Hey, guys. I don't know if you've been following any of the uproar over the Publisher's Weekly list of Top Ten Novels of 2009 and the fact that all ten books were written by men.

While I'm not overly upset by this -- it is what it is -- I've teamed up with some friends and we'll be starting a new book meme at my new blog, Rocks and Reads.

We're calling it Women on Wednesday. The idea is to feature a woman author, or a book written by a woman author. My aim is more to increase awareness of what's available than to get books added to any list -- and with increased awareness will hopefully come increased sales.

I'm hoping you'll come join us. We start this Wednesday, November 18.

http://rockread.westofmars.com/women-on-...

Thank you Susan for taking this stance! Will stop by for sure. Kathy

I hope you'll join in, even if you merely visit the participants. And help spread the word, too.

I know there are a million memes out there, but I wanted to be a part of a possible solution. If not to lists like the one that sparked this idea, than at least to helping a fellow author out.

Susan wrote: "Hey, guys. I don't know if you've been following any of the uproar over the Publisher's Weekly list of Top Ten Novels of 2009 and the fact that all ten books were written by men.

While I'm not o..."

Go back and read Tuchman and Fo's Edging Women Out. Up until the 1870s women were the dominant writers and consumers of fiction in all forms, including literary. They became marginalized when men found a way to make money at this game and colonized the genre of "quality" fiction, relegating women to genres like mystery and romance. Women are presently the major consumers of books, but Romance is the biggest share of the market by far. What you read is what gets written. Since there's no market for quality fiction, the old hegemony prevails, and rhetoric like chick-lit only helps to re-enforce that.

No, what we are PERCEIVED to read is what gets PUBLISHED. I can list a bunch of women writers who do NOT write mystery or romance. Including best-sellers like Jodi Picoult.

Moonrat, an anonymous editor and a damn smart woman tells it better than I could. And is the reason why I went from apathy about the issue to trying to be part of a solution.
http://editorialass.blogspot.com/2009/11...

Personally, if it's a damn good story, I don't care who wrote it, except to mark their names for future reference (and purchase).

While I appreciate the anger this list has aroused, since it is an opinion of the top 10 books in terms of quality, and not apparently in terms of sales, I might point out, in the interests of fairness, that people like Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, Patricia Highsmith, Karin Slaughter, J K Rowling and Stephenie Meyer (to hop across a few genres there) seem to do as well or better than most of their male counterparts.

If you'd like a mere man to make his opinion heard, then, by all means, I'm happy to do so. Selection by gender is reprehensible, whichever way the bias is felt.

Selection by quality is a far harder thing to pin down, but I have no problems with any of the authors listed above. There are many more women authors I've read and enjoyed (McCaffery, LeGuin, Andre Norton, Mary Higgins etc.) There are many lauded male authors whose output I don't like. But that's my personal opinion.

As apparently, is the PW list. The opinion of an individual or a committee.

And there is always the remote chance that many of us might actually agree that their top 10 are the best books of 2009, irrespective of who wrote them.

I agree that selection by gender is reprehensible. Please read what Moonrat has to say about publishers and where their marketing money goes and you'll see why I had to take a stand. It's NOT a level playing field.

I'd like to help fix that discrepancy, that's all. Because like you, I don't care about the author's gender. Nor skin color, nor ancestral background, nor any of the other lines that divide us.

However, I DO believe in level playing fields. A bunch of bloggers will never be able to equal the marketing thrust of the big publishers. But if we can help just one author save a career that's about to be lost due to poor sales because there's no marketing for her (or even him; come on over to my Win a Book blog where I post anything book-related that comes to me), then we're making a change for the better.

Hi Susan, I did read the blog before posting. Nowhere did I see any data. Nor did I see the actual list. I did read in a response to Moonrat's blog, that the list referred to was mainly non-fiction, and that in the corresponding fiction list, half the authors were women.

So I went and had a look for myself. The fiction list is below.

