A column I did for Publisher’s Weekly: (An edited version as published is attached at the end)
A publishing quip holds that the difference between guy books and girl books is this: Men like to read about a lot of characters dying very quickly, while women like to read about a single character dying very, very slowly.
The joke hints at a serious issue. Estimates (although the original source of such statistics, endlessly repeated on the Internet, is unclear) are that up to 70 percent of fiction buyers, and 80 percent of fiction readers, are female.
My novels always have strong and smart female characters, but they usually also have a man as primary protagonist. They have battles (lots of people dying very quickly), intricate plots, and no character-developing Disease of the Week.
In other words, statistically I’m doomed.
My latest novel, “Blood of the Reich,” does have a female as its primary hero and three other important female characters to balance the four primary males. But it also has a Nazi Iron Cross on its blood-red-and-steel-gray cover, and a complete absence of hearts, flowers, children, pets, or ripped bodices.
The marketing reasoning is this: Women will pick up a thriller cover with Iron Cross – a 2000 survey showed they make up 69 percent of thriller buyers – but men will never, ever, pick up a romance or Chick-Lit cover.
I can’t disagree.
Still, how can I persuade female buyers (in the reported 17 seconds they initially hold any book to consider it) that alongside my suspense on Nazis, particle physics, and lost city shootouts, are romance, longing, and the courageous character arc of an appealing young woman?
I like girls. I write stuff girls like; I know this because they tell me so. But I’m sold as a guy author, and admittedly enjoy the manly-man marketing in what is, let’s face it, sort of a girlie (sitting and typing) profession. The Discovery Channel films crabbers and loggers, not writers, for a reason.
Hemingway and Mailer went out of their way to shoot and punch things to avoid that stigma, but nowadays everyone is supposed to be sensitive. American society, including publishing, has feminized the past half-century as women moved into the professional workplace.
In Britain, author Ian McEwen ran a 2005 experiment by spending a few minutes giving his literary fiction away in a London park. He found that women took almost all 30 copies. Male response ranged from indifference to suspicion.
“When women stop reading, the novel will be dead,” he wrote in The Guardian.
Maybe he should put a Nazi Iron Cross on his covers.
What do women want? I’ve asked this of book clubs I’ve visited (always exclusively female) and their answer is not long deathbed scenes from tragic illnesses (though I’m guessing that wouldn’t hurt) but relationships. Romance. Food. Cool places to hang out, like castles and palaces. And sex, if tastefully calibrated.
(Another toughie. I recall humorist Dave Barry reporting that he and his male friends decided to write an erotic novel but had to give the project up. They were finished after one paragraph.)
Women like action, but they want stuff happening inside to people as well as outside to armies. Scientists report that women are hard-wired for empathy, probably because it was an evolutionary advantage in raising children and a disadvantage in spearing enemies.
21st century ladies are also stern. No wimp women, they warn. No shrieking ninnies. They want authors who understand them.
What guy can do that?
My wife has prohibited me from having female characters that pout or giggle.
“But women do pout or giggle, at least once in a while,” I tried.
“Not in your books they don’t,” she said.
Adding mystery to the gender conundrum is that the majority of enduring literary and movie series characters have been male: for every Miss Marple there is a testosteroned platoon of Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Horatio Hornblower, Indiana Jones, Superman, Don Draper, my own Ethan Gage, or even Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman.
Women buy the fiction. But they will read about men.
My plan for world domination, then, is to appeal to both sexes. It would be fascinating to publish “Blood of the Reich” with two titles and two covers, crassly calculated to cover the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ dichotomy.
Failing that, I merely hope that women are less close-minded than men (not hard to do), will give an Iron Cross book a try, will identify with heroic innocent Rominy Pickett, and will tell their friends. Just in case I’ve also got a female tomboy, Buddhist nun and Nazi, to cover all the bases.
Because here’s the secret: In the end, I don’t think men and women are so different after all. The books that move me don’t just blow things up, they feature males and females seeking connection, and purpose. That’s what people do.
Evolutionary biologists contend we’re really just DNA replication machines. All of our schemes, wars, courtships, ambitions, and faiths amount to nothing more than finding and keeping someone to help copy our genetic code. Must replicate. Beep! Must replicate. Beep! Married or unmarried, gay or straight, the instinct for union is there.
Did I say I like women? Female characters bring an entirely different kind of common sense and resourcefulness to a story than male ones do, and each gender brings out the best in the other. That’s handy for heroes.
So it’s not just smart to have good female characters. It’s necessity.
Unless you want to kill a lot of people in a very short time.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I must admit, many, many times I have been in a book store or local library and chosen books strictly based on the cover, and NEVER was there a ‘romantic embrace’ on any of them!
I didn’t select “Blood of the Reich” for its Iron Cross cover, but because I am a keen admirer of your Ethan Gage historical thrillers and wanted to see what you could do with a more modern plot. At first, the Nazi angle put me off, but as I read, I got more interested, as it follows something of an Indiana Jones pattern of seeking a lost place. Adding the tomboy female pilot in China was a great move, too, to capture readers’ attention. Currently I’m close to halfway through the book, and may just have to stay up all night to read the balance. You’ve written another outstanding page turner.