I was commenting to a fellow-writer that, in the slush piles I read, lately female main characters outnumber male main characters so much that the males stand out more and might have an unfair advantage because I find them refreshing and different.
She lamented that we’ve “gone too far the other way” with gender representation and now there are no men in fiction and gosh darn it, she likes men! A male writer of her acquaintance had told her he only wrote female main characters because they sell better.
Which made me say, “That’s weird, because I always got the feeling that my male main character stories sell better.”
And so I decided to once again waste an hour doing statistics on my story sales.
Out of 41 sold stories, 13 have male protagonists and 24 have female, and 4 have non-gendered protagonists (or I simply never reveal the gender heh heh I was told you can’t do that and sell the story and I HAVE. bwa ha ha haaa… oops digression.)
This seems to back up my friend’s opinion as the majority (58.5%) of my sold stories are female protagonists.
However, I mostly WRITE female protagonists. Having recently collected stats on my unsold and sold stories for my post on what affects story sales, I have a handy list of 31 stories I’m trying to sell but haven’t yet. Of those, 22 (71%) have female protagonists. (Two have non-gendered protagonists.) As a woman, I am more comfortable writing women, and so I write men less often.
The percentage of stories with male protagonists among sold stories is higher than the percentage written. (72 stories with 20 male stories or roughly 28% male stories over all, and roughly 32% of sold stories with male protagonists. ) This would seem to back up my gut feeling that my stories with male protagonists sell better.
When I look at average number of rejections per story before sale, the men come out on top. My male main characters averaged 4 rejections before sale and my females 12. Unsold stories the men are doing slightly better than the women with an average of 11 rejections to 13 for the ladies. This seems to back up my feeling that male protagonist stories sell quicker.
So, rest easy, gent-lovers! I have statistically proven that male protagonists sell better. If you send to the magazines I send to. And write like me. Also does it matter that I’m a female writer? Most submissions are not author-blind… Okay, well, it’s a data point, anyway.
Is there a bias in when I choose to write male characters? Probably? My first pro sale had a male main character because I was trying to differentiate my Bridget Jones’ Diary fanfic as much as possible from the source material. (I got away with that one, too!) “The Time Mechanic” had a male main character because I was convinced at that time that I had to have a male main character to sell so I changed all the pronouns. “Keep Talking” had a male main character because I wanted to write about father/daughter relationships. My unsold story “A Living Will” has a male protagonist because I based him on a friend as a way to kickstart thinking about the character. If I default female maybe my male protagonists feel more real because I use them when basing a character on a real person more?
Sometimes I write about men because I’m a female heterosexual chauvinist pig and I find men sexy and want to show how sexy they are in my writing. Well, sex sells? Most first readers in fiction are female, I’m pretty sure–there was a recent study that found that women are the vast majority of the publishing work force at all levels except top executive. So that’s a possibility–appeal to your very-likely-man-loving first readers and you’ll do better.
Anyway, I think fear that a certain type of main character is needed to sell is erroneous. There will always be room for all types of main characters if the story is compelling and we authors are notoriously searching for ways to stack the odds in our favor, only to discover that we just made our story more invisible in the slush pile by imitating what everyone else thinks is hot right now.
