Meet the male writers who hide their gender to attract female readers

[chesilbeach]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/31/male-writers-hide-gender-sell-more-books

 

This is an interesting piece for me, as I know I'm one of those people who predominately read women.  I would say  of the books I read each year, only about 20-30% by male authors.  It's not consciously and intentionally done, but a lot of the series I'm reading are by female authors, which makes quite a large contribution to my reading, but even so, I seem to naturally gravitate to female writers.

[Athena]

That's a very interesting article! I read about ~50-50% but it's true that for certain genres I read more male authors and for others more female authors. It's very interesting how changing an author's name on the book to for example only their initials, can make a difference into how many books are sold.

[ian]

I must admit, this surprised me. I would have thought that it was still more women "hiding" their gender, with the exception being men writing in the romantic fiction genre.

 

It's also giving me food for thought. I would have automatically said I was gender-blind when it came to books; I'll read anything written by anyone and don't care if it's written by a man or a woman as long as I enjoy it. But then I look back at my last 12 months of reading - it's mostly men. Am I unconciously picking male authors? Interesting!