You can now pre-order the book from your preferred retailer as follows –

Paper editions from:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Barnes & Noble – USA only
Waterstones – UK only
Ebook editions from:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Barnes & Noble (Nook) – USA only
Kobo

If you want to go through your local bookshop, these are the ISBNs
Paperback: 978-1-913892-23-4
Hardcover: 978-1-913892-24-1
EPUB: 978-1-913892-20-3
MOBI: 978-1-913892-21-0

If you will be at FantasyCon you can order paper editions for pick-up there.

The first early reviews are in from satisfied readers, I’m very pleased to say.

The Middle Shelf – followed by a Q&A with mild spoilers, consider yourselves warned…

Jacey Bedford – do look up her books as well

Goodreads

What’s that you say? Didn’t I mention the bonus short story earlier? Well, having decided to keep Dan’s adventures in the same timeline as the rest of us, I had some fairly major questions about what months of shut-down would mean for Blithehurst, the stately home where he works. I soon had some entertaining answers, but there was no place for that particular thread in the story Dan has to tell here. But I was pretty sure established readers would be wondering the same things as me, so I decided to let Eleanor explain that ‘Luck Is Where You Find It’.

Following my last post, I’m indebted to Kevin Beynon for directing my attention to the finalists in this year’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off – an admirable initiative from best-selling epic fantasy author Mark Lawrence, which aspiring writers and fantasy fans alike should definitely take a look at.

At the start of this year’s competition, Mark invited self-published fantasy authors to submit their books which were then divided randomly among ten established and well-regarded book bloggers/review sites. Each blogger read those submissions with an experienced and critical eye – the sort of consideration any literary agent or editor will give a hopeful new story. They’ve now put forward their favourite for the final. All the bloggers will now read all the books and score them out of ten, generating a cumulative score to determine the overall winner.

Here’s the first thing that’s significant for the current gender in genre discussion. This year’s finalists are five men and five women. What does this tell us? As far as I am concerned, it indicates yet again that when a playing field is level, as far as writing is concerned, gender bias pretty much evaporates.

I’ve seen this in several writing competitions now, where I’ve judged short stories blind – which is to say, all the entries were reformatted and sent to me without any names or indicators of the author’s gender. Every time, when it comes to picking a shortlist, once the winners have been chosen and the curtain is drawn back, that selection proves to be evenly balanced for gender. I’ve found exactly the same in writing competitions I’ve played no part in.

It also reminds me of one key finding when I analysed Waterstones’ promotional emails for signs of gender bias. In the ‘Staff Picks’ and ‘What We’re Reading’ sections where recommendations came from booksellers and customers based on what they’d enjoyed reading, those choices were 53% male, 47% female.

When the only thing that counts is what readers make of the writing, the story really is all that matters.

The second thing I’m seeing here? Out of three hundred SPFBO submissions this year, the field was 49% male, 33% female and 18 unknown as they were using initials. Can we assume those initials all belong to women? I’d say that’s a risky assumption – and even if that were the case, that still means only a third of the books were written by women prepared to raise a hand to be identified as such. What does that tell us?

Once again, it confirms something I’ve seen time and again since I started writing about inequalities in visibility in SF&F. Something I’ve had confirmed as an endemic problem in fields such as medicine, science, computing, literary criticism, history and the law. Women are still culturally conditioned to put themselves forward much less and to hold their own work to a far higher standard before offering it for publication. It’s a problem that frustrates and infuriates editors, from those working on academic journals, through fiction anthologies in all genres, to the commissioning editors in publishing houses. With the best will in the world, the best initiatives to improve diversity and representation can only work if those who’ve been historically excluded now step forward.

Which means those who’ve been historically excluded need to feel they can step forward. That they can raise a hand without it getting slapped down. That their work will be judged on its merits and nothing else. Which absolutely doesn’t mean initiatives that offer patronising, special treatment or give anyone a pass for substandard work. That merely entrenches the idea that these people cannot make the grade unless the standard is lowered to accommodate them. That’s as counter-productive as it is insulting.

