Who reads epic fantasy?

[rachelmanija]

This post was not only prompted by a remarkably stupid NY Times review of the "Game of Thrones" TV series, in which the reviewer thought the story was a polemic against global warming, claimed that women don't like fantasy, and further claimed that women do love sex, so the sex was gratuitously crammed in to please them.

It was also prompted by curious fact that while many of the most successful, and by successful I mean bestselling, writers of YA fantasy and sf are women writing under clearly female names, and most of the bestselling writers of urban fantasy are women writing under female names, most of the bestselling writers of epic/high fantasy are men or women writing under male or ambiguous names.

To quickly define terms, by "urban fantasy" I mean "Set in contemporary world much like ours, but in which magic and/or magical creatures exist. Typically involves romance, fighting evil, and/or detecting." By "epic fantasy," I mean "Set in non-contemporary world which is not just our world plus magic or an alternate history of our world, big sprawling stories, typically a series of fat volumes, typically involves a huge cast of characters, war, battles, monarchies, and politics. Typically set in a vaguely medieval period."

I have some questions for you all.

1. Am I correct that the bestselling writers of epic fantasy are typically male or writing under possibly-male names? I'm thinking of Robin Hobb (woman writing under possibly-male name), Patrick Rothfuss, George R. R. Martin, Robert Jordan, Brian Sanderson, Tad Williams, Terry Goodkind, Terry Brooks, etc.

I am under the impression that the female authors writing under clearly female names, like Kate Elliott, Katherine Kerr, are midlist or at least not hugely bestselling authors.

Anomalies: Jacqueline Carey - bestselling, I think, but clearly female. Gender of names may not be clear to readers: Sherwood Smith, Mercedes Lackey. I think Sherwood is considered a midlist writer, while Lackey is maybe in between midlist and bestseller?

2. Is epic fantasy really read more by men than by women? In general, women read far more than men do. Is epic fantasy an exception? I would love to see some actual figures here, because I honestly have no idea.

3. Do male or male-seeming epic fantasy authors get a bigger marketing push from the publishers? Are readers more willing to buy their books? Why is this different from urban fantasy and YA fantasy? (Maybe the latter are considered "less serious," because of the association with romance and teenagers, and so the proper province of women?)

(I don't even ask, "Is epic fantasy by women reviewed less?" because we already know that answer. All fiction by women is reviewed less than fiction by men. One of many statistical breakdowns to that effect here.)

ETA: A brief reading list of non-bestselling female writers of epic fantasy:

Sherwood Smith: Overview: Yo, epic fantasy authors. I'm real happy for you, and I'mma let you finish (uh, sorry, George R. R. Martin, I swear that was not a dig) but Sherwood Smith has already written one of the best epic fantasies of all time. OF ALL TIME.

Buy on Amazon: Inda

Kate Elliott: Cold Magic (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

Mary Gentle: A Secret History: The Book Of Ash, #1

Michelle Sagara: Cast in Shadow (The Chronicles of Elantra, Book 1)

P. C. Hodgell: The God Stalker Chronicles

Judith Tarr: The Hound and the Falcon: The Isle of Glass, The Golden Horn, and The Hounds of God

Barbara Hambly: Dragonsbane: The Winterlands Series (Book One) (Note: This book stands on its own, and is a perfect work of art on its own. For the love of God, AVOID THE SEQUELS.)

Laurie Marks: Fire Logic (Fire Logic)

N. K. Jemisin: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Trilogy)

Katherine Kerr: Daggerspell (Deverry Series, Book One)

Comments

[ithiliana]

Robin Hobb definitely a woman.

And I think it's fairly safe to say that, despite all the pissing and moaning teh menz have been doing since the 1970s that women writing fantasy were rooning their crunchy sf, that the best selling fat fantasy/series authors have been men (David Eddings comes to mind as part of the list, though he is not doing as much these days).

[ithiliana]

oops, sorry, posted too soon.

Who is reading is hard to say--there's been a dearth of studies on audiences for sf/fantasy (probably for all other genres). Presumably the companies do business type studies, but those aren't out there, and when I was looking for ANY academic scholarship on what women vs. men read, the ONLY thing I found was one study (available online, let me know if you want link/citation) that was an audience study of FILM genres, not book genres (lots of published stuff on what boys/girls read, but not the adult audience so much).

