Blog: Female Authors Aren’t Being “Infantilized” by the Publishing Industry. They’re Doing it to Themselves.

Recently, I ran across a channel on YouTube run by a woman named Elizabeth Wheatley and for those of you who haven’t watched any of her videos, she’s a fantasy/romance author who penned the Dandreth’s Assassin series and generally makes videos promoting her book and talking about the genre she’s in. At first, I really liked her channel, especially as I myself am a writer and my books include some romance within the fantasy setting. However, the other day as I was scrolling through her channel, I ran across a video she posted 11 months ago titled, “Young Adult book or just written by women?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ffjyb–hhA). In this video, she basically talks about how books written by women are more likely to be put in the young adult sections, even if their stories have heavy adult themes in them that would go over the heads of most young adult readers, so today, I’m going to give my take on this issue as a conservative who has looked into the publishing industry and knows how crappy it is.

In the video, she starts off by saying that her problem isn’t with what kids should be reading, but is rather with female author’s books being put in the YA category for seemingly arbitrary reasons. She says that the reason why this is is because female authors are being discounted as serious authors and gives the example of Megan Whalen Turner’s book series The Queen’s Thief which is very vague about how old the main character is and has a very complicated, heavy plot in it that would go over most kids’ heads. From there, she claims that while this is a problem in the fantasy genre in general, she just knows that if a male fantasy author was a woman, his work would be shelved in the young adult section.

This is where I my first problem with what she’s saying. While yes, the fantasy genre does have this problem, it’s not based soley on the sex of the author. It’s based mostly on who is writing the books. According to Wikipedia, women are 57% more likely to write urban fantasy/paranormal romance and are 68% more likely to write YA novels, as compared to men who are 43% likely to write urban fantasy/paranormal romance and only 32% likely to write YA literature. On top of that, as of 2021, 50.45% of authors were women and in the publishing world, women make 96% more than men and there’s been a decreasing number of bestselling books penned by men over the years (if you want to see some more author stats, here’s the link: https://wordsrated.com/author-demographics-statistics/). With this in mind, it makes sense that more women would be dominating the YA category.

Another fact that debunks her claim that female-written fantasy stories are being infantilized is George R.R. Martin’s bestselling series, A Song of Ice and Fire. If you look up “Is A Song of Ice and Fire YA?” on Google, you will see a ton of people on the internet claiming that it is an appropriate book for kids as young as 12 to read. In comparison, I asked if I could recieve that series as birthday gift this year and my dad (who has read the series) says that he doesn’t want me reading it until I’m at least 17 because of how grisly the series is, being choc full of scenes of graphic violence, nudity, etc. Men’s fantasy books get “infantilized” too. Your story isn’t being discounted because you’re a woman.

This leads to the next claim she makes that every time she sees a woman write a sci-fi/fantasy book that doesn’t have explicit content in it, it gets shelved in YA. Once again, this is not true. Other than the absurd claim that it’s just women, it seems that contemporary YA novels are just as graphic as adult novels, and often its the female authors who allow the explicit content to be kept in the book even when their publishers tell them they want to rate it as YA. A notable example of this is Sarah J. Maas, the author of ACOTAR (A Court of Thorns and Roses). Though she originally wanted to rate it as “New Adult” (which fits an age range of 18-25 which would’ve been perfect for that series), she agreed to rate it as YA as long as her publisher didn’t censor any of the sexual content. For context, YA is 12-18, though I’ve seen it be as young as 8-15.

She also says that young adult books don’t sell better than adult books, which is ridiciulous. According to Words Rated, the YA genre makes $11.45 billion globally while the adult genre only makes $6.01 billion (as of 2021). The reason for this is the fact that the main buyer of books in the U.S. is the Teachers’/Librarians’ Unions, which, ironically, are run mainly by women. Often times, they will arbitrarily rate books as YA, even if they’re pornographic and very adult (such as the book Gender Queer which had been found over and over again in school libraries across the U.S.) because they want kids being numbed out to certain things. Women are most likely to fall into the category of having their books incorrectly fall into the Y.A. category because they are the ones who are most likely to write things that kids will read and put in the messaging that these unions want kids absorbing.

If you’re a woman and you’re reading this and don’t want your books to be “infantilized”, then a solution could be self-publishing and you advocating for what you want your book to be rated as without relying on what a traditional publisher wants your book to be.

Until next time,

M.J.