Self-publishing lets women break book industry's glass ceiling, survey finds

If a woman writing fiction needs “money and a room of her own”, as Virginia Woolf suggested, writers at the beginning of the 21st century should perhaps insist the room comes with an internet connection, after a new study has found that the proportion of self-published bestsellers written by women is almost twice as large as in traditional publishing.

The DIY sector of the books market is currently booming, both in terms of numbers of books created, and numbers bought. In 2013, Nielsen Book found that 18m self-published books were purchased by UK readers, up 79% on 2012, while according to Bowker, there were over 458,000 titles self-published in the US in 2013, up 17% on 2012 and 437% on 2008.

Now, a report from online publishing platform FicShelf has found that the authors doing best in the medium tend to be women. Looking at the most popular titles across the top self-publishing platforms Blurb, Wattpad, CreateSpace and Smashwords, FicShelf found that 67% of top-ranking titles were written by women. This compares with the top 100 traditionally-published titles on Amazon, of which FicShelf discovered that 61% are written by men.

The study did not include self-published titles on the Kindle, because Amazon does not separate them out from traditionally-published books in its bestseller lists. But FicShelf is confident the survey’s results are representative of the market as a whole, adding that the platforms considered are “growing at an impressive rate”, with Wattpad boasting 35m members.

“More and more female writers are seeing success in self-publishing,” said Monique Duarte, chief executive of FicShelf, which released the results to mark International Women’s Day on Sunday 8 March. “It’s a level playing field.”

FicShelf also found, it said, that “men are more likely to receive recognition for their work ... with preconceived notions of a ‘literary canon’ and curated lists of top titles still dominated by male writers”. Male authors account for 80% of titles in the Telegraph’s “100 Novels Everyone Should Read”, 85% of the Guardian’s “100 Greatest Novels of all Time”, and 70% of the Telegraph’s “The Best Books of 2014”, it found.

Self-published author Alison Morton said: “There’s definitely a gender disparity among traditionally-published authors. More women buy, write and read books in numerical terms, but more ‘weight’ and status is given by publishers to books by male authors. With self-publishing, it’s the effort by the individual that counts, irrespective of gender.”

In total, FicShelf looked at 227 bestselling self-published titles, a mix of fiction and non-fiction. When it focused on novels, the results were even more skewed: of 134 fiction titles, 109, or 81%, were by women, 11 were by men, and 14 were unknown.

“The scale of the discrepancy shows that women writers aren’t being treated equally in traditional publishing,” said the author Roz Morris. “We’re usually pigeonholed into obviously feminine genres such as chick-lit and romance, but not generally allowed to be complex artistes, to write the unusual books that break new ground. These figures show a huge vote of confidence for the writer in charge of their artistic destiny – and indicate that the literary world should take more notice of what women writers are publishing.”

Morris has recently worked with six other female authors to self-publish the ebook anthology Outside the Box: Women Writing Women, a collection of seven novels featuring “strong female characters” which the writers are making available for a limited period, until May.

“While mainstream publishing plays safe with predictable stories and heroines who repeat the same familiar tropes, where are today’s most ground-breaking authors? The answer is that they are self-publishing,” say the writers, who include Orna Ross, an author who has previously been traditionally-published but who went on to found the Alliance of Independent Authors, Joni Rodgers, author of the bestselling cancer memoir Bald in the Land of Big Hair, the award-winning Jane Davis, Carol Cooper, Kathleen Jones and Jessica Bell.

“For me, these writers are the real superstars of self-publishing. They’re storytellers dedicated to their craft, who have proved their worth with awards, fellowships and, of course, commercial success,” said Morris.

Dan Holloway, columnist for the Guardian books pages and publisher, said that the anthology authors were “at the forefront of a strong cohort of ground-breaking, boundary-pushing women writing and self-publishing literary fiction”.

“The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is ‘Make It Happen’, and our study proves that self-publishing is making it happen for female writers across the globe,” said FicShelf’s Duarte. “In self-publishing, there is no glass ceiling to smash through – it’s about the individual rather than the usual old boy’s club mentality. It’s not about who you know, but what you can do – and what you can write.”