It's just...nobody really knows, and so the perceptions rule unchallenged, more or less, till something like this happens.

[ithiliana]

a great link (found at deadbrowalking)

http://andweshallmarch.typepad.com/and_we_shall_march/2011/04/this-is-how-much-i-hate-fantasy-fiction-which-as-you-know-since-i-am-a-woman-i-hate-so-very-much.html

[rachelmanija]

Great photo!

[daedala]

I was going to say N.K. Jemisin -- but she's using initials. But she is epic!

[rachelmanija]

But is she a bestseller?

[dorothean]

1. I think you might be right about that. I didn't actually know that Sherwood Smith was a woman until this post! (Never read anything by her.)

N.K. Jemisin is another example, although I'm not sure that's on purpose! Another anomaly: Anne Bishop.

In my head, though, there's "fantasy" and then there's "epic fantasy" and plain "fantasy" is mostly by women and consists of everything I read in high school that wasn't by Tolkien: Robin McKinley, Tamora Pierce, Susan Cooper, Monica Furlong, Madeleine L'Engle, Margaret Mahy. Exceptions: Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, Philip Pullman.

The more I think about it, though, the more the line blurs. I do get a sense that there's some fantasy (which I mostly didn't read) that is mainly characterized by really, really long series. But the fantasy I read was by women.

I also thought that the gender stereotype in speculative fiction was that women read and write fluffy fantasy stories while men read and write hard, intellectual science fiction? *snort*

2. I don't/didn't read epic fantasy, except for Tolkien, unless we can count some of the authors I mentioned above in the just "fantasy" category. But my female friends in high school were ALL reading Terry Brooks, George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan, Terry Pratchett, and Mercedes Lackey. My male friends were too, but not more. I think my male friends were more likely than female friends to read tie-in novels for things like Star Wars and L5R.

3. Don't know!

[rachelmanija]

Robin McKinley, Tamora Pierce, Susan Cooper, Monica Furlong, Madeleine L'Engle, Margaret Mahy. Exceptions: Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, Philip Pullman.

All of those (excellent) authors write children's or young adult fantasy, not (adult) epic fantasy. Interesting, eh?

[twistedchick]

C(arolyn).J.Cherryh has been writing epic sf/fantasy (several series, ranging from very fantastic sf to science-based sf to sf/fantasy blends) for decades, is bestselling, has just published the 12th volume of an epic series that started with a medieval-era Asian-inspired alien society becoming updated by modern technology. She was primary guest of honor at the 1998 World Science Fiction Convention in Baltimre. Adult books, selling very well in both hardcover and softcover.

[rachelmanija]

...and uses initials, like N. K. Jemisin.

[jesuswasbatman]

I don't think "Mercedes" is even faintly gender-ambiguous.

[rachelmanija]

I only mention it because Lackey is the only person I've ever heard of with the name. My other association is the car. (I assume it's actually Spanish?)

[starlady]

I agree with your categories in terms of content, but this is also partly a marketing thing, and in marketing terms, epic fantasy is big, thick hardcovers and then big, thick MMPBs. I think under that rubric there are fewer women writing it (Kate Elliott and Michelle West spring most forcibly to mind), since it excludes people like Mercedes Lackey, who writes in finite sets of shorter books, even though it's all in the same world.

I do think the bestselling writers of the multi-volume MMPB series (David Drake springing to mind as yet another example) tend to be male or have male-sounding and/or neutral sounding names. Speaking personally as someone who reads fantasy and defines herself as female, people like Martin and Brooks and Goodkind and Jordan just don't appeal to me--I've read a few scattered volumes of these epics, but they never seem to be that great in terms of writing and/or female characters. David Drake I'd actually list as a partial exception to my objections on those counts, since I recall finding his books better than average in high school, but I didn't like them enough to keep up after about the fourth book or so. And the epic fantasy I do like--Kate Elliott and Michelle West, who are both awesome--has great writing and great female characters; I don't think that's terribly disconnected.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that Kate Elliott, who did get a fairly big marketing push, and Michelle West, who is getting one recently (or at least, much bigger than before) are both published by DAW. So is Cherryh, for that matter. In other words, I do think the major publishers market epic fantasy by men much more aggressively--and publish it too.

