, military scifi and hard Scifi.
Military fiction from a female author would be a very hard sell I imagine.
Even with military scifi there's exceptions though (Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie won Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Arthur C Clarke awards last year, although I suspect most military scifi fans would hate it. Quite a few of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels would class as military scifi).
I don't know how you'd go as a bloke trying to publish chick lit either for that matter. :icon_lol:

 

[CombatCyborg]

One of Borges' stories deals with the issue of the context in which a story's written - Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. It's from the point of view of a literary critic talking about how Menard recreates Don Quixote word for word, and how that novel being written in the modern day is a greater and more fascinating accomplishment than Cervantes' original work, even though they are exactly the same.

 

[uppercutbus]

It sucks that even at the highest levels of intellectualism that kind of shit still happens.

This is with "scientific journals" too.

Whatever that means exactly, but it should be at least more impartial I guess, especially if it's sopposed to be something able to be replicated scientifically.

More women read novels than men, and the stories are all simple enough for a retard to follow.

roff

 

[James Keith]

Person makes new email account and finds they get many more responses from emails on that account than on their old account.

Maybe her old account is getting spam filtered.

 

[JDragon]

Person makes new email account and finds they get many more responses from emails on that account than on their old account.

Maybe her old account is getting spam filtered.

Now that is the best skeptic response so far.

 

[2DUM2TAP]

Three of the top five are written by women(and are complete shit) Harry Potter, Twilight, and 50 shades.

You have to look at their qualities though, there's more women than men, more women read novels than men, and the stories are all simple enough for a retard to follow.

If I were a publisher I'd be printing every crap series like maze runner, hunger games(might be in the top 5 as well) and shit like that to make money. I doubt there's any truth to the article given the direction literature is going. Even these sexist publishers want to make money.

You take that back you son of ......

 

[2DUM2TAP]

Id fall in the age range of Harry Potter thing growing up but I don't know any boys growing up who liked Harry. I never read the books but he is a complete wimp. No guy respects that

Hell i've even heard girls who read the book that they think Harry is a wimp and not great character.

You've just disqualified yourself from discussing anything Harry Potter related with this post.

 

[2DUM2TAP]

Yeah exactly. Its no Great Gatsby but it has its place and its probably better than Twilight/50 Shades of Gray/Divergent

Great Gatsby was shit.

 

[Cold Front]

Success is about people buying the book. This adressed the problem of getting published in the first place.


Same answer: you're not really adressing the issue. It's about getting published at all, not making numbers once you're there. By all means, one article like this isn't really a mountain of evidence, or even evidence at all, but your answer doesn't seem especially relevant to the allegation.

I am addressing the issue. Publishers want to make money. Why would they have mountains of evidence that women authors sell books and not want to publish women authors?

Use your head, dammit.

 

[PrinceOfPain]

But it is still a pretty strong anecdote. I see no reason not to believe her. The only question is: what does it tell us? Literature agents really have no interest in being sexist as they typically will be driven by money. If they believe something sells, they will try to get the stuff published.

In this case, as I said before, my guess would be that the gender / genre combination seemed wrong or difficult to place. Like a male 50 Shades of Grey. Yes, that is also a sexist way of looking at things, but it would not be inherently sexism but money that is the driving factor.

Sorry, I meant that one should be skeptical of this telling us anything of importance, not skeptical of the truth of the story. I have no reason to think the woman is lying, I just don't think she's discovered anything of relevance.

I cannot remember if she mentions what her book's about but, as you say, the importance of her gender (if any) may only have been in how it aligns with her target audience, or the content of the book itself. But even that is probably giving this story too much significance.

I don't know if it's a strong anecdote or not, and don't want to get into a debate about that. At the end of the day not only does it make for a bad study on gender bias in publishing, but if this were coming from a friend of mine, aspiring to be a writer, I'd **** an eyebrow at the actual implications of the tale.

This was her second novel. Her first had failed to make the agency runs and the doubts about her ability as a writer, something she had obviously staked a lot of her own worth on, were setting in. Not only that, but while she is waiting for the response from her prospective agents (no doubt, bracing herself for rejection) she's reading studies on unconscious bias and seeking to apply those studies to her own experiences. Unconscious bias indeed.
She's performing her experiment while having a personal, vested interest in the results of that experiment.
She even tells us how agents obviously have more faith in her male alter ego's ability to write a novel as "big" as the one she is writing.

By the end of her story, she lets us know that she stopped sending out queries, edited her work (generally this is the best first step in dealing with rejection... not trying to figure out what everyone else is doing wrong) and had success finding representation.
The best part of it all is that her current agent sought her out based on another piece of her writing altogether - one that was published under her own name. If she was sought out by an agent (not at all common) for something she published under the name "Catherine" and she came out of the experience thinking that agents are sexist, she's safe to ignore.