So this brings us back to that level playing field. How do we achieve it? How about taking that idea of no special treatment one step further? Let’s stop giving one privileged group the lion’s share of promotion and publicity. Review coverage, promotion through social media, recommendations, citations and award nominations, anthology selections and more besides, remain stubbornly skewed in favour of white male writers. They get roughly two-thirds of the publicity that’s so vital for the word-of-mouth popularity which sustains a writer’s career. Everyone else gets to share the third that remains.

When the vast majority of white male writers working today never sought such favouritism. They find the dead hand of cultural inertia and institutional racism/sexism as problematic as anyone else. Not least for themselves. They don’t want to win awards for writing the best SF/Fantasy/Horror book from a westernised white male. They want to win for writing the best book in that field from anyone! That old saying that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to get half the recognition? It has a flipside. Winning a competition that’s rigged so you can do half the work for twice as much reward as the opposition? Is that prize really worth having?

We have a long way to go. Everyone needs to play their part. Readers and writers alike will benefit and that can only be good for our genre.

Meantime, this particular competition’s outcome is an encouraging sign of progress for me.

What does it mean and what can we do about it?

In January 1999 I had the wonderful experience of going into my local Ottakar’s bookshop and seeing my debut novel The Thief’s Gamble on display as the SF&Fantasy Book of the Month and piled high right at the front of the store. That wasn’t all; a tempting discount sticker, still a novelty in those days, encouraged potential readers to yield to their curiosity and give this new author a try. Enough book buyers did just that to ensure that my second novel got the same level of promotion. After that my successive releases got their month of helpfully noticeable display on the New Releases fixture just inside the door. Meantime my backlist books could all be found on the SF&Fantasy shelves for browsing fans to find when they’d read the latest releases from their favourites and they were looking for something new. Not because I was getting any particular special treatment but because that’s how books were sold back then.

Fast forward fourteen years and how many new books are granted that level of visibility? How often are any debut novels outside the mainstream flagged up to potentially interested readers by Waterstones, the only remaining national bookselling chain on UK high streets? SF&F newcomers may still be shelved in the relevant section but the odds are increasingly stacked against them attracting enough attention to launch a sustained writing career these days. Readers simply don’t browse bookshops in the way they used to. Why pay full price to take a risk on an unknown author when perfectly good reads are on offer at the front of the shops and cheaper? Once such a useful promotional tool, discounting now cuts the retailer’s own throat.

Book-buying is severely skewed towards those tables offering a narrowing and permanently marked-down selection. Those titles are increasingly the safe bets offered by publishers; either the latest from established stars or quick cash-ins surfing a wave of mass-media hype. They have to be, if a chain bookstore is going to compete with the supermarkets cherry picking the best sellers to be piled high and sold cheap alongside the baked beans and sliced bread. Books are simply another commodity in that retail environment and seeing them devalued is of no concern to Tesco’s.

It’s of grave concern to book shops who used to rely on 20% of titles generating 80% of their profits, at least according to the old booksellers’ mantra. Without the revenues from those best sellers, bookstores can no longer afford the luxury of stocking extensive backlists, especially not since publishers have cut right back on the titles they were willing to supply on sale or return. So it’s not only debut authors who readers won’t find on the shelves. Midlist writers have seen their sales and incomes plummet and that steadily reduces the chances of their new releases getting any decent visibility. Why promote the latest title by an author whose track record offers no guarantee of a worthwhile return for the hard-pressed bookseller?

That’s in the UK. Over the US different problems can cause authors just as much grief now that Barnes & Noble similarly dominate the physical bookstore sector. With B&N locked in a financial dispute with Simon & Schuster over who bears the costs of ebook discounting and print book promotions, writers can do nothing as Barnes & Noble decline to stock S&S titles in an effort to force an agreement on favourable terms. And let’s remember that Amazon’s growth notwithstanding, physical bookstores do still matter. Here in the UK, they still sell 75% of our books.

