[falcolas]

Pretty aside (while not denigrating its value in videos), the book market has long been dominated (reading, writing, and publishing) by well-off white women.

Not always dominated, mind you, but when they took it over, they grabbed ahold of it with both hands.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

By definition - isn't the market going to be dominated by successful participants?

Do you mean independently wealthy people? Long ago, this was definitely true - as you only knew how to read & write if you were rich, and you were definitely only buying books if you were rich.

Starting shortly after the printing press - yes, poor people weren't dominating the market. But it wasn't dominated by royalty (the vast majority of actual wealthy people of the time).

I don't know where you'd consider Alexandre Dumas - but he's kind of the typical successful writer from his generation. His family was somewhat upper-class, but definitely not wealthy for most of his childhood.

Charles Dickens was much less wealthy than Dumas. Mark Twain & Thoreau grew up definitely not in the upper class. Same for Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Dostoyevsky was not from wealth

Mary Shelley was wealthy. Jane Austen & Emily Dickinson were upper class - but not wealthy. But neither were highly successful during their lifetimes. The Bronte sisters were somewhat well off - less so than Austen and Dickinson - but not from a long-line of wealth, and even they weren't very successful in their lifetime!

Tolstoy AFAIK was the only super successful independently wealthy writer from the time. Poe, Melville, Henry James, and Victor Hugo were definitely well off, but "wealthy" seems like a stretch.

If you look at today - it is definitely not true. JK Rowling is by far the most successful author of the generation, and she was arguably poor before finding success with Harry Potter.

Suzanne Collins worked her way up from the bottom and had very middle class life before success with The Hunger Games.

Maybe you mean the majority of authors have not-poor spouses? They better! The median author probably makes less than $100 in their career as a writer.

[Dylan16807]

> By definition - isn't the market going to be dominated by successful participants?

They said well-off, and when it comes to book sales being part of the successful masses is a few steps short of making you well-off.

> writers

Almost all of these are from the 1800s? That doesn't contradict the idea that a group "not always" dominated but has "long" dominated.

You only named two authors that are clearly recent enough to be relevant to the argument.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

The early 1900s is a continuation - with men dominating, and the women being mostly upper class but not wealthy.

Wharton is rich (the phrase keeping up with the Joneses comes from her family), Woolf and Gertrude Stein are well-off and McCullers & Plath a bit less so. Harper Lee's father was a lawyer, and she's a one-hit wonder. Toni Morrison was not rich...

The vast majority of men - who dominate (not the women) - are not from well-off families: Steinbeck, Orwell, Sinclair, Tolkein, Fitzgerald, Lewis Carroll, Tennessee Williams, D.H Lawrence, Jack London (who claimed to be poor but wasn't), Kerouac, Vonnegut. Stephen King and Stan Lee were arguably poor.

Hemingway, Salinger, Conrad, Roald Dahl, and Joseph Heller are not from wealth, but definitely not poor.

Frank L Baum was wealthy, similar to Melville & Hugo - Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Jane Austen - but less so than Tolstoy.

[dontlaugh]

Rowling said she was only able to write because she was on benefits, which allowed her a short reprieve from poverty.

[vidarh]

> They better! The median author probably makes less than $100 in their career as a writer.

This is in agreement, not to contradict you, to be clear: The median author form whom writing is their primary income in the UK earns well below minimum wage from their writing, and the vast majority of writers do not have it as their primary income.

At the same time, as I've expanded on elsewhere in this thread, the household income of that same group is above the UK median.

[Brybry]

This is only very recently true (and disregarding the "well off" part).

Women probably authored over 50% of books starting sometime in the 2010s. [1]

And dominate might still be too strong of a word to use, though it's likely true for some genres (ie. ~80% of books and sales in romance).

Going by the graphs on page 28 figure 2: Today, women are probably authors of around ~45% to ~60% of new books in the dataset (Goodreads/Bookstat(amazon)/US copyright) and still climbing .

[1] https://doi.org/10.3386/w30987

[Mat3777]

Do you have data on white women dominance?

[paulcole]

When did they take it over?

[FrustratedMonky]

90's? 1996 I think.

[paulcole]

What happened in 1996 that changed the game? Wasn’t that the Primary Colors year?