Over at BookEnds, Literary Agent Jessica Faust talks about Switching Genres. This is a question I hear writers discussing when ever they get together. They might be published in children's books and want to sell books for grown ups, they might be published in straight romance and want to sell into fantasy, but their publishers (if they do the other genre) don't want them to change.
The problem is that writers get ideas for all sorts of stories and, when the idea takes you, the urge comes to write. Faust says if you can manage to produce enough books to publish regularly under two different names, then go for it, but otherwise, stick to one genre so you develop readership.
Here at Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss has come across a writer who is attempting to auction off an idea for a book, with a starting bid of three million. This one is so bizarre I don't know where to start. If you are anything like me, you have so many ideas you will never have the time to write them all.
And over at the ROR blog and my personal blog I've been discussing gender in fantasy. It all arose from a comment from a UK interviewer in an interview here. It reminded me of a discussion at World Con when a US author commented that fantasy was a bit of a boy's club. Since most fantasy writers in Australia are female, this was a bit surprise. I decided to start a series of interviews of female fantasy authors, starting with Emily Gee.
Here is a pod cast on the subject, where (among a lot of other things) the publisher involved says only a very small percentage of men read fiction. I don't know about this. I see an equal number of males and females reading books on the train.
Since I'm based here in Australia, I can only speak as an Australian and say that we have a lot more female fantasy authors than male. Are there more male fantasy authors in the US and the UK? Or is it just a perception that there are more because female fantasy authors get less shelf space? I don't know.
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