Are men being 'pushed out of publishing'? Industry insiders discuss
Commentators are asking whether "men are being pushed out of publishing" amid discussion of groupthink, editorial turnover and the gender split of book-prize recipients.
BBC Radio 4 podcast AntiSocial explored this issue on Friday (18th July) following recent widespread social media discussion of an article published in March by the US journal Compact, The Vanishing White Male Writer.
The BBC programme, Are Men Being Pushed out of Publishing?, featured writers Gytha Lodge and Nick Tyrone alongside former Penguin Books communications director Amelia Fairney. The show was hosted by BBC journalists Adam Fleming and Lucy Proctor.
The speakers discussed the gender divide across the industry and in terms of book-buying. Proctor said: "Women are definitely dominating the buying of books – women make up 58% of the buying of books in the UK; this figure goes up just for fiction too.
"Women are also dominating the bestsellers list by quite a country mile: of the top 20 bestselling novels, 17 are written by women; one woman – Freida McFadden – has written five of them."
