A recent report on NPR’s website reviews what people in the publishing industry already know: most men aren’t smart enough (or don’t care enough) to read. The majority of people who buy and read books are women, and when you compare the few men who do read with female readers, here’s what you get—women: fiction / men: nonfiction. In that sense, the article points out, even Hemingway, and just about all other fiction, is “chick lit.”
One exception: more boys have read Harry Potter than girls.
I frequently wonder how readership splits across the gender divide for my own books. Anecdotally, I seem to get about equal feedback from male and female readers.
According to the NPR report, both genders are also reading less in general. It appears that I’m not exactly in what you could call a growth industry.
