Death of the Woman’s Hardback

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts-and-culture/night-and-day/6939143/death-of-the-womans-hardback.thtml

Death of the Woman’s Hardback

EMILY RHODES

To say that books are going through a troubled time is a gross understatement. The Bookseller appears to have an endless supply of horrific statistics, whether it’s that book sales during the week of the Royal Wedding were the worst in eight years (20% down on the same week last year) or that the trade’s just suffered the worst March in six years (an 8.7% slump on last year).

Waterstone’s is facing a buyout after HMV’s repeated profit warnings. Bookshops are panicking over the news that e-books are now the bestselling format for books in the US. It’s going to take more than a bit of excitement at last month’s London Book Fair to restore faith in this shaky industry.

One can’t help but feel that something’s gotta give. And that something may just be hardback novels by women.

Novels used to be published first in hardback for around £20 and then, around a year later, in paperback for around £7.99. The theory goes that reviews and hype surround hardback publication and then the paperback – a more accessible format – gives the book another life.

But, over the past few troubled years, publishers have started to add an extra stage to this model, introducing a trade paperback format six months or so after the hardback. (For those of you who are understandably mystified by this term, a trade paperback book is the same size as a hardback, but has a soft cover and costs only around £12.99.)

Take Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow, for instance. It was first published as an £18.99 hardback in February 2010, then as a £13.99 trade paperback in October 2010, and now, since April, as a £7.99 mass-market paperback. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell are all published according to the same three-stage model.

It’s very sensible. Once the initial surge in hardback sales has passed, few people are willing to part with the best part of £20 for a book. For the latter part of that year after hardback publication, sales will dwindle to a trickle. Bringing in a cheaper version at a halfway point boosts sales, while still remaining sufficiently different in design and price not to cannibalise sales of the mass-market paperback six months later.

But what about Lucky Break by Esther Freud, Rescue by Anita Shreve, and We Had it so Good by Linda Grant? All new novels, all published straight into trade paperback, all written by women.

It would appear that a hardback novel written by woman is a very rare book indeed. Of course there are a few. The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obrecht is in hardback, as is The London Train by Tessa Hadley, and The Paris Wife by Paula McLain – although these three all share the cheap, trade paperbacky price of £12.99. The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright is a £16.99 hardback, as was Great House by Nicole Krauss, but I’m really struggling to think of many more expensive hardback novels written by women. And even these more expensive ones are at least two pounds cheaper than their male counterparts.

It really does seem as though the work of an established female novelist is valued less than that of an established male novelist. It is particularly odd, given that women have always read more novels than men.

When novels first came into being in the 17th Century, men looked down on them as rather frivolous distractions. It was women who devoured them, as a welcome alternative to needlework and piano-playing. Three hundred years later, the needlework might have gone out the window, but novels haven’t. Ian McEwan undertook an – albeit utterly unscientific – experiment a few years ago, in which he gave away novels in his local park. He noted in his article about it for The Guardian  that every woman he approached was:

eager and grateful to take a book. Some rifled the pile murmuring, ‘Read that, read that, read that ...’ before making a choice. Others asked for two, or even three.

Whereas the men:

were a different proposition. They frowned in suspicion, or distaste. When they were assured they would not have to part with their money, they still could not be persuaded. ‘Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks mate, but no.’ Only one sensitive male soul was tempted.

When I began working in a bookshop, I was surprised by how the men tended to gravitate towards the non-fiction and the women towards the fiction. Having studied English Literature at Oxford, where there seemed to be just as many male students as female, it had never occurred to me to divide reading habits along such bold gender lines. Obviously more women read ‘chick lit’ than men, but seeing that very few men read any novels at all was a real shock.

More interesting still is noticing – on the rare occasions that men do buy fiction – which novels they buy. Chances are, it will be one of those £18.99 hardbacks, written by a man. There are undoubtedly more male readers of Martin Amis, Jonathan Franzen or Howard Jacobson than of Esther Freud, Linda Grant or Tessa Hadley.  

Evidently, men will spend the best part of £20 on a hardback novel, whereas women won’t. This unleashes a flurry of questions:

Does a novel have to be an expensive hardback for a man to feel it’s substantial enough to warrant reading? Does it have to be dressed up to look almost like a work of non-fiction? Why do men and women value books so differently? Are women shy of buying a hardback? Are they intimidated by it? Is a hardback perceived as a man’s format, whereas a paperback is a woman’s?

I’m afraid I don’t have the answers. But publishers have responded to this difference by pandering to the market. Women won’t spend the money on a book, so women’s novels are cheaper. And publishers have made them look cheaper too.

It makes sense, but it also makes me quietly furious. Why should a novel, written by a woman for a woman, be deemed of less value than a book written for a man? Why should a historian’s heavily-footnoted thesis be valued more than a novelist’s astute observations on human behaviour? How can publishers tell a woman that her choice of book is only worth £12.99, but a man’s is worth £18.99? And, worse still, how can they deny a woman’s book all the trimmings – hard covers, dust jackets, a decent RRP – that belie confidence in its publication?

Ian McEwan’s conclusion from his novel-giveaway experiment was, ‘when women stop reading, the novel will be dead’. Women are still reading and the novel isn’t dead. So why have novels written by women suffered such physical butchery? What have they done to deserve losing their hard covers? Why do we value them so much less than novels written by men?

Emily Rhodes writes the book blog Emily Books.