The publisher Planet has awarded its annual award, and with this has confirmed the importance of female authors in the Spanish publishing scene. With its peculiarities, Planeta is a good thermometer of market tastes and trends, and it certainly means something that this year Paloma Sánchez-Garnica has won the award with ‘Victoria’ and, as a finalist, Beatriz Serrano with ‘ Fire in the throat’.
The details. There are, of course, abundant nuances in this award and even some malicious extra details: Sánchez Garnica was a finalist for the award in 2021, with ‘Last days in Berlin’. It was the year in which Carmen Mola, a female pseudonym under which three men hid, won. Last year a woman did win, especially from the media, Sonsoles Ónegajust as it did the previous year Luz Gabas. And this year, two women win the award. Although since 1952, only a little more than twenty women have achieved it.
More women writing. If we go to Labor force survey of the National Statistics Institute of 2022we find more female writers, journalists and linguists than their male counterparts. Only in children’s literature (a subsection in which there are many female writers) and in textbooks, for example, women published 4,317 titles in 2022, compared to 3,378 books by men.
More readers… If we go to Reading Habits report This year, the reading statistics are clear: the percentage of women who read in their free time exceeds that of men in all age groups covered by the study. The greatest distance is in the section between 25 and 34 years old, where female readers reach a percentage of 73.4% and male readers reach a percentage of 55.9%. In total terms, 68.6% of women read in their free time, compared to 59.3% of men. Since 2021, the percentage of women readers has increased by 5.3 points and that of men by 4.5 percentage points.
…and more sales… The feeling we have that the new shelves in bookstores and award ceremonies like the Planet are favorably tilted towards women (in the last five yearstwo out of three of the ten best-known literary and commercial awards, while in the previous period the proportion was one to three) has a very simple basis. And logically, looking at the statistics on the number of female readers: they sell more. At the end of 2021, El País published a report which talked about how women had written 21 of the 50 most popular books this year (42%), but in terms of copies sold, the female percentage reached 51%. A year earlier, in 2020, the percentage of sales for women was only 35%.
…but they publish less. Although women may apparently be calling the shots in the Spanish literary industry, statistically this is not the case: the latest data we have is from the year 2022 in relation to the year 2021, in a report from the Ministry of Culture. In the ISBN of that year We obtained the following data, which confirms that the presence of men was much higher in terms of publication: of 66,371 titles registered in Spain, 61.8% were by men and 37.8% by women (the rest are from publication collective or registered as works of institutions or entities).
Unbalanced editorials. In March of this year, Infolibre published an article in which it counted what percentage of men and women there were in a few independent publishing houses, in which in theory there should be a search for equality. The author, Carmen Peire, wandered through the catalogs of publishers such as Cliff (approximately 20% of what they publish are women), Asteroid Books (10%), Candaya (in just a couple of lines on your seal women reach 30%) or Captain Swing (30% female authors).
Peire manages to vindicate, of course, the work of publishers specialized in publishing women, such as Transit, With M for Woman, Huso Publishing, By Conatus, foam pages, mother’s love either With Ink You Got Me.
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