Women's literary fiction - qu'est-ce que c'est?

How would you define women's literary fiction? Is it considered a genre? In your opinion, what would you consider roughly the appropriate word count? Would 70,000 words be considered too small?

The rapid-fire nature of your questions makes me feel slightly beaten-about-the-head-with-a-blunt-instrument, so I need a few seconds to recover ...

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Okay, let's continue.

I define women's literary fiction as genre-less fiction written for women (and we can identify that it's written for women mainly because there is a heroine rather than a hero, or a group of protagonists who are women). That's mainly because I don't really know what 'literary fiction' is so I tend to like to call it 'genre-less' fiction, mainly because the label 'literary fiction' is often applied to stories that can't be slotted into another genre. But please note that this is my definition and it may not be used against another other literary agent in a court of law. And let's not confound 'literary fiction' with 'literature'.

To answer your second question: given the above definition, it's a kind of non-genre (IMO only!).

Word count is as word count does, but to make the production of the physical book viable for a publisher (i.e. how much it costs to buy the paper, pay the printer etc due to economies of scale), anything less than 50 000 words won't really cut it. Anything over 90 000 words may make people nervous for similar reasons. So 70 000 words is just about right. NB: All this is moot in e-book land, where you have no trees to fell and ink to dry.

Stell-aaaaaa Stell-aaaaaaa

I wonder if you've been keeping up with the recent debate about a perception of bias against women in the publishing industry (widely defined to include publishers, publications, writing prizes, and book reviewers)? And if you are across the debate, what are your thoughts?

See also:

• http://blog.taramoss.com/index.php?itemid=662
• http://thestellaprize.com.au/news/post/stats-and-more-stats/

Love your blog, by the way, and only wish you'd post more often.

Okay, last point first - thanks for the compliment, and the reason I don't post more often is, first, that people don't ask me questions that often any more and, second, after four years of doing this I don't have too much left to say that I haven't already said. Oh, and there's a third reason: blogging takes up a fair bit of time and I seem to have more to do than ever, what with the keeping up with digital issues and whatnot. So even if I wanted to blog about non-questiony things, I just wouldn't have the brain power or, frankly, the time.

Now, to your question.

Yes, I've been keeping up the debate. I try to keep up with current debates in all sorts of things because it makes me seem less unedumacated when I talk to people.

I don't think the problem is bias against women in the publishing industry. I think the problem is bias against women in the culture generally. Male sports players, male musicians, male writers, male film-makers, male newsreaders dominate our cultural outpourings. Et cetera. This is not new news. We have a male-dominated culture - for now. This is not to say that all men support this culture, or that men are solely responsible for it.

Why it seems weird in publishing is that women buy most of the books. Often they buy those books for men and, rightly or wrongly, they have their own perceptions about what sort of books men will read. As do the men themselves.

This often goes no further and is not more complicated than the author's name on the cover. Female name: men don't buy. Gender-neutral name (i.e. female author uses initials or has a first name that is gender-ambiguous): men probably buy. Male name: men buy. NB: women will buy books by anyone for themselves, but not usually for their son, father, brother or husband. (This is my observation and not a scientific statement.) But I know men who are really eclectic readers, in that they will read books in any genre, but they categorically will not buy a book written by a woman because they think it has no relevance to them. Apparently women don't have the same issue regarding male authors - and thank goodness, because Dan Brown and John Grisham et al would never have had careers.

So where does this bias start? At school? In the home, when those men are little boys being read to by their parents? Who knows. But it's there. And booksellers and publishers are businesses - they will go where the money is, so they are reluctant to publish books in certain genres that will only appeal to women. That's why you see a lot of authors with initials on the covers of crime novels and thrillers. And not just in those genres: JK Rowling, anyone?

This debate has focused on so-called literary fiction. There has been a lot written about it by people far more eminent than me. But, in short, the genres that women traditionally read and write are not, and are unlikely ever to be, considered to be 'literary' fiction. So that genre is in the blokes' domain. Hence, there are more blokes nominated for literary prizes for literary fiction. As far as I'm concerned, they can have fun with their prizes while Harlequin laughs all the way to the bank and dominates the publishing landscape in the digital age. But I am not a literary novelist trying in vain to get published in a genre that seems to favour people with different chromosomal structures, nor am I a book reviewer or someone trying to get a book reviewed. I completely understand their frustrations. And to that I shall say what I usually say to people seeking to change institutions and institutional structures: subvert from within.

Taboo or not taboo

I'm your typical wannabe-writer. I'm 25 and have dabbled a lot but am working on my first novel (it is up to 50,000 words so far). I still have a long way to go. My question is this: are gay characters too taboo to publish here? I'm painfully aware that lesbians in general are under-represented in popular culture and this is even more true in Australia. Is there even a chance that an Australian could get something that is gay (dare I say?) literary fiction published? As a second question, how short is too short? Things I've read say not to even bother with less than 70,000 words, others suggest 60,000.

The question is not whether or not the subject matter is taboo - it's not. The question is whether or not there's a large enough market for it for a publisher to take on gay-themed fiction in this country - and there's not. It's nothing to do with anyone's social sensibilities or lifestyle choices (after all, we work in The Yarts); it's purely about the amount of units they can shift.

The majority of book buyers, and readers, in this country are women: straight or straight-identifying women - that's just statistical, I'm not at all implying anything better/worse by that. The straight sheilas tend to want to read about men who want to have sex with them (or fictional versions of them - heroines). The gay blokes don't want to have sex with them, ergo they make bad heroes for straight-sheila stories. Just look at romance fiction: arguably the biggest-selling genre around the world, absolutely killing it on the e-book front, and no gay heroes in sight. So publishers go where the money is. A gay hero would necessarily be in a story largely written for gay men, and that's a smaller audience. James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room is one of the most sublime pieces of fiction ever, but you'll never hear it - or him - being whispered of in the same breath as, say, Norman Mailer, and it's probably just because not as many people were aware of the novel at the time it was released. (And if you've never read any Baldwin, you simply must - Another Country is almost unbearably beautiful.)