So far, so grim, but what has this to do with women writers specifically? Male debut and midlist writers are suffering equally alongside their sisters after all. True but this is where other factors make discoverability markedly more problematic for women. Consider the disparity of review coverage between male and female writers in genre magazines and blogs. Check out the 2011/2012 SF Counts at Strange Horizons if you’re unaware of this and more recently, LadyBusiness’s analysis. I wrote about this issue for the SFX blog in September 2011 . The 2013 Strange Horizons SF Count shows there still an awful lot of work to be done before we see the gender balance of books reviewed equalling the balance among their writers.

Lack of visibility by way of reviews matters because that’s the information which so often guides the non-fan book-seller making disproportionately influential choices. Just last month I went into a local branch of Waterstones to be confronted by a display promoting epic fantasy tied into the new series of A Game of Thrones on TV. Below the George RR Martin titles were a selection of very good books, many of which I have read – and every single one was by a male writer.

When a bookseller saw me standing looking thoughtfully at this fixture, she asked if there was anything she could help me with. I said she could promote some of the many books by women who write epic fantasy on those shelves. ‘Do they?’ she asked, sceptical. ‘Like who?’ When I gave her a list of names (yes, including my own), her answer was to shrug and say dismissively. ‘Well, I don’t read science fiction’. No, so where did she find those authors to showcase? From the review pages or perhaps in one of the recent articles recommending other writers to A Song of Ice and Fire fans, so often and so infuriatingly only listing men.

That bookseller may not read the genre but her choices can skew SF&F purchases in favour of male writers, so when someone higher up the chain is looking at sales figures to pick those safe bets for front-of-store promotion, they will apparently see proof of the insidious myth that SF&F by women doesn’t sell. If it won’t sell, there’s no profit in promoting it. So those books aren’t among those offered for people to buy at those insidiously attractive discounts and thus the self-fulfilling prophecy is reinforced.

The impact on female authors doesn’t stop there. As with review coverage in genre magazines and blogs, this lack of visibility in bookshops for women will influence online sales. 48% of Amazon purchases are generated by targeted searches rather than idle browsing. People go looking for what they want to buy, frequently after visiting high street shops. How are they going to go looking online for books by women which they don’t even know exist?

Lack of visibility goes on to have more subtly insidious effects. Even with so many excellent female editors and agents now at work in the UK and the US, SF&F imprints consistently report under-submission by women compared to the numbers of female participants in writing groups and courses. Why is this, when the days of deliberate prejudice or overt sexism in the book trade are long gone? Believe me, along with many feminist genre writers I have looked long and hard for such bias and have simply not found it.

But what about the following advice offered to would-be writers far too often these days. Since the book trade won’t promote female authors within a particular genre in the firm belief that they won’t sell, so this received wisdom goes, doesn’t it make sense for a woman writer to abandon her hard SF novel for something more commercially viable like urban fantasy? The first trick is getting published, after all. She can always come back to SF once she’s established. Perhaps she would be better off rewriting that SF novel as Young Adult fiction? Because look, women are highly visible in both those fields while they’re absent from hard SF – just glance at the bookshelves. That’s the point where it becomes increasingly hard to argue on behalf of those agents and editors I know who are passionately keen to promote good writing by women in every sub-genre of SF&F. It becomes my word against the apparent evidence. Once again the self-fulfilling prophecy of ‘what everyone knows’ is reinforced irrespective of the reality.

Anthologies is another key area where women writers could and should benefit from opportunities for visibility drawing new readers to their work. However editors similarly report disproportionately fewer female submissions though those I have spoken to invariably note the overall higher quality of the work they see from women and thus their greater chances of success. This reflects the quelling influence of wider culture which still curbs women far more than men. Studies into the under-representation of women in published research from academic institutions to scientific and technological companies has found precisely the same pattern of fewer submissions, albeit of a higher standard overall than those from equivalent men. Because popular culture still teaches women to hold themselves to a more demanding standard while men are encouraged to value their work and opinions from the outset. Is all this infuriating? Yes. Can we ignore it? No.