She is also vague on how long she continued her experiment after she gathered her numbers. She mentions that there is an overlap between the agents her male and female alter egos approached. Surely she wasn't trying to approach the same agents with the same story, written by two different people?

I would also be curious as to how she scouts out the agents she approaches, something she makes no mention of. She sent fifty queries as herself, and fifty as George. Why didn't she send out 100 queries all as herself in the first place? Did she dig up the fifty 'George' queries quickly, skimming a database of agents in the relevant genre and mailing the ones with the most interesting names? If so, maybe she's just very bad at placing her work with agents and so the group she picked at random gave her better odds of success than the ones she filtered herself.
That would fit with her first novel's failure, and her eventual representation by someone that had to actively seek her out.

There are simply too many things we don't know, and speculation wouldn't tell us anything. The author's clear subjectivity makes her anecdote of limited significance.

 

[Cold Front]

Its amazing that people in this thread are proving her correct.

Its fucking fascinating the cognitive dissonance MRAs and Meninists display in such issues. It warrants some serious psychiatric study. Like the shit that people come up with to justify this sexist behavior its amazing:

• Publishers get more requests by women than men, so its normal(?) to show bias against women.
• She made this story up, she lied. Why? Because women are like that, they always lie.
• A woman wrote harry potter so that means we have achieved perfect equality. Clearly, since it was a woman who wrote harry fucking potter then there can never be any bias in the publishing world, ever.
• Having a man's name as the book's author makes it more interesting, so naturally publishers would go for it more. WTF.

etc

Keep on guys, keep delivering that cringe we so desperately need.

Why deliver it when you seem like the kind of person who goes out and wants to find it? You've misrepresented each of the issues you've summarized, but then people who are desperate to "cringe" at everything in life are like that.

 

[Cold Front]

It may not be indicative of the overall fiction market, it was the first thing I found.

You implied women have equal numbers in the fiction market, do you have anything to back that up?

I cited two things: 1) a study of late nineteenth-century literature which found that 30 to 40 percent of the best-selling authors at the time were women (and, hence, that women have always fared well in the publishing industry compared to other lines of work, even during periods when there was real and pervasive gender bias in society), and 2) a more recent rundown of the best-selling authors in fiction who have sold tens of millions of books.

Neither is a solid scientific study, of course, but both are more revealing of potential problems than Miss Anecdote's self study.

 

[PrinceOfPain]

You've just disqualified yourself from discussing anything Harry Potter related with this post.

In all fairness, Harry is a pretty useless character. His sidekicks carry him the whole way through.
Longbottom deserved to be the chosen one, and Harry's about as potent a male as Frodo Baggins.

Main characters are often passive and non-distinct though, makes it easier for the reader to project.

 

[UpaLoompa]

It's funny that we know that these sorts of biases exist and yet so many are willing to dismiss them outright. I've no idea if this actually was a fair test but it is funny to see so many uncritically dismiss the observation even though they match up well with those made elsewhere.




(Also saying that the sample size is too small is an irrelevant reply. Did you do a power analysis? If a statistically significant result were found (none was tested for here), what is your criteria for "too small"?)

 

[UpaLoompa]

I cited two things: 1) a study of late nineteenth-century literature which found that 30 to 40 percent of the best-selling authors at the time were women (and, hence, that women have always fared well in the publishing industry compared to other lines of work, even during periods when there was real and pervasive gender bias in society), and 2) a more recent rundown of the best-selling authors in fiction who have sold tens of millions of books.

Neither is a solid scientific study, of course, but both are more revealing of potential problems than Miss Anecdote's self study.

Neither of your examples address questions about barriers to entry.
For example, the scientific journal outcomes I anecdotally mentioned earlier demonstrate no difference in quality of work and demonstrate that there had been barriers to entry.

I've no idea if what this author is reporting is representative of the field as a whole but I wouldn't be surprised if the report was.

 

[UpaLoompa]

In all fairness, Harry is a pretty useless character. His sidekicks carry him the whole way through.
Longbottom deserved to be the chosen one, and Harry's about as potent a male as Frodo Baggins.

Frodo is the most worthless piece of shit ever written. "The ring is so heavy Sam." STFU. When I reread the books prior to the movies I skipped all of the Mordor bits. Boring and annoying.

Main characters are often passive and non-distinct though, makes it easier for the reader to project.

Indeed.


The Harry Potter books are throw away entertainment. They're fun and calorie free. There's nothing wrong with that. Then again I also enjoyed watching Pacific Rim but readily acknowledge it is awful. Entertaining doesn't have to mean "good".