Fiction
The Scarecrow
Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

The Fate of Katherine Carr
Thomas H. Cook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Spooner
Pete Dexter (Grand Central)

Dark Places
Gillian Flynn (Crown/Shaye Areheart)

The Man in the Wooden Hat
Jane Gardam (Europa)

Ravens
George Dawes Green (Grand Central)

Tinkers
Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)

The Believers
Zoë Heller (Harper)

The Vagrants
Yiyun Li (Random)

How to Sell
Clancy Martin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

New World Monkeys
Nancy Mauro (Crown/Shaye Areheart)

The Last War
Ana Menendez (Harper)

Nemesis
Jo Nesbø (Harper)

Lark and Termite
Jayne Anne Phillips (Pantheon)

The Cry of the Sloth
Sam Savage (Coffee House)

Drood
Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)

Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese (Knopf)

The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters (Riverhead)

Sag Harbor
Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

Once the Shore
Paul Yoon (Sarabande)

I make that 11 men to 9 women.

We must be looking at different lists. This one is the list in dispute, which has both fiction and non. And even a graphic novel, too.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/...

Still, look around. Come spend time at Win a Book; any contest listed as "Usual Rules" is sponsored by the publisher. The vast majority are books written by men. Granted, I only list the contests that bloggers send in, but if you stop and count the number of books being given away (as many contest give five copies at a time), you'll see this is, sadly, actually happening.

Like I keep saying, I'm only trying to level the playing field. I don't expect it to have any real far-reaching consequences, but I DO expect to have fun. And if we save an author's career along the way, so much the better.

OK, that's a laudable objective. I'll visit sometime today.

I must have found the same list you did Susan. After reading the reviews, I must say not a book on this list is one I would bother reading for free, let alone buying. Though it's not a hard fast rule, I tend to read female authors more than male authors. JA Jance, Janet Evanovich and Nora Roberts as JD Robb come to mind, I can't stand what Nora writes under her own name though. Of course, there are female writers I won't touch with somebody else's ten foot pole, they simply don't know what the hell they're doing, in my opinion, even though they are popular. Some of the female writers that do make the top don't seem to belong there, as do some of the men. I like most of what Patterson does, though not all of it. Don't care for what Clancy does personally, though the books he lends his name to written by others are good, when he writes it himself, he seems to think he's being paid by the word so he pads the work by saying the same thing over and over, not even in a different way. Is the playing field level? No way, it never has been, never will be. Right now, it's not just unlevel, it's tiny, as publishers pull back on the reins, sticking only to tried and true authors, rarely giving a new author even a cursory glance.

Yep. Go read Kristin Nelson's post this morning about publishers pulling back.

http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2009/11/rea...

I worked in the music biz for a long time. Almost seized some of the offers I was made when I graduated with my BA. It's a shame to watch publishing making the EXACT SAME mistakes that music did. You'd have think that extremely literate people, as we tend to think publishers are, would have learned.

Susan wrote: "I agree that selection by gender is reprehensible. Please read what Moonrat has to say about publishers and where their marketing money goes and you'll see why I had to take a stand. It's NOT a lev..."

That's just what I meant, that the playing field is NOT level and how it got that way and what sorts of things stand in the way of leveling it. Sorry to seem cranky

No worries, Charles. We all have our cranky moments; it's what makes us human. And interesting. But not necessarily easy to live with (she says, wondering why she feels like she ought to be looking in a mirror about now...).

Susan wrote: "Hey, guys. I don't know if you've been following any of the uproar over the Publisher's Weekly list of Top Ten Novels of 2009 and the fact that all ten books were written by men.

While I'm not o..."

I think it's because both women and men read books written by men.
But mostly only women read books written by women.
Therefore, male authors sell more books.
What do you think?

I think that's bogus. I generally prefer female authors, if they're in the genres I prefer. Not heard of any women that do military fiction, but there might be some. As for who dunits, gritty cop drama, or humor, I generally prefer female authors. There are exceptions, of course, I'll always like Lawrence Block's stuff, especially the Bernie series, but then he's a personal friend, not the run of the mill author. I'm wondering do male authors actually sell more books... I mean are there more male authors in print? Patterson is prolific and sells in high numbers, so one very successful author like him could skew the numbers all out of proportion. I don't know how the books made it onto Publisher Weekly list, but I hope they're printed on toilet paper, it seems to me that's all they could possibly be good for, they're not the kind of books people actually read.

I'm sure there are some industry professionals who could answer that. You might also want to draw the line between fiction and non-.

In my reading, there is no nonfiction. I see no need to waste precious reading time with someone's idea of nonfiction.... well maybe there is some nonfiction, since for some strange reason, humor books are considered nonfiction.