But of course these days, this isn’t the whole story. Influential as bookshops may still be, what about the Internet? Famously, no one knows if you’re a dog or anything else online. Surely the solution is simple and in women’s own hands. We must generate our own high profiles through blogs and a dynamic social media presence. Look how successful some writers have been; Gaiman, Stross, Doctorow, Scalzi to name but a few highly visible … men. For the purpose of this particular discussion, we’ll take as read the inconvenient realities of just how long it takes to build up a high-traffic blog, and how much concentrated hard work, not to mention the requirement for an innate talent for a distinctly different style and approach to writing, compared to novels. Those hurdles face men and women alike trying this supposedly easy route to fame and fortune. Irrespective of gender, most will to end up with one of those millions of websites visited by five kindly relatives and their cat.

However online misogyny presents additional challenges for women. I’m unaware of examples in the book sphere as extreme as the attacks on Mary Beard or Anita Sarkeesian but I have followed the negative and argumentative responses to a male blogger aiming for gender balance in his own reading over the coming year. This sort of aggression definitely deters women from putting themselves in the firing line.

So is it time to throw up our hands and despair? Must blind market forces and uncaring cultural inertia inevitably prevail? Not as far as I am concerned. These are dumb systems and we are intelligent people, men and women alike. We can analyse situations and identify inherent, unconscious bias. We can all take active measures to counter inequalities from reviewers making a positive decision to broaden the scope of their reading to the editors of anthologies and short story magazines checking the gender balance of their choices. Readers can use online resources to buy the books they see recommended and work by talented writers which they can’t find in the bookshops. If enough of them do, the bookshops will soon start taking notice. We’ve seen that played out in spectacular fashion in the last year or so, albeit for regrettably less than spectacular books.

None of this means giving a pass to substandard work simply because the author is a woman. That does no one any favours, women least of all. But if we act to make sure that the playing field is a level one, if women are still absent, we can legitimately ask why. Discussion around this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award is a case in point. I was one of the judges, four out of five of us women, who agreed on an all-male shortlist from the books submitted for our consideration. Not so very long ago, male dominance of awards was taken for granted and even cited as evidence that women simply weren’t up to producing work of sufficient calibre. Since then women from Pat Cadigan to Lauren Beukes have shown that complacency for the nonsense it is. Consequently this year’s debate has highlighted very different issues around women’s writing as inthis article by my fellow judge Liz Williams . Why are female SF writers not afforded the same sustained publishing careers as some men? Responses have also highlighted forthcoming books by female SF writers which will be eligible next year, including but not limited to Naomi Foyle and Stephanie Saulter.

I had the honour to help present the Hugo Award Nominations to this year’s UK Eastercon where an encouraging number of categories had a significant number of female nominees, particularly for the best related work, fancast and semiprozine awards. If women are still culturally, infuriatingly, disinclined to promote their own work, they are often very good at recommending other women’s work. This very blog you’re reading, and a great many others, are evidence of that. Facebook and Twitter recommendations offer further opportunities for everyone to help increase women writers’ visibility. Moreover, the more women are active online, the greater the solidarity and support available to counter the sexist trolls.

Those Hugo Award nominations were also notable for those categories where women are significantly under-represented or absent, particularly in the graphic story and dramatic presentation categories. Along with many others, I am still waiting for someone to identify whatever dumb systems prevent female screen writers from working on high profile UK shows like Doctor Who but meantime, excellent women writers are at work in US genre television. Debate on barriers to entry and visibility for creative women in the comics world continues apace. Those content with the historic status quo are increasingly challenged to justify excluding female participation for no better reason than ‘that’s just the way it is’.

Challenges to gender disparity on guest lists and panels has now expanded beyond comics conventions. The EightSquaredCon Committee (on which I served as Chair) made a commitment to strive for gender parity across the Eastercon 2013 programme for the reasons detailed here. A full write up of the issues we encountered along the way is in hand. For the purposes of this discussion, it’s sufficient to say that 46% of the convention’s panel participants were women; that over 60% of panels had at least two men and two women while panels with only one man or one woman were equal in number – and you may be certain that we’re keenly interested in the reasons why those particular situations arose. With EightSquaredCon’s public statement encouraging women to volunteer, the programme co-ordinators were able to achieve this without any compromises on the quality or scope of discussion. Indeed, the positive feedback we have received indicates that this drive for panel parity actively contributed to the strength of the programme overall. Everyone benefited as encouraging new perspectives offered established convention contributors the chance to engage in fresh debates and offer previously unheard opinions.

