A Question For Men Only

[Nebula7]

 Question: Do you mainly read books written by male authors? If so, why? If not, why? I'd like to hear your opinions.

As a man and an avid reader for 50 years I've come to the conclusion that I like books written by men. They write from a man's perspective and I read from one (da). Almost every time I read a book written by a woman I end up not liking it. I've tried many times but have never been really satisfied. I'm sure there are good female authors out there but that's not my point. It's my reading of them that concerns me. Don't get me wrong, I like women a lot including my wife, so it's nothing personal. Just can't get into their books. My own mother happens to be the same way - she prefers books written by men.

  And for the record I checked my wife's library and it was almost 100% female authors. P.G. Wodehouse is her favorite but outside of him and a couple of non-fiction books they all written by women. Funny, I'd never noticed before.

[Krista D. Ball]

Are you sure all of the books you've read and liked are actually by men?

[QuantumIguana]

I don't really pay that much attention. I would say that I am more likely to read male authors, but I'm a big reader of science fiction. C.J. Cherryh is one of my favorite authors, up there with Pratchett in my list of must-buys.

[Krista D. Ball]

CJ is a female (in case no one knew)

[Coral Moore]

As an avid reader for 30 years I've come to the conclusion that I like books written by Hispanic, straight, chubby women. They write from my perspective. Every time I read a book written by anything but a Hispanic, straight, chubby woman I end up not liking it. I've tried many times but have never been satisfied. I'm sure there are good non-Hispanic, straight, chubby women authors out there but that's not my point. It's my reading of them that concerns me. Don't get me wrong, I like non-Hispanic, straight, chubby women a lot including my husband, so it's nothing personal. Just can't get into their books.  

Now do you see how ridiculous this sounds?

[StephenLivingston]

The gender of the author has no bearing on whether I read a book or not.  I've read brilliant books and poor books by both male and female authors.
Best wishes, Stephen Livingston.

[Krista D. Ball]

Stephen, I did a reading challenge once that was like this:

Male author
debut author
Female author
established author
Non-English author
debut author
Non-white author
established author
Non-North American author
debut author


etc etc It was fascinating because I had to seek out books and discovered that many of my favourite books already fell into one of these categories and I didn't realize it! I got to re-read my favourites and discover new authors, too.

[jmiked]

It's something I pay no attention to, and probably am not even aware of most of the time.

Mike

[StephenLivingston]

Hi Krista, discovering a great new author is one of the joys of life.
Best wishes, Stephen Livingston.

[Todd Young]

I don't think it matters. I probably read more female authors than male authors, but I really don't use that as a criteria for what I'm going to read.

[Geemont]

I defiantly read more books by male authors than female, 27 out of 161 in 2011, but that's just the way it plays out. There are very good female authors in just about every genre: literature, mystery, non-fiction, science fiction, and even a few writing hard science fiction.  Also, as someone has already pointed out, some authors may be women writing under a man's name to avoid bias.

[Mike McIntyre]

Your question sent me running to Goodreads to check my own stats. I was stunned to learn that of the 305 books I've rated, only 22--about 7%--were written by women. I gave most of them 4 and 5 stars, though, which probably means I should be reading more women authors. As an aside, Natsuo Kirino's "Out," and Denise Mina's "The Dead Hour," were as good as any male-written genre books I've read in a long time.

[jumbojohnny]

Done a quick think back, I don't know the exact figures, but it really seems even Stevens; from the kids books I read through to now. If there is a bias to male authors then I suppose it's because, like most men, I don't read Romance cra-, er, books. But, I think it's about equal.

[Chad Winters]

Many of my favorite sci-fi authors were women, many had female main characters

CJ Cherrry
Ursula K LeGuin
Kage Baker
Mercedes Lackey
Anne McCaffrey
Elizabeth Moon
Octavia Butler
Joan D. Vinge
Julian May
James Triptree Jr

I'm pretty sure I have never made a reading decision based on the author's gender. And I'm glad..because those were some good books

**Dang!! I almost forgot Andre Norton**

[QuantumIguana]

Male authors don't write from "the" male perspective, they write from their own. Your perspective isn't "the" male perspetive either. I'm male, and your perspective and mine probably aren't the same.

[Grumbles]

Now do you see how ridiculous this sounds?

I don't think it is ridiculous at all.  Chic lit, african american lit, "queer lit" (not my phrasing), etc are all genres that have developed because people were drawn to authors with certain points of view/backgrounds.  

I haven't looked, but I would guess that a large portion of my books are written by male writers.  This isn't a purposeful decision, but the noir/crime genre and horror genre that I am currently reading are written mostly by men.  There are definitely some strong women writers out there who I enjoy, but I have never sought them out (I don't pick books based on author gender...).

[MariaESchneider]

The OPs point is perfectly valid--and I hear it ALL THE TIME in my cozy group, only the other way around.  I'm not kidding.  I'm in two fairly large cozy groups and we've had the discussion.  A large percentage of them are women (all) and a large percentage of them don't want to read cozies written by men.  They've "tried them and just don't like them."   Some are more than willing to try again and others simply won't, not even if if the book is free.

On the site I used to review for, they did a "Look at your shelf and report back--how many authors are women versus men."  The site was mostly sci/fi and fantasy readers/reviewers.   A fair number of the men readers discovered, much to their surprise, that they obviously gravitated towards male authors.  This was not on purpose and a lot of them decided to go explore women writers.  Completely unconsciously, or by virtue of magazines/shorts/what they were exposed to, they read a lot more male authors and in some cases, 90 percent.  Some of that could also be because it's only in recent times that female authors have made headway in getting published frequently in the sci-fi/fantasy genre.