[thistleingrey]

Hmm, interesting, because I would match up Lois Bujold with David Drake. I didn't realize till I looked him up just now that he began writing fantasy in the late '90s; mil-SF was his thing. (Of course, Bujold has also turned her hand to fantasy since.) And I find "epic fantasy" and "doorstop" non-correlative; to me, bestselling epic fantasy is also Roger Zelazny, David Eddings, and (urgh) Piers Anthony.... Eddings's books seemed long at the time, but not by today's standards. In the late 1980s early 1990s, I read Robert Jordan because he was there.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Sara Douglass comes to mind, as does Margaret Weis, as women writing epic fantasy.

I do find that a lot of the historical fantasy I read is written by women. Morgan Llywelyn, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diana Paxson...

[boundbooks]

On a side note, if I were to ever be published, I would use initials. Growing up in a household with my father, who won't even touch a book written by a woman unless it's a double Hugo/Nebula winner, has drilled some hard truths into my head about the prejudices of the current average male sci-fi/fantasy reader. He has two categories: bad books written by women, and marginally acceptable books written by women. The double Hugo/Nebula winners are all in the 'marginally acceptable' category. =/

[thistleingrey]

One more bestseller for recentish epic fantasy: Steven Erikson. One more anomaly: R. A. Salvatore, who is male yet uses the initials; most of the time nowadays it seems as though initials flag a covert woman.

2. Huh, interesting thought. When I knew people who read a lot of epic fantasy and/or a lot of sprawling fantasy series (Melanie Rawn's big books come to mind), most of them were male, but we were reading this stuff because we were in high school or early college and had the time to read big book after big book, or ten Zelazny titles in a week, or whatever.

3. I guess I'd want to line up male writers of urban fantasy as well, to compare big marketing pushes, but the only one who springs to mind and who has had a long enough career for comparisons is Charles de Lint. (T. A. Pratt--male--hasn't been publishing for long enough, IMO, and I have no idea how well marketed his books have been.)

[jesuswasbatman]

But Salvatore, from what I gather, writes mostly vampire novels with heavy romance, a very female-coded genre.

[coffeeandink]

Does anyone else remember the discussions about BFF (Big Fat Fantasy or Big Female Fantasy) novels a few years ago? Also known as "Extruded Fantasy Product." Because when men write long Euro-medievalish fantasy series, it's "epic fantasy"; when women write it, it's "big fat fantasy." When men write it, it's a valued and bestselling subgenre; when women write it, it's a pernincious popularization (dilution) of genre.

[boundbooks]

Holy cow. That is so messed up. I'd never even heard of BFF before, I'd just assumed that those giant epic fantasy novels were, well, referred to as 'giant epic fantasy novels' regardless of the gender of who wrote them. That is so messed up.

[cofax7]

AHAH. I new I'd find this if I looked hard enough:

NSF study on gender distribution in reading/watching SF. Okay, fair, it's not fantasy, but I think it's informative...

[ambyr]

For those curious about sales and who's bestselling versus midlist versus whatever, I pulled some numbers out of Nielsen Bookscan. Disclaimer for those unfamiliar with Bookscan: Bookscan does not track all sales, so none of these numbers should be treated as absolute. It can, however, generally be trusted to track the same percentage of sales of two books released at similar time periods and of the same genre.

These are the sales numbers, more or less, for the first four weeks after release date of the most recent hardcover high fantasy novel I could find for the given author.

