Study: Publishers sell books written by women for less than those written by men

boing
30

Not exactly. There could be selection effects at work. For instance, as noted, most romance writers are women, and their books are going to tend to be at the lower end of the price scale. Similarly for children’s books, though not quite as lopsided as romance. Books with higher price tags are going to tend to be nonfiction, and those books often have higher production costs due to illustrations and higher editorial costs. Perhaps male authors get better promotion budgets. Do these books tend to skew towards male authors? Are male authors more likely to be able to sell these books? I don’t know, but I’d guess it’s within the realm of possibility. Do male authors write longer books? Again, I don’t know. It might be interesting to see if that was the case.

At least at the places I’ve worked, if there’s sexism in pricing decisions, it would have be encoded into the spreadsheets that drive all the decision-making.

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31

Okay, I’ll play. You could say I know a thing or two about books, considering I worked in bookstores and stores that sold selections of books for oh, fifteen or twenty years or so.

Really? I’d say most romance authors publish under female names, but they may not actually be women. For all we know, some pen names may belong to men, or teams of two people writing a book together. Do you have any figures supporting your suggestion?

Why? What justification is there for books written by women to be cheaper? What justification is there for romance books to be cheaper than any other genre? Given that romance is typically one of the top ten selling genres in bookstores, you might expect them to be more expensive than other books, if popularity relates to value or price.

Again, do you have figures to prove that theory? Because I don’t recall any huge author/gender disparity in childrens’ books.

No argument here; technical volumes do tend to be thicker and more illustrated and therefore more expensive to produce. But what does that have to do with books by women costing less than books by men?

Why should they? Do men need more help than women to sell books? Or could it be male authors getting preferential treatment?

Unless books are sold by the ounce, I really don’t see why men writing longer or shorter books is relevant. (And few people would be able to afford your average Wheel of Time volume. :wink: )

Sorry, I can’t buy that. Oh, I don’t doubt that sexism is baked into the system, but I don’t believe the computers are the ones that put it there. Long before there were spreadsheets, there were female authors who couldn’t sell their work unless they used male or androgynous pen names. The Brontes sisters originally published their works under male names. James Tiptree Jr. won a host of awards and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame… yet it wasn’t until 1977 that the world discovered “he” was Alice Bradley Sheldon. Even J.K. Rowling was told, by her publisher, that young boys wouldn’t be interested in reading a book written by a woman. Because somehow only a man could make Harry Potter a bestseller? Really?

And it makes no sense. We should value books for the ideas that lay between the covers, for the skill with which the words and sentences within are crafted. There’s no reason to consider the talent of writing to be gendered one way or the other… and yet, there are biases in the system.

 
Edit to clarify sentence, minor wording change.

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32

Thanks, I was going to ask about that. That sounds like it’s saying that, yes, the 9% remaining gap seems to be likely due to sexism of some kind, but the remainder may be due to genres with lots of female authors being lower-price genres on average. Now, I don’t know why that would be the case either, but it still feels like a potentially different problem.

Also, I could understand (not accept, just understand) publishers low-balling payment terms to authors based on gender, but sale price for the book? Why would they ever want to lower that, since it also cuts into their own profit just as much? Ditto for bookstores. So is the gap actually from customers not buying as many books by women unless they are cheaper? Precisely who is being sexist here?

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Maybe paying women less means selling their books for less?

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34

An excellent point, and apparently disregarded by the researchers. “The authors analysed the gender of each author by matching names to lists of male and female names”

So this BB article should be titled “Publishers sell books with women’s names on the spine for less than those with men’s”. Bellamy must have borrowed Cory’s headline generator for this one.

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35

In which case the publishers wouldn’t just have to be sexist, they’d have to be sexist enough that suppressing pay to women is important enough to them to cut their own profits but somewhere in the 9%-45% range. Across almost all publishers, otherwise the more profitable and equitable ones would take over or shut down their rivals.

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36

Also, do more women than men buy books written by women? —that’s probably true at least for romance novels—

Maybe the fact that women in general are paid less means that women have less to spend on books, so maybe the prices are “what the market will bear”? In other words, the whole world needs to be revamped, not just in terms of pay to women authors, but pay to women everywhere (but we knew that!)

I’m not sure how that thought might fit, or not, for books other than the romance genre…

37

Unless I have missed it, this research does not take into account volume of sales either.

Prof. Hugo Hackenbush writes a $200 textbook on pathology. He sells 175 copies a year to his students who are required to buy it.

Susanne Crankemout writes a $20 cozy mystery, number 14 in the series. She sells 175,000 copies to her devoted fans.

As I see it these wold be counted in the study as

One male written book - $200
One female written book - $20

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38

Lower book prices doesn’t mean reduced profits if the lower price means that you sell more books.

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39

Books written for the mass market, impulse buyer are pretty consistently lower priced than books directed at the special interest reader which are in turn lower priced than scientific/medical books.

A study such as this would have more validity if it stratified the books into those categories.

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Yes, and if the lower price means you sell more books, it means the female author gets a bigger royalty check, too.

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Depending, that is, on what sort of royalty percentage she’s been given. I wonder if a study has been done of those percentages compared to those offered to men. Given the broader tendency in corporate life to pay women less, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re lower.