Those of us women at the site (I only remember 3 of them specifically, although there were at least 2 other reviewers that I can think of at the moment who were female) had a pretty even number of male/female authors on the shelf.  My own shelf leaned toward women authors, but not by a whole lot.  I was also, coincidentally, the one at the site who happened to read the MOST cozies at the time. 

One of the guys read mostly thrillers and he admitted that he tended to look for male authors because he felt he enjoyed the novels more.  He was willing to try recs but he really did lean consciously towards male writers.

And look, like it or not, all of us have a style.  That doesn't mean it's a male versus female style and I've known male cozy authors and I've know male authors who would like to try their hand at cozies.  I know women READERS who WILL not read books with main characters who are male.  They just aren't interested.

Wrong or right the biases exist.  As writers it's really only our job to write the best story possible.  It's not going to appeal to everyone and it's perfectly reasonable and valid for people to have preferences.  It's not automatically discrimination to say "I don't enjoy most women writers as much as male writers so I tend to buy male writers."    Now, if that is rephrased to say, "No woman can write as good a book as a man," that's a different story. 

But I don't think that is what the OP meant.  I took his post to mean he likes the style of male writers most often and therefore he buys male writers.

[MariaESchneider]

Oh and OP opinion aside-

For those of you who are sure gender doesn't matter--go check your shelves.  (Freebies on the kindle don't count.)  What have you spent money on over the years?  When it comes to actual BUYING patterns, you might surprise yourself.

I actually thought my shelf might be more biased toward women writers than it was.

[SylviaLucas]

As an aside, Natsuo Kirino's "Out," and Denise Mina's "The Dead Hour," were as good as any male-written genre books I've read in a long time.

Augh!

Implies the male-written genre books are "the standard to aspire to."

Augh!
[/freakout]

You have to wonder, though, how many female authors have been turned down because their writing didn't fit into whatever box an editor or publisher thought it should. A friend's literary fiction had a hard time finding a publisher because they didn't know how to market it. It wasn't "women's fiction," see - not a straight romance, not a straight family drama with either a cancer victim or an affair. Yet, I bought a book by a former instructor that's also difficult to categorize in a traditional "men's fiction" category (oh - wait! there isn't one!), and it was published by a big-name publisher.

(Maybe his book was better, you say. Maybe. But I'm willing to bet that it's the rare female author who gets her non-"women's fiction" book published vs. the standard male author.)

Which leads us to why there's more male writing on your shelves.

[Disclaimer: this is a theory. If this were a real statistic, you would see numbers and percentages. This is a theory. Beeeeeep.]

[Seanathin23]

I don't pay attention to the gender of the author, because they need to be able to write both sexes equally convincingly in the end.

[Tony Richards]

In general, the gender of the author makes no difference -- I'm a huge admirer of classic writers like Dorothy Parker and Katherine Mansfield, and a woman's name on the cover does nothing to put me off a book. But I'm afraid I do struggle with novels written from the point of view of -- say -- a lonely teenaged girl; there's just nothing much there for me to relate to.

[Betsy the Quilter]

When I started reading adult fiction, I read a lot of male authors--Heinlein, Clarke, Burroughs, Gardner/AA Fair, Stephen King.  So when I discovered there were some darn good women writing mysteries & sci fi, many of them with female protagonists, I intentionally sought them out.  Eventually, there were enough women in the field that I didn't have to seek them out; I could just find them in the course of looking for good books.  Now I don't worry whether it's a male or female writer, just whether it's a good story with characters I'm interested in.  I love McCaffery, JD Robb (Nora Roberts not as much), Scottoline and I also love Robert Parker and Lee Child.

But I see nothing wrong with looking for books by male authors or with female characters....anymore than I think it's wrong to buy someone's books because you're on an internet forum with them and you want to support them.  

Oh, wait, the OP wanted men's opinions.  Sorry.
 

Betsy

[Todd Trumpet]

Two words:

Jane.
Austen.

Todd

P.S.  But I don't talk about it with my football buddies...

[Geoffrey]

I read both men and women.  Some of my favorite authors are female (Nancy Kress, Sheri S. Tepper, Katherine Kurtz), but at a guess, I've probably read more books by men than by women but that's mostly because I've read more Science Fiction/Fantasy than any other genre and those have been predominantly male dominated genres until about the past 20 - 25 years when it started changing.

But, counting my life as a whole, I've also read more books written by white people, written by North Americans, written by the middle class, written by heterosexuals ... the list goes on.  And, again, that's a function of who was being published in those genres more than anything I actively pursued.   To be honest, in the past 20 years, there has been a noticeable change in these genres and its been easier to find authors outside those parameters.

For the fun of it, I looked at my last 42 books (everything since Nov 1) and 20 books were written by women ....  

[Coral Moore]

In general, the gender of the author makes no difference -- I'm a huge admirer of classic writers like Dorothy Parker and Katherine Mansfield, and a woman's name on the cover does nothing to put me off a book. But I'm afraid I do struggle with novels written from the point of view of -- say -- a lonely teenaged girl; there's just nothing much there for me to relate to.

The like, or dislike, of a particular type of character I can appreciate and agree with. That's worlds different from intentionally picking only women or men writers because of some ephemeral quality that can't even be put into words.

(I realized after I posted that this seems like I'm still responding to Tony. I didn't intend that so I just wanted to make it clear. The paragraph below is in response to the people who said it was okay to choose books based on the gender of the author.)
A reader is free to like or dislike my work based on whatever criteria he wants, that's fine. A reader can say that she doesn't want to try my book because of the genre it's in, also fine. But to automatically assume that because I'm a woman my book is going to be a certain way, that's wrong. I'll scream the wrongness of it every day of my life. It's just as wrong as not reading a book by a person of a different race, or a different faith, or a different anything on that basis alone.