Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
I've noticed this as well.
It's often said that more books are written and published by male authors, but I'm starting to doubt it. I've been in a B&M bookstore a few times in the last few weeks, and when picking up random books in the fantasy section, all but a few of them are young adult fantasy coming of age works, written by females, with (often) female protagonists.
Same with Kobo recommendations; over 90% of the books recommended to me are written by females, and most of them have female protagonists, and are either YA coming of age fantasy, or distopian. Most of them also seem to be modelled on the 80's coming of age fantasy by writers such as Eddings, Brooks, and Tad Williams.
I do read mostly fantasy, and I have read a lot of 80's coming of age fantasy as well, but I don't read ONLY that; still, it feels as if the fantasy genre is now dominated by young(ish) women, writing about young female protagonists, often using a saccharine way of writing (as determined by reading some sample chapters here and there; often it's more romance-with-some-fantasy than anything else it seems).
I could be wrong though, and that my experience is as it is just because of Kobo's recommendations (which is, granted, based on books bought 7-8 years ago, when I started to replace my paper books with e-book versions), and because of the books stocked by Dutch stores these days...
Oh. And with regard to library borrowing... the few times I've been in a library in the last year or two, all of the staff was female, and most of the patrons were female as well. These females were indeed mostly to be found in the YA/fantasy sections (the younger ones), or the romance section (the older ones), and some in the mystery section. It was hard enough to find a guy somewhere, the ones I saw were mostly in fantasy, science fiction, and horror.
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I read a lot of fantasy and have noticed that there are a lot of women in the field in recent years. So of that seems to be that urban fantasy is a favorite for the romance crowd. A lot of the YA fantasy tends to be coming of age stories. I can't say that I've noticed the field being mostly women, but then again, I do only read a handful of them and most that I read have been around a while, Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey for example. Hum, when I do a quick check of the YA books that I've bought over the last couple of years, all three of the new authors I tried are women. Interesting.