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Bias in publishing .. an experiment

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    Bias in publishing .. an experiment

    http://jezebel.com/homme-de-plume-what-i-learned-sending-my-novel-out-und-1720637627

    What happened when an author sent her work out under a male name.

    #2
    Bias in publishing .. an experiment

    This is depressingly unsurprising.

    I would expect similar results from experiments in which she used stereotypically black or white names.

    I also think that she does a good job of sketching the economic and social forces that encourage this kind of thing.

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      #3
      Bias in publishing .. an experiment

      Have we really moved on so little in 150 years?

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        #4
        Bias in publishing .. an experiment

        Yes, what I find really interesting (although actually not surprising) is not just that the male author was perceived more positively, but that the book was viewed quite differently.

        I have a "male" name on another forum and treated quite differently*, and have come up against that "oh. she speaks." or "did your boyfriend tell you that/did someone help you with this?" reaction all my life but it's depressing that it still goes on, in the arts, where they really should know better by now.

        * I have had one woman call me sexist and at least one say I obviously have "no idea" how women feel about abortion. Ha.

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          #5
          Bias in publishing .. an experiment

          My completely anecdotal, rather limited, and strictly New York/US - based sense of things is that the crisis in arts funding (whether it be private giving, government grants and/or commercial revenue) has led great swathes of those involved to become more retrograde in such matters, as they are convinced that retrograde is what sells (in part because they perceive their target demographic as being increasingly elderly, given that "yoof don't do books", etc.)

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            #6
            Bias in publishing .. an experiment

            Not in any way disputing the story or underlying premise, but this was coincidentally in The Guardian the other day.

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              #7
              Bias in publishing .. an experiment

              Two sides of the same coin, I'd say.

              In each case the more commercially successful route is to assume an identity that doesn't challenge agents/editors/readers pre-conceptions.

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                #8
                Bias in publishing .. an experiment

                Hmm.

                In academic publishing, all worthwhile journals review blind. Usually double-blind, sometimes single, sometimes triple. But reputable journals always review blind. It doesn't work 100% - some will tell you it's far less effective than that - but that is the standard.

                However, monographs are virtually never reviewed blind. Or rather; the referees will be anonymous, the author never will. And that's because the publishing house is a business; the author's identity clearly affects the commercial prospects of the book. I'm currently co-writing a textbook with a Very Big Name, and publishers are falling over themselves; that simply would not happen if I wrote the very same text myself, which is perfectly reasonable.

                So the result here is interesting, but I guess we need to know more about the novel, its genre, its market sector, marketing norms in that sector. If, say, very few female authors sell True Crime books in any significant numbers, you could understand a publishing house being more reluctant to take a punt on a female-written True Crime book. I could at least imagine the converse happening if a man were shopping around a novel aimed at teenage girls.

                I don't know that this one example tells us a great deal, in other words.

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                  #9
                  Bias in publishing .. an experiment

                  So much on this topic has appeared in my various timelines this last couple of years that I've lost track of which study was which, but a fairly recent one looked at which books get reviewed in the press and by whom. There were some clear outcomes: across the board, male authors are better represented and male reviewers even more so. But the interesting thing to me was that the worst culprits by miles were your London and New York Review of Books - "serious" publications, in other words, are total sausage fests. Where sales are substituted for "importance", the gender divide widens.

                  Female authors publish and sell more books overall, I think, but reviewers tend to relegate them to genres while regarding the output of male literary and non-fiction authors as being "proper". That's the really significant skew.

                  I think the experiment in the OP says a lot about about how books are marketed now. The "personality" comes before the book, because authors make their money from book tours, magazine features, being "writers in residence" and that sort of pointless shite, rather than book sales (which yield close to bugger all cash, as I understand it).

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                    #10
                    Here's an excellent long-form profile of my publisher Unbound. I'm posting it in this thread because I was looking for an old thread about publishing trends but couldn't find one. I'm also posting it because most people still don't understand what Unbound is and why it's so different from regular publishing houses. And because I've been to their very friendly and helpful office and what they say in the piece is true - the diversity of their authors is reflected in the diversity of their staff too.

                    For those interested in getting published - they hold regular 'pitching hours' where you can put your book ideas to them. In that sense it's much more democratic than the traditional, wearisome path via an agent or the one-in-a-thousand crapshoot of the slush pile.

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