These days, female authors are publishing as many books yearly as males.
In a 2023 study, “The Welfare Effect of Gender-Inclusive Intellectual Property Creation: Evidence from Books,” University of Minnesota economist Joel Waldfogel looked at sales on Amazon, reviews on Goodreads, and other data, and concluded that, as of 2020, women are now penning 50 percent, maybe even slightly more, of the books published yearly.
This is a huge leap from 10 percent a century ago, and 20 percent 60 years ago. And while this is welcome news for anyone who believes in gender parity in creative fields, it is not surprising to publishers, particularly ones at companies that have made it their mission to elevate women’s voices.
“I think that women writing and women reading, and that sort of symbiotic community of writers and readers — energized by book clubs, energized by word-of-mouth recommendations that come from all different sources, whether it’s your friends or your booksellers or it’s media personalities who have led book clubs — has driven a very robust environment for reading and publishing by and among women,” says Anne Messitte, publisher of Zibby Publishing, which, since 2023, has published only women (though one male author has a book dropping this year).
Before joining the company, Messitte spent several decades at Random House, helming its Vintage and Anchor divisions. One of her more famous discoveries was “50 Shades of Grey” author E.L. James.
“So yes, I’m not surprised that women have achieved parity,” Messitte continues. “In fact, I would say if one were to delve into the self-publishing arena, I would even venture to guess women are the majority.”
Self-publishing used to be a costly and exhausting endeavor because authors not only had to pay a printer to produce their books, they also had to get bookstores to sell them, or else their work would gather dust in a storage space.
But since the early aughts, companies like Amazon have been offering authors the chance not only to print digitally (e-books are not only much cheaper to produce, they can be sent instantly all over the world), but on paper, and then sell their work through their websites. The ease and reasonable price of these services (Amazon charges nothing up front for e-books, just a percentage if the book sells) made them incredibly popular, with every aspiring author now able to unleash their brilliance on the world.
But did more women take advantage of this technology than men? That was apparently true in 2015, when a study from a now-defunct literary community called FicShelf found that 67 percent of self-published authors were female. While there is no confirmation that this is still the case, in 2024, the Alliance of Independent Authors found that self-published women made 40.9 percent more money than self-published men.
Former Seal Press editor Brooke Warner agrees that gender parity in publishing is a step in the right direction. That said, Warner contends there’s still work to do before women — particularly women of color, older women, LBGTQ, and disabled women — achieve true equality in the field.
“I think it’s an interesting time,” says Warner, who started woman-focused She Writes Press in 2012 with author Kamy Wicoff. “I think it’s true that women probably publish more books these days than men do, but I also think that when it comes to questions of who gets published, or who gets attention, and who gets marginalized, it’s absolutely true that men get more awards and men get more opportunities.”
The FicShelf study also found that male authors outnumbered women three to two in traditional publishing, but again, that was 10 years ago. The Alliance study, however, found that men make 41.4 percent more money than women when signed by a traditional publisher.
A traditional publisher covers all the costs of production and printing, and usually pays authors for their work up front — a payment called an advance. If authors sell enough books to earn back their advance, they start getting some of the profits from the book sales, known as royalties.
Unfortunately, even true equality among the sexes in publishing doesn’t mean the average author will ever make enough money writing to give up her day job.
“If you go into the writing game, you cannot expect to make a living at it,” author Michael Castleman said on the Nov. 19 episode of the Southern California News Group’s podcast, “Bookish.”
His newest book, “The Untold Story of Books, A Writer’s History,” paints a rather bleak picture of the publishing landscape, and goes through its history, from scribes who wrote every manuscript by hand, to the Gutenberg Press, which mechanized the process, to e-books, which traded paper for pixels.
Castleman said that nowadays, only 6 percent of authors can expect to sell more than 1,000 copies. The main reason is that about 2 million new books are published every year. And yes, about two-thirds of those are self-published.
“It’s never been easier to release books, and it’s never been harder to promote them,” Castleman said. “These days, every new book is a blade of grass on a golf course, and it’s very, very hard to get noticed.”
So unless you’re already a best-seller, or a celebrity with millions of fans, your chances of becoming as rich as J.K. Rowling are slim, even if you’re signed by a big publishing house.
Nor is this a new problem.
Jane Austen sold the copyright for “Northanger Abbey” to a printer who just set it aside. Since she had lost the rights to her work, and couldn’t afford to buy them back, she decided to publish “Sense and Sensibility” by commission. “By commission” back then was risky, because it meant she had to pay back all the printing and other costs if her book failed to sell. Luckily, it was a hit, but even then, she never earned enough money from that, or any of her other work, to live in any sort of luxury before dying at just 41 years old.
And yet, there is hope for aspiring women writers with reasonable financial expectations.
In his study, Waldfogel couldn’t figure out why women have achieved parity in publishing but not in other creative fields. Setting aside female dominance in self-publishing, another variable may be that, in the last decade or so, there’s been an uptick in women starting presses that focus on publishing women, and, more important, on helping them as much as possible to stand out from the hordes.
