2016 – the latest Stella Count

Women write about two thirds of all the fiction books published in Australia. Yet books written by men are still more likely to be reviewed in the Australian mainstream media. The situation is changing, but very slowly. The 2016 Stella Count surveys twelve Australian publications – including national, metropolitan and regional newspapers, journals and magazines – in print and online. The Count assesses the extent of gender biases in the field of book reviewing in Australia. In order to do this, it records the authors, book titles and book genres [...]

2018-03-25T00:56:51+11:00August 2nd, 2017|Writing|2 Comments

Book Reviews – where are all the women? Stella Count paints a depressing picture.

For five years the nice people at the Stella Prize have been counting who receives (and writes) book reviews in Australia. No prize, even a stellar one, for guessing who does: men. Reviews that were of books by women, tracked over the past five years. Source: https://thestellaprize.com.au/the-count/2015-stella-count/ Despite men writing only 28% of all Australian books published in 2015, books by men received well over half the published reviews.  Men's books were consistently the focus of longer reviews and male reviewers had more reviews published than did women [...]

2018-03-21T14:54:26+11:00August 1st, 2016|Book Review|0 Comments

Popular history writing remains a male preserve, publishing study finds

Here is a fascinating, and depressing, article showing publishing's overwhelming bias towards male historians and male historical subjects. Slate magazine studied 614 popular history titles published last year in the US and found a genre dominated by generals, presidents and male authors. Of those 614 titles, three-quarters were written by men.  Of the published biographies, nearly three-quarters were about men.  Only six percent of male biography authors wrote about women.  Sigh. Slate argues that the persistence of this imbalance, even among authors writing for presses that publish more academics, "seems [...]

2018-03-27T21:00:27+11:00January 12th, 2016|Interesting Articles, Writing|0 Comments
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