This is just one example of the way in which in equality in visibility isn’t just a women’s issue. It’s a readers’ issue. It’s an authors’ issue. More than that, striving for equality goes beyond gender concerns. It matters for every historically under-represented group. These days, thankfully, it also matters to those able-bodied white males now recognising unjustifiable limitations imposed on their wives, sisters and daughters. Plenty have the wits to realise they are personally playing life on the lowest difficulty setting . They’re ready to challenge disparagement of female authors which has nothing whatsoever to do with their work. They’re inviting female guest contributors to the high-traffic blogs they’ve worked so hard to establish. The Hawkeye Initiative cheerfully and effectively mocks the contorted sexual displays foisted on comics fans.

So while inequality of visibility remains a problem for women authors which we must not ignore, it’s equally as important that we recognise the many ways in which we can all take action to counter this and other exclusions. The more equality of opportunity expands, the more self-evident it will become that everyone will benefit as SF&Fantasy writing is enriched by an ever-widening range of experiences of gender, race and cultural backgrounds. Our genre has always been the pre-eminent literature of exploration in all senses. We can all ensure that fine tradition continues.

I’ve been writing about the subtle ways in which women writers are disadvantaged for a while now. If anything is to change, it’s important that we all understand the dumb systems involved and how they work to create the unconscious and cumulative biases that add up to a negative impact.

On one level, yes, this is about sexism – but it’s a case of institutional sexism. There’s no patriarchal conspiracy, no cabal of evil men intent on doing women writers down. Dealing with these issues would be so much simpler if there were!

It’s also important to realise that times are tough all round in the book trade, for male and female writers alike. There are ups and downs for everyone. Anyone, even if they’re currently at the top of the bestseller lists, would be very ill-advised to sit back and exepct the cash and kudos to roll in for ever and a day.

And while my focus here is primarily on systemic obstacles for women writers, it’s equally important to recognise how many, if not all, of the same arguments and disadvantages apply to other minority groups within writing; those of differing colour, race and gender to the mainstream.

I’ve grouped these pieces together by theme as far as possible, with those looking at book trade issues following by writing-related posts. Copies of the guest pieces I’ve written for other websites are followed by links to posts on my own blog from oldest to most recent, and with the posts specifically referencing Waterstones gathered together.

Lastly, I’m also including a few related pieces assuredly contributing to this debate, including those relating to panel parity at EightSquaredCon, Eastercon 2012, where I served as Chair for the Committee collectively committed to promoting equality.

I think I’ve found everything that’s relevant from my own blogging. If you know different, let me know. I’ll aim to update this page as new things come along.

Guest Posts

Everyone Can Promote Equality in Genre Writing (for SFX Magazine, 2011)

Inequality of Visibility for Women Writers(for Fantasy Cafe 2013)

Sexism in Genre – Myth or Menace? (for the British Fantasy Society 2013)

The Representation of Women in Fantasy. What’s the problem? (for Bad Reputation 2011)

Writing Characters with Disabilities (for SF Signal ‘Special Needs in Strange Worlds’ 2014)

Blog Posts

What the black scientist Rufus Carlin brings to “Timeless”

Gender in Genre and the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off 2016

Andrew Marr’s Paperback Heroes – a masculine view of epic fantasy entrenching bias.

Brief thoughts on women writers being erased from SFF – again
Because articles doing this cross my radar if not weekly, at least once a fortnight. And that’s without me making any effort to find it.

Why the SFWA Shoutback Matters

Reviews, Reviewing, Reviewers and Gender

Is it time for a Women’s Speculative Fiction Prize?

Disability and fantasy fiction – more questions than answers

Where are our Female Villains?

What Do Female Villains Do That Bad Guys Don’t?

Diversity in SFF – some thoughts on some recent reports

Let’s hear it for the quiet girls

There’s a point to ‘rainbow sprinkles’ for writing and ice cream.

