So... sexism in publishing is a pretty well-established, well-documented fact. I won't even attempt to dispute it. But the facts as presented here (and in the Jezebel piece it's taken from) don't jibe with my experience. 1) "Chick lit" is a category most represented amongst agents. There are more agents looking for "women's fiction" than most anything else. 2) According to Sol Stein, 80% of the market for hardcover fiction is female. So "literature?" Sure, there's a problem. "Fiction?" Well, the audience is certainly there. 3) I did a systematic, thorough beatdown of Publisher's Marketplace in my quest for representation while me and my agent (a woman) were on the outs. Even pushing things to ridiculous extremes, I was only able to come up with 19 names that were even vaguely worth bothering with. Sixteen of those nineteen were women, by the way, and two of them responded with something other than a form letter. The rest of the field - and it's a big one - was so not targeted to what I write (and we're talking "thriller" generic) and so not relevant to my publication that it wasn't worth bothering with. Those responses, by the way, took anywhere from two to eight weeks, with fully a quarter of the agents posting on their sites "if you don't hear from me in six months, consider it a no." 4) Catherine Nichols sent out a total of 100 queries, according to the article, and got nineteen requests for her manuscript. That's roughly 10X the industry-wide response rate; if you get one request out of 50 you're kicking ass. It kinda makes me wonder, again, as to who she's querying.
Since you know way more about this than me I wonder if you can answer a question I have. What percentage of 'chick lit' is written by male authors? I'm curious because it doesn't seem to me that a woman has to write a book that's aimed at women (or vice versa). For example John Green is a super popular YA author and mostly girls read his books. I'm not really familiar with the genre though.
I can't speak authoritatively. My sense in observing writing in general is that you are at a disadvantage if you use a male name to write distinctly female genres. I have a friend who writes a bunch of KindleSmut and all of the pen names they use are female (having wargamed no less than 50 different names). That said, I had an author tell me once about someone he knew who analyzed the best seller's market for segments to see what was lacking and he discovered "romantic dramas for women written by men" and set out to write those. His name is Nicholas Sparks, and I'll bet he's long since left Danielle Steele's revenue in the dust. A man can be assumed to write for men and women unless proven otherwise. Women are assumed to write only for women unless proven otherwise. It's pretty shitty. I think a lot of it is that to make it truly big, you need a movie... and movies are aimed at 15-25YO boys. BUT Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins Harry Potter - Joan "JK" Rowling Twilight - Stephanie Meyer Divergent - Veronica Roth Yeah, Hugh Howie and yeah, James Dashner but right now the phat stax belong to the girls.
Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about smut -- intuitively it does seem like that would be almost exclusively female writers, and your friend's experience confirms that. And it's true that the hugest YA authors right now are women. I wish there were big databases on novels with metadata about author/genre/etc, it would be really interesting to look at.