Is gender dividing the digital publishing world?

Credit: Elixabeta Lopez Photography

Last Friday morning, an eager audience of aspiring authors, editors, agents and publishers sat gripping cups of strong coffee and gazing upon a veritable smorgasbord of literary goodness. International best-selling author Kate Mosse, Orange Prize winner Linda Grant and award-winning young adult author Nicola Morgan were assembled to confess the joys and terrors of ‘Writing in a Digital Age’, the topic of a two-day conference from The Literary Consultancy – and confess they did.

Moderated by Guardian Books editor Claire Armitstead, the conversation focused on the degree to which writers should promote themselves and their books through social media. Linda Grant described how she overcame her initial skepticism to embrace Twitter’s eclecticism and “terseness of form”. Nicola Morgan explained that she veers between appreciating the huge value social visibility has brought her and feeling like she “loses a piece of my writer’s soul” in the process. Kate Mosse was defiant about her refusal to engage, maintaining that “my business as a writer is to get better as a writer and for that I need peace and quiet in my head”. The theme was the balance between a writer’s duty to build reader relationships versus her duty to her craft; the tone was one of authenticity and honesty about the emotional toll that such a balancing act can take.

The afternoon panel had a very different subject and feel. Experimental writer Tony White, creative director of online publishing platform Publit Jonas Lennermo, and Julian McCrae and Mike Jones from cross-platform production company Portal Entertainment, shared how they were using innovative multimedia approaches to bring stories to readers in new ways. The tone here was more conceptual and technical – how did the automated responses in White’s ivy4Evr, an SMS drama, actually work? How do Portal’s role-playing experiences differ from traditional online RPGs? – although no less interesting.

But the most provocative moment came at the end of the panel, when a feisty female audience member got hold of the microphone. “I couldn’t help but notice,” she said, “that all of you on this panel are men. This morning, when we were talking about the warm and fuzzy stuff, it was all women. Why do you think that is?”

Why indeed? Was it a coincidence? Does it even matter? Attempts to ask such questions have a tendency to lapse into gender generalistion and cliché. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth exploring. Working in a prominent position as a woman in a tech-led space, I am frequently treated with the suspicion-come-adulation of a flamingo in a fish tank. So, on an instinctive, anecdotal basis, do you think that digital’s increasing hold over the publishing industry is affecting the status and power of women – and if so, how?

“Historically its been possible to observe a gender split in publishing” reflects Jo Ellis, Associate Director of The Literary Platform who spent five years as Marketing Director at Faber and Faber. “Men in sales, and women in PR. There certainly seem to be more men prominent in the digital arena, but I think that relates to every industry – not just publishing. The collision of the two worlds is so new that we won’t clearly see what is happening for a while. There are some amazing women leading digital publishing businesses, such as Kate Wilson at Nosy Crow, Anna Rafferty at Penguin and Sarah Lloyd from Macmillan, and some brilliant women working in digital development, but it’s true; the majority of developers and coders I come across are men.”

Ah, yes: coding. Computer programming code has become the invisible language that underpins much that we now experience as both writers and readers, but it is a language many of us are woefully ignorant in. “I’m hopeful that this will change pretty quickly as the effort for greater code-literacy in schools picks up,” says Ellis. “We’re in a transitional moment.”

But does the division go deeper than a male bias towards JavaScript? During her panel, Linda Grant recalled a disturbing episode of Alan Yentob’s BBC documentary Imagine. In Books: The Last Chapter, Yentob visited Silicon Valley and met some of the men behind the companies dominating the e-publishing landscape: Amazon, Apple, Google and co. Not only were they just that – all men – but it was clear that these guys were tech-lovers first, bibliophiles second; in fact, many of them admitted that they never read at all. Whereas traditionally publishing was the refuge of bookworms who spent their formative years hiding in their bedrooms constructing invisible worlds, digital is the refuge of coders who spent their formative years hiding in their bedrooms constructing Altair 8800s. The essential passion on which publishing is built may be starting to shift.

There is also the issue of in the evolution of the modern literary skillset. To be successful in self-publishing, you don’t just need the ability to write a great story. You also have to be an editor, a designer, a social media strategist, a self-publicist, and preferably a coder, too. The conference’s workshop on self-publishing was run by the delightfully droll Robert Kroese, who has sold 50,000 copies of his novel Mercury Falls on Amazon and became the first author to self-publish a book on self-publishing. Kroese undoubtedly earned his success through talent and hard work, but it came as no surprise that he just happened to be an early-adopting blogger and freelance software developer on the side.

“It was striking that our first major conference about writing seemed to divide those talking about social media and those about technical matters – from self-publishing to new online literary forms – along gender lines,” muses Rebecca Swift, co-founder of The Literary Consultancy. “The social media session was all women, the keynote a man. The digital online session was all men, and all those presenting in audience story-time about their digital experiences were women.”

She believes that the reason behind this split may not just be skillset but emotional style. “Several of those women had self-published and then (charmingly) panicked! We did not hear from a single man who had self-published and panicked, just carried on regardless, and I found myself wondering, is it really true that woman are more social and more sensitive about the impact of their personal offerings on their readers than men? This is not a conclusion – but a musing…”

Musings are all we can really make on this topic, which is hugely complex and frequently contradictory. But there did seem to be two things on which speakers and attendees agreed. One: there are more male coders, developers and digital executives out there, and they have increasing control over the direction and manifestation of the publishing industry. And two: female authors seem to find the concept of public self-promotion, relationship building and authenticity more fraught than their male counterparts.

It is impossible to know whether these observations are symptoms of our “transitional moment” or whether they are indicative of a deeper set of gender preferences and power structures. Either way, they are worth watching as our newly hybrid publishing industry starts to emerge.