“That girl looks like trouble!” The distinction for me between writing epic fantasy as a feminist and writing Feminist Fantasy.

Waterstones

How your choice of good books and new authors to discover is going to shrink and shrink

Equality of Visibility – Progress with Waterstones

Waterstones & Everyday Sexism – the book & the problem in action

Waterstones & Gender Equality. The good, the bad & the business case for doing better

A noteworthy & positive SF&F promotions email from Waterstones!

Waterstones? Yes, I’m still watching…

Eastercon 2013 and Panel Parity

Why we are committing to Gender Parity on Panels (Eastercon 2013)

Panel Parity – what we achieved and how we did it (Eastercon 2013)

Blog Posts with Links To Other Relevant Writing

Discussing diversity & representation in SFF – links round up
Because I’m by no means the only writer to post reflections on this issue.

Epic fantasy and Women. Girls and Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks

Who Gets to Escape? Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown ask a fascinating question.

Links to some gender in genre thoughts (and book recommendations) from other folk

Invisible: essay collection edited by Jim Hines. See Why Diversity & Inclusion Matter in SF&F

Genre sexism. Yes, it really has been one damn thing after another lately.

The Guardian gets the idea! Women do write and read epic fantasy!

Thoughts on accessibility at conventions – Mary Robinette Kowal

I’m heading into London later today for the David Gemmell Legend Awards. No, I have no idea who’s won. But I can tell you one thing for certain. All the prize winners will be men because the shortlists are all male this year. No, I’m not criticizing the DGLA administrators for that, or scolding the thousands of fantasy fans who take the time to nominate and vote for their favourites each year, and I absolutely respect and admire the shortlisted authors, hard-working professionals all.

But this does nothing to help the ongoing problem of lack of visibility for women writing epic fantasy.

Yes but, I can hear someone saying, this is just one award. Look at the progress towards gender (and other) equality in other areas.
Three of the last four winners of the Arthur C Clarke Award have been women.
The Nebula Awards were dominated by female authors this year.
The British Science Fiction Association best novel award has been won jointly by Ann Leckie and Gareth Powell.
The Hugo Award shortlists are encouragingly diverse, despite blatant attempts to game the system by die-hard sexists (and worse).
Even the British Fantasy Society is offering a wide-ranging slate for 2014, including a Best Newcomer shortlist that’s all women after so many years dominated by male nominees and a definition of fantasy heavily skewed towards horror.

All that’s absolutely valid. And that means this whole issue is worth a closer look rather than simply deciding it just means these Gemmell Awards are an unfortunate aberration.

Look closer and you’ll see all these recent awards and shortlists I’m citing come from Fandom with the active participation of juries in many cases. These are driven by the high-volume readers (and writers) who actively engage with genre debates and developments through conventions and online venues, blogs and forums. This is where so much recent change to broaden diversity and inclusion within SF&F has happened and continues to be driven forward, not without difficulty at time and with profound thanks to the determination of those who refuse to be silenced.

By contrast, the Gemmell Awards are a popular vote and as such, these shortlists reflect the entirety of fantasy readers, the majority of whose tastes and purchases are driven by what they see in the shops, what they see reviewed in genre magazines and blogs, and such like. Where male writers dominate. I’ve written repeatedly about the gender skew in Waterstones (and a full blog post on that is forthcoming) and just this week, I got a ‘Top Fantasy Titles’ email from Amazon, offering me fifteen books by men and just one by a woman writer. Female authors are still consistently under-represented in genre reviews and blogs.

Why? Because of conniving hard-core sexists upholding the patriarchy? Er, no. Because retail is a numbers game and that means it skews towards repeating successes rather than promoting innovation. To revisit an example I’ve offered before –

When a non-fan bookseller, eager to capitalise on Game of Thrones, is making key decisions about what’s for sale, and all the review coverage and online discussion indicates a majority-male readership for grimdark books about blokes in cloaks written by authors like Macho McHackenslay – that’s what goes in display, often at discount, at the front of the store. So that’s what people see first and so that’s what sells most copies.

