The future of the book

Interesting study. My novels are definitely about male experience, and I see my audience as male, hence I write for the smallest part of the fiction market. My wife (who once told me she doesn't read books written by men, which proves not to be quite true -- but close) told me all this long ago. No wonder writing sometimes feels like pissing against the wind ha ha. On the other hand, my plays and screenplays often have strong female characters. But novels focus on interior lives -- and in my work, those lives are male.

clipped from www.npr.org Why Women Read More Than Men by Eric Weiner  One thing is certain: Americans—of either gender—are reading fewer books today than in the past. A poll released last month by The Associated Press and Ipsos, a market-research firm, found that the typical American read only four books last year, and one in four adults read no books at all. A National Endowment for the Arts report found that only 57 percent of Americans had read a book in 2002 a four percentage-point drop in a decade. Book sales have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way for the foreseeable future. When it comes to fiction, the gender gap is at its widest. Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain. Book groups consist almost entirely of women, and the spate of new literary blogs are also populated mainly by women. The Associated Press study stirred a small buzz among some of those bloggers.