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Have you considered reading the article before weighing in? I mean I know this is the internet but still…

The gender of a name is not necessarily an accurate reflection of author gender, particularly because some authors write with pen names. For example, a famous female author appears as male under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith and as gender-unknown when published as J. K. Rowling. Socially, the use of androgynous names has remained relatively stable over time, but the use of such names has increased among parents of daughters [29]. Therefore, it is possible that use of androgynous pen names is more common among female authors than among male authors based on these same trends in taste. Finally, we see the perceived gender of the pen name as a conscious choice in relation to the market, akin to construction of appearance in social relations. As Ridgeway and Correll [14] state, “Knowing that they will be categorized in this way, most people carefully construct their appearance according to cultural gender rules to ensure that others reliably categorize them as belonging to the sex category they claim for themselves” (p. 515). In traditional publishing, the choice of what name to put on the cover may be influenced by the publisher as well as by the author.

To be clear, book prices do not accurately reflect author earnings. An author’s earnings are a function of advances (if received), the royalty rate, and the volume of books sold. However, book prices closely resemble output-related payment systems, like piece rates or commissions, for which a price is set, but total income depends on sales performance [9]. They resemble price setting, for example, as in the price on offer for a freelance gig in the absence of information about how many jobs will ultimately be contracted. Moreover, selling items and personal creations, including books, is an important facet of the gig economy. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 18% of Americans earned money in 2015 by selling things online, and 24% of Americans had earned money from a digital commerce platform [10]. Finally, book prices are subject to the same mechanisms and sources of discrimination as are these payment systems, thus offering an illuminating window into discrimination mechanisms and their implications for inequality in the gig economy.

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43

Well, fair enough I suppose. I read the Guardian article linked by Bellamy, but not the full original research report.

From your quotes, it appears that the researchers are aware of both the points I made but declined to attempt to adjust for them.

So good on them for recognizing these factors, but the research is not made more accurate or complete by simply commenting that they exist.

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44

That’s exactly right, and it would be a solid data point for sexism in publishing, much more so than just counting up and averaging cover prices.

At the highest levels, women writers are five out of the top eleven money makers world wide.

So it may be harder to break in for a woman, but once she gets a solid following, money rolls in as much as it does for men.

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The article shows mostly that there is a large gender effect on average max cover price by genre.

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Also, the average percentage of authors identified as female was about 25%.

Genre is misleading here, because most of the sales accrue to just a few genres. The genres most dominated by women (and thus farthest to the right) are romance, contemporary women, crafts, juvenile non-fiction, erotica, cooking, juvenile fiction, christian fiction, and pets. The genres most dominated by men are technology, transportation, sports, comics, math, science, and games. With mean prices above $50, these seem to often be specialty books and textbooks.

According to this:


the five highest genres by sales are:
5. horror ($79million) (17/55 in men’s favor)
4. Scifi/fantasy ($590 million) (16/57 and 30/40 in men’s favor)
3. religious ($720 million) (roughly 17/58 in men’s favor)
2. Mystery/crime ($728 million) (33/41 and 16/55 in men’s favor)

  1. Erotica/romance (1.4 billion) (49/16 and 60/10 in women’s favor)

Note that if women are represented over 25% in the data, they are above the average in the genre. So if there is a positive here, it is that some of the lower-priced female-name-dominated genres have high volume and make a lot of money. Of course, probably half of the scifi/fantasy dollar goes to JK Rowling. Fiction in general is gender-equal representation at 36% each, meaning it is also has more women than expected. So, erotica, romance, mystery, and fantasy are all technically over-represented by women, even though more books are published by male-named authors in mystery and fantasy.

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46

That’s true, but they did do a breakdown by genre, which is meant to compensate for that effect. There is a graph:

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It looks like male dominated fields/genres have highly variable prices, while in more female dominated fields/genres every book sells for $20.

Here’s the direct link to the article

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47

Good on you for recognising that you were in error, but your comments are not made more accurate or complete by simply stating they didn’t deal with it to your satisfaction.

Their research is exactly as accurate and complete as the authors state it to be.

As in it is accurately and completely setting out its methodology, the reasons for that methodology and its results along with their interpretation of the results.

You disagree with those? Fine.

You can because they gave you the info. But don’t say “they didn’t think of this” as though that makes your point the killer argument that on its own demolishes their paper.

Especially when reading a summary of someone’s work, one has to be careful to check whether the summary is accurate. In this case, we start from BB’s summary of The Guardian’s summary.

The paper wasn’t looking into gender pay gaps in publishing in general. That’s the gloss put on it by both The Guardian and BB.

The paper was (as its title indicates) specifically looking at whether pay equality/inequality in indie/self-publishing was different to mainstream publishing.

The points you make are generally relevant to the wider question - do women get paid more or less per book than men, they are not especially relevant to the paper’s actual point of interest: Is the pay gap, better, worse or the same in indie/self publishing compared to mainstream publishing.

For those purposes, it doesn’t really matter how they establish the measure of pay or how they decide which author is male or female for example as long as they are consistent in both.

They explain how they’ve tried to do that.

If you can do it better, go ahead.

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48

Thanks to you and @bunkyboar for pointing to this.

It seems that the underlying raw data they have would permit something like:

History books: Average price for male authors: $–.-- Average price for female authors: $–.--
Computer books: Average price for male authors: $–.-- Average price for female authors: $–.--
Mystery books: Average price for male authors: $–.-- Average price for female authors: $–.--
Romance books: Average price for male authors: $–.-- Average price for female authors: $–.--
SF books: Average price for male authors: $–.-- Average price for female authors: $–.--
Home repair books: Average price for male authors: $–.-- Average price for female authors: $–.--

If the differences within category were statistically significant, and if extremely low volume books were stratified out, I think it would be very solid evidence that the deck is stacked against female authors.

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49

Awright, awready.

I assumed that the Guardian article and Bellamy’s post accurately described what was done.

A mistake I will try not to make again.

Have a great day!