As for lesbian stories - well, same thing. The audience for lesbian stories is mainly lesbians, and that's a statistically small group. Straight women don't mind a bit of a lesbian storyline in their otherwise straight saga - the same way straight women like The L Word because it's about girl world, not just lesbian world - but they're not likely to buy a story that's written purely for a lesbian audience. First, because there's no straight-male hero who may want to have sex with them. Second, because escapism is a powerful motivator for reading stories and it's hard to escape into a world that is so different to your own in terms of how relationships work. There's a reason why Rita Mae Brown isn't as well known as Barbara Taylor Bradford, and it's not because BTB is a better writer.

The good news is that the United States market is big enough for everyone. So query agents there. I'm not saying it would never happen in Australia, just that it's statistically unlikely.

As for your word count: your story is as long as it is. There is so much talk about word count but, really, the story is what it is. Write it first, revise it, revise it again, then see how many words you have. Less than 50 000 isn't a good idea; over 120 000 probably makes it look like a fantasy novel. But please don't let word count dictate what your story is going to be.

Too down under to get out from underneath

Is it possible for a manuscript to be too Australian? Our humour can often leave foreigners scratching their heads, and a lot of our slang is unintelligible to anyone who hasn’t grown up here. I realise that I am being incredibly optimistic to even think that I could be published in Australia, let alone have the conundrum of changing things for an overseas audience, but is it possible? Would an overseas agent take one look and reject on the strength that it is too niche-ie?

In short: yes. How many Australian novels do you know of that have gone on to worldwide acclaim? It's not because Australians can't write; it's because we used to be a colony (or, rather, a collection of colonies and - YES, SOUTH AUSTRALIANS, I KNOW - some settlements). You don't see flotillas of New Zealand or South African - or, really, Canadian - writers setting the world on fire. The Canadians have a better chance because they can peer over the border to the US but considering how many outstandingly great writers they have, they're underrepresented on the world stage. As are writers from non-English-speaking countries. And I suspect the issue is twofold.

First, we are all considered to be 'in translation' because we are not writing in the dominant dialects of English - namely, American English and, erm, English English - nor are we considered to be writing stories that will be deemed to be of interest to Americans or Britons, and they have the largest English-language book markets in the world.

Second, as former colonies we are still trying to shake off our own and others' sense of us being 'less than'. The Australian, NZ, Canadian, Indian and South African publishing industries still fight regular battles to get rights to sell in their territories, because the British publishing companies just take them as their entitlement. They simply do not consider that we may want them. Canada has the worst time of it - as members of the Commonwealth they regularly suffer from the UK presuming they can have the rights for themselves, but American publishers want them too, although the Americans can be a bit more relaxed about it. It's a wonder Canadian publishers get anything done (they do, though, and very well).

So for an Australian author writing an Australian story, there's a very small chance they'll get published overseas, and it will probably be in genre fiction where readers are more interested in the story fitting the genre than in its setting. Young adult fiction also travels, because teenagers are less finicky about place than adults. But it's hard and dispiriting trying to get published overseas. If you're really intent on being published in the US or UK, it does make sense to not set your story in Australia and also to research the market for similar books in those territories.

As a point of interest I can tell you that, in my experience, the Americans are less likely to care about an author being from outside the US than the British care about a writer not being in Britain. But they still care about whether or not the story is too Australian for their readers and some things have been changed for some books (but not all) for US publication.

The so-called death of literary fiction

Is writing in the literary fiction genre a futile exercise these days if one would like, some day, to have more than only those nearest and dearest as readers? Is it correct to assume that marketability – in the form of solely plot-driven, rather than character- or theme-driven manuscripts – is the primary focus of publishers in our commercial world? If my passion is to take readers on an emotional and evocative journey, to create vivid images through description and to express ideas about lives not immersed in mystery/turbulent romance/fantasy/Opus Dei and dramatic turmoil of that ilk (not that there's anything wrong with that), should I resign myself to seeing my scribblings in print only when I supply the ink, paper and technology myself?

I'm not going to lie and say that literary fiction as a 'genre' is about to become the most popular thing around. It never has been - Jane Austen certainly wasn't literary fiction in her time, and nor was Dickens (who understood marketing even before it really existed).

Part of the problem is in classifying any writing at all as 'literary fiction', because these days that implies a novel that is worthy, turgid and requiring some work by the reader. It's much better to write what you want to write and let the agent/publisher decide what it is. You should always write a good story, well told, regardless of where you think it should go in the bookshop (which is really what categories are all about - making it easier for booksellers to shelve books).

The key words in your question are 'passion', 'emotional', 'evocative' and 'vivid'. Beautiful - this is exactly what all fiction should have. So stick to these principles and you may find that not writing about Opus Dei doesn't really matter. The books that come out of nowhere and surprise everyone with their popularity are books that don't follow a trend (because once a trend is identified, it's essentially over). I'd never advocate writing to follow a trend unless you do indeed want to write in a very specific genre.

But - there's always a but, isn't there? It is going to be harder to find a publisher for non-genre/'literary' fiction simply because most book buyers like to buy something safe. Doesn't mean it can't be done - just means you need to be patient and believe in what you're doing - you need to maintain your passion. And, just as I said to someone else below, the best thing you can do to make publishing Australian literary fiction an easier decision for publishers is to buy it - literary fiction always undersells genre fiction, with the odd exception (such as that 21st century masterpiece, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell).