Reddit reviews Das Schwert des Lebens: Roman (German Edition)

"I found a number of books that I loved, and stories that I can't wait to finish"....YAY. This, THIS is why I seize every chance I can to make people aware of the many excellent yet seemingly invisible female authors in the field--because so many terrific books are out there waiting to be discovered and enjoyed by more readers. OP, I am so glad you've found some new authors to love.

But every time a thread about female authors appears, I see the same mistaken assumptions pop up in the comments. Rather than responding to folks individually, I thought I'd tackle them here.

Mistaken assumption #1: Not many women write epic or secondary-world fantasy.

Not true, and never has been true. See this other comment I wrote in the thread. The problem is not that women don't write the genre, but that people don't hear about them. Take a look at this list of epic fantasy written by women (where I held to a fairly strict definition of epic fantasy, as opposed to S&S, adventure fantasy, etc). How many have you heard or or read? How about this more general list of 40 women writing secondary-world fantasy taken from my own shelves and all the names in the comments? Or the names mentioned in this thread about sweeping epics?

Mistaken assumption #2: Well, even if women write secondary-world fantasy, I haven't heard about them because they're not any good. Except maybe Robin Hobb.

Again, no. The idea that "quality will always rise to the top" is a happy fantasy shared by many readers and newbie authors because they don't understand how the publishing industry works. See this comment where I detailed a whole bunch of reasons an excellent book may not sell well--reasons that have nothing to do with gender. When you put gender in the mix, you get an even bigger problem, because female authors are much more likely to be saddled with misleading covers and blurbs.

For a really stark example, check out the US cover for Betsy Dornbusch's Emissary. Now look at the German edition. Which one of these correctly signals that the book is a bloody political epic fantasy full of battles and almost no romance?

There is also the chicken-and-egg marketing problem. Male authors have sold big, therefore publishers are more likely to choose a male-authored book as their lead title and throw their full marketing weight behind it, therefore the cycle continues. (The amount of marketing support from a major publisher makes a huge, HUGE difference in how many readers a book can reach. The impact is almost impossible to overestimate. And it has nothing to do with ads; it has to do with convincing bookstores to put in large orders, and paying for front-of-store displays and endcaps and other special placement, and blanketing the online world with ARCs, etc.)

Okay, but why should I care?

We all want to find more books we'll love, right? The point here is that you may have been choosing books from a pool limited not by your preferences, but by mistaken assumptions on the part of someone at the publisher. (Either, "Hey, this author is a woman. She must be writing romantic fantasy--give her a cover to match." Or even, "Okay, this is a gritty political epic fantasy, but the author is a woman so let's try and pull in some of the enormous romance market. I don't care how many epic fantasy fans we lose if we can pull in a fraction of the romance readers. Make sure the blurb focuses on feelings.")

Maybe you're a slow reader and you already have a huge backlog of books you want to read; fine. But if you're actively on the hunt for something new & good to read, the way to make sure you're not missing out on excellent books that are right in your sweet spot is to look even more closely at those written by female authors. Forget covers and blurbs, try the actual samples on Amazon. Or yes, you can even deliberately seek out recs of female authors who write the sort of stories you like. The point is not that you should read them because they're female. The point is to find more awesome books that you didn't get to hear about because the author is female.