“One of our missions is to elevate the experiences of female writers,” Anne Messitte said.
Zibby Publishing is part of Zibby Media, which was founded by author Zibby Owens, and includes Zibby’s Book Shop in Santa Monica.
While the publisher operates under the traditional model (which usually prefers an author to have a literary agent and/or a large social media following), it cannot match huge advances offered by the big companies. But what they do offer, Messitte says, is a personal approach and a welcoming community of fellow authors and readers.
The big publishers put out so many books every year that they usually don’t have much time (or funds) to work closely with each author, but at Zibby Publishing, Messitte says, “the central vision” is that all their authors are rock stars, and get treated as such.
“There were a lot of things about it that I didn’t expect, like for instance, I met a lot of other authors, and from what I hear, that’s not really that common,” said former TV writer Patty Lin, whose memoir, “End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood,” was published by Zibby in 2023. “They really very consciously created a community of writers, so they had us do a retreat together. Especially as a debut author, it was so nice to have that community.”
Zibby Publishing is not the only press with that approach.
Northern California-based author Karen Nelson published her first novel, “The Sunken Town,” with Sibylline Press in 2023.
“One of the things I found the best about it,” Nelson says, “is that if I had been picked up by a very big publisher, well then, I’m a tiny, tiny fish in that pond, and so what I really appreciated about Sibylline is that they treat us all equally. They really do try to build a community. Now I’ve gotten to know the other authors there, and I feel supported.”
Sibylline Press was founded in 2022 in Grass Valley, Calif., by four publishing industry veterans determined not just to see more women get published, but specifically, more women older than 50 get published.
“Our authors are women who have the wisdom of years,” says publisher Vicki DeArmon, a Glendora native now based in San Diego County.
Among them, the four Sibylline Press founders have a century’s worth of experience in publishing. “We interview our authors in person over the phone before we take on their book, and to a one, they describe a landscape that is not receptive to older women, and really doesn’t recognize the strength and the wisdom of older women and what they bring to the table.”
And while Sibylline is happy to be part of the push to publish more women, “frankly, we’re not ahead of the wave, but on top of the wave.”
“I have noticed a lot of publishing companies formed now expressly for women,” she said. “But when we came out with our publishing company for women over 50, that was a bit of an innovation.”
Sibylline does not require its authors to have an agent, or a social media following, also known as a platform.
“Generally, our women don’t have a platform, or have a small platform,” DeArmon said, adding that what matters most to her is that they’ve written a great book.
Sibylline follows a different business model from Zibby, not paying advances, instead asking the authors they accept to pay an initial fee of $3,000, and after that, monthly smaller fees over the next two years.
This helps with promotion costs, DeArmon explained. The company takes care of the editing and printing, and makes sure the book gets distributed to brick-and-mortar and online booksellers. Sibylline also launches a marketing campaign for each author as much on par with big publishers as possible.
Having authors share costs is part of a model often called hybrid publishing, though it seems very similar to Austen’s by commission model more than 200 years ago.
“It’s called hybrid because it’s neither traditional publishing nor self-publishing,” said Brooke Warner, who coined the term more than a decade ago.
She Writes Press calls itself a hybrid, and exclusively publishes female authors. If accepted, the authors are expected to pay $10,000 up front. This price may seem steep, but it is an option for an author who doesn’t want to deal with self-publishing, and appreciates a beautiful end product. Like Zibby and Sibylline, She Writes also offers authors connections with other writers and helps with promotion and marketing.
The hybrid model has been criticized by various groups, including the Society of Authors and the Authors Guild, who say it makes it easier for bad actors to exploit vulnerable authors by sucking them dry financially with nothing to show for their work.
Warner agrees this is a risk.
“The better — and only — way to address the problem of bad actors in the publishing space, especially those who are coopting the good name of ‘hybrid’ for their own reputational and financial gains, is to educate would-be authors,” she wrote in a 2022 piece, “We All Need to Be Defended Against Predatory Publishing Practices.”
In the comment section, several She Writes authors defended their publisher and the hybrid model.
“I came to She Writes Press, the hybrid Brooke Warner leads, after two agents and 25 rejections from traditional and university presses over six years because they predicted the numbers my book would likely sell was lower than they could accept,” wrote Gretchen Cherington, author of “Poetic License, a Memoir.” “I went with SWP and quadrupled the numbers they predicted.”
Nelson is also happy with her investment in Sibylline, and plans to publish her second novel with them in 2026.
“I never went into this with any expectation of making money,” she said. “It was important to me that I found a press that was reputable, that had a vision for the future, and had a clear idea of who they were. And Sibylline met all that.”
Women authors having choices, and opportunities — now that’s something to celebrate, not just during Women’s History Month, but year-round.
“That’s the amazing thing,” Messitte said. “Great stories, excellent voices, can find their way now.”