That’s what they say in conventional publishing, and by that, I mean the world of print and paper, Waterstones and WH Smiths, the big five and their huge marketing departments.
And, broadly speaking, they are right.
Male action heroes don’t sell that many either, with a few exceptions like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Even spy thrillers don’t shift in huge numbers, apart from those by John Le Carré and a select handful of others. If you want a UK spy thriller (the reading public reasons) you go to John Le Carré, king of the genre. Why would you go anywhere else? No need to reinvent the wheel. Le Carré’s appeal is broad - he is read equally by men and women and beloved by both, something he shares with Lee Child. And this is the key to their success.
Because it is women who buy fiction.
According to Helen Taylor in Why Women Read Fiction (and I see no reason to doubt her) 80% of fiction books are bought by women. Pretty staggering, right? And it’s not that women don’t like action, it’s just that, all things being equal, they prefer other genres, and if they are reading action, they seem to prefer (for whatever reason) male heroes.
Now let’s consider the brave new world of content consumption that is Netflix, YouTube, Audible, Amazon Prime, Tiktok etc. Compared to twenty or thirty years ago, there is vastly more content being delivered now, in vastly more original ways, and every bit of it is in direct competition with print books. Books are up against it in the fight of their lives.
On the plus side, the amount of content being consumed is also going up. Accurate data is hard to come by but, in the last couple of decades, it is estimated our content consumption has more than tripled. Smartphones have a lot to do with this. They are with us all the time – when we’re walking, driving, at the gym, in the house. And earbuds make it so easy. They carve out a space for new content where there wasn’t a space before. It is no surprise, therefore, that audio, as a means of delivering content, is increasing its market share fast.
And here’s the thing - the absolute game changer for conventional publishing - the audio audience is not the same as the audience who buy print books. Because half of them are men.
Granted, they are not all listening to fiction. There are podcasts and an ever-expanding array of non-fiction titles to choose from, but still. The numbers of men, and the quantity of fiction they are consuming, is steadily rising.
This is good news if you write spy thrillers with a female lead because here’s the other thing.
Men like stories with action heroines.
I guess it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Kick-ass women have been popular on screen (and gaming consoles) for years: Ripley, Buffy, Nikita, Lara Croft, the Black Widow, Electra, Trinity, Dark Angel, Sydney in Alias (to name but a very few). Popular on screen that is, but not in conventional publishing.
The only place in a bookshop you will find a kick-ass action heroine is young adult fantasy. The Hunger Games, The Cruel Prince, A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass (basically everything by Sarah J. Maas) feature action heroines kicking butt. In fact, if you were to try to sell fantasy YA to an editor, without a strong female lead, you would probably struggle. That’s a whole generation who are growing up loving Katniss and Feyre and Aelin, who have had their tastes shaped at a formative age, and who, when they grow to adulthood, will likely find the current fiction offerings lacking. Put it together with the rise of the male reader, and conventional publishing is going to need to up their female-action game.
There is a certain amount of talking my own book here, of course. I write a kick-ass female spy called Winter, for Audible. Winter is what Bond would be if he was being created today. For a start, in our surveillance age, he would work at GCHQ (snoop central), not MI6, and would be good at coding. Also, there’s a chance he’d be a she. Some things would stay the same – the promiscuity, the weapons proficiency, the combat prowess. The smug invincibility. Winter is all these things.
But more than this, she is the hero. The Alpha if you like. The mythic hero. She’s not ‘making it in a man’s world’. She is the world. She is exactly what conventional publishers don’t like and audio and screen audiences love. She’s a fantasy. A John Wick, Vin Diesel, fight-to-the-death fantasy. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of many other heroines in modern fiction who can claim this. She is one of the first, but you can be absolutely sure she won’t be the last.
Winter Falling by Alex Callister is available exclusively on Audible from 7th April 2022.
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster....Firestorm is down - the assassin for hire website that had the world by its throat, gone. Alek Konstantin, king of the underworld, is in hiding. But while the world celebrates, Winter is bracing for what must surely follow. All the world’s cut-throats, assassins and thugs are unemployed, roaming the globe without a leader - and nature abhors a vacuum. Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken....Something’s not right, and it’s not only that Winter’s body is in pieces. A boy held captive. An attempted assassination. Thirty men gunned down in rural South Wales. What sinister hand is directing these events, and to what end? GCHQ is a place of secrets, and they follow Winter everywhere. There is so much she must conceal, and Control is keeping something from her, something vital about her past. As she crashes towards the ultimate showdown, Winter faces the hardest decision of her life - and she must ask herself the question - whose side is she really on?
More information about the author can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @CallisterAuthor. You can also find her on Facebook.
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