Women over 45 love books – it's time the book trade loved them back
COMMENTMAY 24, 2022BY HARRIET EVANSPatronised, pigeonholed and ignored, women over 45 are buoying up book sales but are rarely consulted or celebrated in publishing.
I wasn’t surprised last week at a literary festival when the chair turned to one of the panellists, a well-respected popular journalist who’s written a novel, and asked her: ‘You’re writing for a Mumsnet audience with this book, aren’t you?’. Implicit in it is the dismissiveness rife whenever women write and read fiction that isn’t a) literary b) crime or thriller. (She also hasn’t got the memo: Mumsnet is a hotbed of radicalism, haven’t you heard?). In the audience there were audible murmurs of irritation. But as I say, I wasn’t surprised. Seventeen years since my first novel was published I’ve grown wearily used to defending both commercial fiction by women and the habits and assumptions made about female readerships.
Yet I was surprised by the Bookseller report of 19th May on the decline in e-book sales in 2021. To quote loosely from the article, e-book sales fell to their lowest since 2012 (still, 80 million e-books were downloaded in 2021 compared to 95 million in 2020, the first year of the pandemic). One in five books bought in 2021 were e-books, adding up to £342 million, 13% of the overall books market value. The piece contained this startling nugget of information: women gained 1% of total e-book purchases in non-fiction, with those aged 45+ increasing their status as the dominant consumer group, reaching 37% of e-books overall and 43% of fiction.
Also: the highest e-book shares were found in erotic fiction (61%), romance (59%), adventure/war stories (50%), crime & thriller (47%), historical (44%) and science fiction (44%) followed by classic fiction at 31%.
Women over 45 are the ones buying hardbacks as presents and tickets for festivals. The ones doing the weekly shop and seeing books in supermarkets, queuing up at WHSmith at the airport with paperbacks under their arms. They are the sandwich generation, caring for parents and children and doing the lion’s share of homeschooling and housework during the pandemic whilst holding down jobs, still finding time to be curious, read other people’s stories. They are setting up social media accounts to discuss books they love, buying books for grandchildren, visiting libraries and joining book clubs. (There are many book clubs.)
Publishing and bookselling both need to normalise and celebrate the vast diversity of women over 45. I don’t know another audience more ignored by the media and publishing relative to its importance in sales. In the wider world it’s wild to me how little effort is made to actually understand the demographic’s vastness and subtleties. E-books give readers choice: for all that I remain a committed consumer of print books and bookshops it’s not so long ago that in the largest bookshop in London I was seeing my books shelved round the corner in Romance. I’m used to this, but they were alongside Rose Tremain and Barbara Trapido (yes seriously), though Sebastian Faulks, David Nicholls and Ian McEwan, all authors of intensely romantic novels, had mysteriously managed to make it onto the Fiction shelves at the centre of the shop. This has since been rectified but it speaks to the mindset of some gatekeepers.
The largest publishing houses are opening offices all over the country and conversations are changing all the time, so hopefully some of these attitudes will change: in my years as an editor I never once went to a prison in Rochester, a bookclub in Staffordshire, a library in Middlesbrough or a superstore in Dumfries. As an author I have, and meeting readers is without doubt my favourite part of the job. They know everything. They have opinions on everything. They have buried loved ones, worked double jobs, know you’re wrong about wristwatches in 1942 and they’ve read everything under the sun, from Ann Cleeves to The Girl with the Louding Voicevia Raynor Winn and Noel Streatfeild. Of course most of the people I meet at book events are women over 45.
Only recently have I started to see the correlation between readers and authors and how we patronise women’s choices in both reading and in what they write. I have a degree in Classical Studies, I’ve edited and published several No. 1 bestsellers, written thirteen bestselling novels, sold a million copies, won a prize and been a Richard and Judy Book Club selection – twice. I’ve also homeschooled a 10 and 5 year old and survived, just. I’ll give you my opinion about literally anything, but I’m never asked for it. Yet two of the most interesting, informed interviews about my books have been with those who celebrate and love fiction by women and those readers over 45. Firstly with the excellent blogger Clare Reynolds of Years of Reading Selfishly, secondly the times I’ve been interviewed by Richard and Judy for the WHSmith Book Club. Their questions were challenging, intelligent, well-researched, absolutely anything but patronising. Both understand their market. They know their market doesn’t want to be talked down to. That this market wants new, exciting worlds.
In short: women 45 and over are propping up the book industry. Stop taking them for granted and take the time to understand them.