Robert Jordan -- Knife of Dreams -- October 2005 -- 169,114 copies
George R. R. Martin -- Feast for Crows -- November 2005 -- 108,945 copies
Terry Goodkind -- Confessor -- November 2007 -- 103,443 copies
Patrick Rothfuss -- Wise Man's Fear -- March 2011 -- 65,811 copies
Brandon Sanderson -- Way of Kings -- August 2010 -- 21,247 copies
Terry Brooks -- Bearers of the Black Staff -- August 2010 -- 20,364 copies
Tad Williams -- Shadowheart -- November 2010 -- 6,993 copies
Jacqueline Carey -- Naamah's Curse -- June 2010 -- 6,711 copies
Anne Bishop -- Twilight's Dawn -- March 2011 -- 6,233 copies
Lois McMaster Bujold -- Horizon -- February 2009 -- 5,233 copies
Robin Hobb -- Dragon Haven -- May 2010 -- 4,216 copies
Katherine Kurtz -- Childe Morgan -- December 2006 -- 3,962 copies
Mercedes Lackey -- The Sleeping Beauty -- July 2010 -- 3,623 copies
Elizabeth Haydon -- The Assassin King -- December 2006 -- 3,057 copies
Elizabeth Moon -- Kings of the North -- March 2011 -- 3,012 copies (NOTE: only 3 weeks of data)
Margaret Weis -- Secret of the Dragon -- March 2010 -- 2,080 copies
C.S. Friedman -- Wings of Wrath -- February 2009 -- 1,887 copies
Sara Douglass -- Infinity Gate -- June 2010 -- 1,804 copies
Trudi Canavan -- Ambassador's Mission -- May 2010 -- 1,547 copies
Sherwood Smith -- Treason's Shore -- August 2009 -- 1,391 copies
Katherine Kerr -- Silver Mage -- November 2009 -- 1,232 copies
Kate Elliott -- Traitors' Gate -- August 2009 -- 1,154 copies
Michelle West -- House Name -- January 2011 -- 752 copies
Jennifer Fallon -- Palace of Impossible Dreams -- June 2010 -- 701 copies
Daniel Abraham -- Price of Spring -- July 2009 -- 424 copies (this makes me cry)

[rachelmanija]

Thank you, that is fascinating!

Do you happen to know approximately where the lines are drawn between bestseller/midlist/didn't sell well?

[larryhammer]

Mercedes Lackey counts as best-selling, fwiw -- she still commands 5-figure advances, last I heard. Not sure where Michelle Sagara (West) fits -- probably mid-list?

As a data-point, I read very little epic fantasy these days, and what I do is all written by women. I prefer my fantasy domestic, contemporary, or urban.

---L.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Ms. West's recent work -- which I very much love -- is urban fantasy, unless there's more that I've missed.

Lacking actual data and basing my opinion only on bookshelves, I would say that publishers have figured out/decided that heroic fiction with female protagonists who have interiority* will find its audience in YA and in romance, but not so much in mainstream epic fantasy, and that sort of epic is often what women write. (Did the Deed of Paksenarrion, which qualifies under the above, ever reach the bestseller heights?)

* Is that a word? I'm groggy. I mean that the character's reactions and processing of those reactions are a significant part of the plot.

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

There's also Margaret Weiss/Tracy Hickman, if you're willing to count Dragonlance as epic fantasy. This pair is odd, as it has one clearly female name and one that is ambiguous. I had always assumed Hickman was female until I looked it up just now.

I don't know the readership breakdown on that series, but if you count the series as a whole, they have sold a trainload of books.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, too.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Good points. Did Dragonlance exist as a popular RPG before the books, or did the books make it popular, I wonder.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It's a telling point that I would not have thought to put either Carey or Lackey in the "epic fantasy" camp, even though when you list the usual characteristics of that sub-genre they both do pretty much fit the bill. I find myself reflexively disqualifying them -- Carey because of the romantic layer, Lackey because of the YA sheen -- which says a lot, right there.

But yes, the top names in thick, gritty, war-laden epic are undoubtedly male; you can add David Eddings, Joe Abercrombie, and Steven Erikson to that list, and many more besides. Anecdotally, I think they get read more by men, but I don't have data to back it up.

As for why that is . . . there's a pretty well-documented shift that as the proportion of women in an activity increases, the societal valuation of that activity decreases. And obviously we class certain topics as female (romance) or male (war). So clearly the Important Books are the ones about war, the ones men are (mostly) writing, and all the rest of that stuff is nice but not nearly as important.

I'd love to see sales figures for urban fantasy vs. epic -- not just the top names of, say, Hamilton vs. Martin, but a more comprehensive comparison of the genres. If it turned out that UF actually moves more units all told, I wouldn't be remotely surprised.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

there's a pretty well-documented shift that as the proportion of women in an activity increases, the societal valuation of that activity decreases. --I hate this fact.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That NYT review was *so* stupid; the woman so clearly had been compelled to watch and review it, that it made me wonder what the parameters are for a reviewer, at the NYT and elsewhere. It seems pointless to have someone who has no interest in or sensitivity to the genre review something. If you think that liking Lord of the Rings is a kind of deviance, you are not a suitable reviewer. Recuse yourself!

Or maybe someone was holding a gun to her head.

I think plenty of women like epic fantasy. I was waiting to pick up my younger son from a flute lesson, and there was a girl there, about 13, waiting for her music lesson. She was reading one of the books in either the Wheel of Time series or Song of Ice and Fire series (honestly, I can't recall which it was), and when I asked about it, she was completely with it. ... Which is to say, young female readers are still picking up these sorts of books too.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Definitely, many women like epic fantasy. What I am curious about is if there's a gender split at all in readership, and if so, what it is. Like, what if 70% of all readers of epic fantasy are women? (I think that's the percentage of fiction readers in general.) Then what's the point of hiding female names, or selecting male authors for the huge promotional push?

Epic Fantasy Bounces Back

[pingback-bot.livejournal.com]

User sartorias referenced to your post from Epic Fantasy Bounces Back (http://sartorias.livejournal.com/462369.html) saying: [...] has some questions about epic fantasy--who reads it and how it is perceived [...]

[sleary.livejournal.com]

On my shelves, the only woman besides Carey and Smith who'd fall into the epic camp is Melanie Rawn. IIRC those were successful books, for a number of reasons, she stopped working in that genre in the late 90s and is now into urban fantasy.

I think your observation is pretty accurate. Depressing, but accurate.

[sillylilly-bird.livejournal.com]

What about Mary Gentle's The Book of Ash [4 volumes]?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

They're great! But not bestsellers, so far as I'm aware.

[auroraceleste.livejournal.com]

I've long wondered if it is because female authors get pushed into YA. I know that Tamora Pierce tells the story of how her Song of the Lioness story was pitched to fantasy publishers but she was told to split it into four books and publish it as YA. That was 30 years ago, but it does seem that stuff written by men is still more likely to get published by adult fantasy imprints and shelved in adult fantasy sections that stuff written by women, even when you consider the age/gender of the protagonist.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

You may well be right. Certainly YA has many more female writers with clearly female names writing bestselling epic fantasy. And many "adult epic fantasy writers" also have young protagonists.

[cassiphone.livejournal.com]

The perception of epic fantasy as a masculine domain always knocks me sideways, because it's the exact opposite in Australia. Our first BIG bestselling fantasy author was Sara Douglass in the mid-nineties, whose books launched HarperCollins Voyager, our oldest & longest standing SF/fantasy imprint. Since then, the majority of big name fantasy authors in Australia have been women, with only a few outlier male names doing well - and of those male authors many, like Garth Nix, are outside epic fantasy.

Certainly the female fantasy reader is heavily courted by those Australian publishers who do publish/promote epic fantasy as a genre.

But it has not escaped my notice that the Big Name fantasy authors we import tend to be male, and particularly that the longer careers (ie the authors still in print on the bookshop shelves that were also there 15 years ago) seem to belong to international male names.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that's very interesting.

[cafenowhere.livejournal.com]

Just another data point: NK Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy. Despite the initials, I don't think it's very hard to figure out it's *Nora* Jemisin. The first two books seem well reviewed, but are not bestsellers. Jemisin is a "newer" writer, of course.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I think it's nearly always easy to discover an author's gender if you're really curious. The initials are there for the people who are prejudiced but not curious. Perhaps it would never occur to them that a book they enjoy could be written by a woman.

Comments on DW suggest that they are indeed bestsellers, perhaps for loose values of the term. (Top 10 on Locus.)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I don't know about anybody else, but my favorite fantasy has always been secondary world fantasy, and I have surrounded myself relatively easily with epic fantasy reading women friends.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

also, there's some best selling YA epic fantasy written by women, too, but YA has more women authors overall.

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

In the early 90s, when I was being published by Bantam, my editor asked for a publicity budget for my books (Deverry series, Katharine Kerr) because they were doing so well in the UK and Australia. She was told by the head of the department "No, because men don't read books by women." AT that time, a survey by a UK newspaper showed that 60% of fantasy was read by men. IOW, the other 40% didn't count to this dork.

It's probably the reason I'm writing UF now.

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

Oops, I should add that judging by emails and the people who showed up at book signings, easily half my readers were and are men and boys.