Six months down the line, the accountants at head office look at the sales figures and think excellent, Macho McHackenslay is one of our bestsellers – and the order goes out to ask publishers for more of the same. Now, chances are, some editor will be dead keen to promote the second or third novel by P.D.Kickassgrrl. Unfortunately her sales aren’t nearly as good, because her book’s on sale at full price in the SFF section at the back of the shop or upstairs, where retail footfall studies have proved people just don’t go to browse any more, especially now that booksellers don’t routine carry authors’ backlists.

When it’s a numbers game like retail, that passionate editor will struggle to get a hearing, however much he insists the body count and hardcore ethics of P.D.Kickassgrrl’s excellent book will surely appeal to Macho McHackenslay fans – especially when that bookseller won’t have seen any reviews of P.D.Kickassgrrl’s work to prompt him to stock it at the front of the shop – because genre magazines and blogs have the same skew towards conservatism, on the grounds that ‘we have to review the books people are actually buying, because those are the ones they’re clearly interested in.’

And so the self-referential and self-reinforcing circle is complete. Which how we end up with all male shortlists for the 2014 Gemmell Awards.

And it is absolutely no answer to say ‘oh well, look, there are plenty of women coming in at the debut stage now, so we just have to wait for them to rise through the ranks.’ Because we have decades of evidence to show that this simply isn’t going to work. It hasn’t worked in the law, in medicine, in academia, in any number of other professions. If it did, these arguments wouldn’t keep recurring.

So how do we break this cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy? What would get women writers in SF&F noticed outside genre circles, which is what needs to happen if female authors are to have any chance of the sustained writing careers which their male peers can achieve.

How about a Women’s Speculative Fiction Prize? Because prizes garner press coverage and column inches outside the genre in the mainstream press. Just google any of those awards I listed earlier to see that. Prizes get the attention of publicists and booksellers who aren’t specifically interested in genre – any genre. The same’s true for crime, romance, etc. Shortlisted books get reviews because a magazine or newspaper that might not have otherwise noticed them now has a specific reason to take a look.

No, I’m not volunteering to set this up. I know full well how much hard work goes into administering and fund-raising to support an award, year round. As a judge for the Arthur C Clarke Award, I got a good look at the busy team behind the curtain and I’ve been a supporter of the Gemmell Awards since the first discussions about how to go about setting that up and whether it should be a juried or popular vote. Establishing a new award like this would not be an easy undertaking, even with the active support of genre publishers willing to supply yet more free copies of books, if this was a juried award rather than a popular vote. And that’s just one of the complex issues that would need discussing, alongside eligibility and other criteria.

This idea is still worth discussing though. And if you don’t think it’s a good idea, feel free to come up with some other solutions, to offer female authors of epic fantasy some reason to keep on writing in the current hostile retail climate.

So, this week, Waterstones announced they’re expanding their range of kids and teens toys for 2014.

Er, were they not watching Borders’ demise? What part of ‘bookseller’ are they struggling to understand?

It seems other business minds are none too impressed by their current strategies.

“…so many copies of the latest Jamie Oliver and Sharon Osbourne there will be no room for the newest upcoming authors; Waterstones seems to have decided it is in competition with WH Smith and Tesco.

Recently one of my top authors went to his local branch to see how sales of his novel were doing: there were no copies left, they had sold out, and he asked if they’d be getting any more in. No, he was told, they wouldn’t. In what other business do you sell out of a product then not bother to re-stock what’s obviously popular?

Not to mention those of us who might like to point out the flaw in their reasoning that male SFF writers (sold at discount in the front of the store) outperform female authors (sold at full price, at the back/upstairs/behind signs saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’) More on that from Cheryl Morgan.

Not that things are any better in the US, now that Barnes & Noble are the sole book chain. As this sorry tale from Mindy Klasky makes clear.

Yes, I have a dog in this fight. I’m an author who’s seeing her income eroded year on year by changes in the industry I can do nothing about.

But if – or as looks increasingly likely, when – the day comes when I simply have to quit because it makes no financial sense for me to carry on – I will still be a reader.

And I don’t want to be a reader offered a narrow, impoverished, pre-selected by electronic sales figures morass of pap!