Do Women Buy Eighty Percent of the Books Sold?

Honest answer: after much searching, I just don't know.

Here's what I do know, though--that the eighty percent figure has been repeated many times over the past few decades (you can find the very similar claim that women buy 70-80 percent of books in a 1997 New York Times article); and that there seem to be many similar-sounding but really not identical claims about women of some sort buying eighty percent of something of some sort. Thus have I also read that it is specifically college-educated women that buy eighty percent of the books, or that women buy eighty percent of fiction, which are not the same thing (in the first case only a portion of the female population doing the relevant buying, in the latter women buying only a portion of the books, because nonfiction is obviously left out). I have also noticed that unlike the earlier New York Times item many of the more recent claims do not identify the source of their information (with, indeed, an Author's Guild claim about women buying eighty percent of fiction in 2022 offering a now broken link as its source).

At this point I suspect that trying to get to the bottom of this one would require a lot of detective work of the kind that is getting tougher all the time in this age of broken search, paywall fetishism, and often unhelpful answer engines for the meager payoff of finding out that, yes, people have been lazily and sloppily repeating the number for many decades now. Still, there may be something to be said of why this is the case. Certainly there seems the extent to which, just as happens with all other kinds of information, a great many people do indeed misuse and abuse statistical data, often without even having sufficient understanding of it to know that they are doing so, with this easy to imagine here.

This is all the easier to picture given the extreme scarcity of information about publishing. If Hollywood is far from being open about its finances, as the Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament reminds us every year with what it gets right and what it gets wrong and what just looks dodgy in it, you can make a much better guess about what people are watching from the box office report than what they are reading from the bestseller list. This arguably reflects the fact that with films, especially theatrically released features, we are talking about a more limited and manageable offering of "content," but frankly it also reflects there being rather less interest among the media in book sales, the more in as our culture is so much more audiovisual and so much less word-centered than it used to be, with this leaving the analyst reliant on what few scraps of information seem to them to have any credibility whatsoever for lack of better.

However, it seems that alongside the sloppiness of many people's use of statistics, and the relatively limited reportage on the book industry as compared with film, there is the matter of why the scrap in question should seem so credible--why people so readily accept the claim that "women buy eighty percent of the books/fiction/etc." Stereotypes about innate differences between males and females, and the manner of their upbringing, would seem to have their part in this--the idea that females are more verbal than more visual and mathematical and mechanical males, of the well brought-up young lady being kept indoors as the boys are encouraged to "go out and play," all as a boy's being "bookish" is thought unseemly by his peers and even by adults in a way that it is not for a girl to be so. Indeed, the literary historians have given us to understand that women have historically been the primary audience for works of fiction intended for private, personal, leisure reading, such that the form has so often been oriented to a female leadership. (After all, what is the male equivalent to the stereotype of the high school age girl with her copy of Pride and Prejudice? Hint: there isn't one.)

All of this would seem to have had reinforcement in an age of increasing access to audiovisual forms of entertainment, which seems to have been especially connected with the decline or outright collapse of categories of publishing conventionally regarded as oriented to a male reader--the spy story, the paramilitary action-adventure paperback, the military techno-thriller. (Yes, there were women readers for all that stuff too. But especially in its heyday it tended to be very male-oriented stuff for a mostly male audience--often, very, very male-oriented in a way that few presses would stand for today--so, no, probably not as many women read it. Additionally I suspect that the males who read this stuff were more likely to read just this stuff, rather than partake of other kinds of fiction reading, as compared with the female fans, who were probably less likely to give up on fiction reading altogether when they moved on from such material, instead watching more TV and playing more video games.)

By the same token there is how the decline of print adventure-oriented fiction left the female-oriented romance category looming the larger within publishing. And there are also the ways in which work in publishing became something of a "pink collar" job--more women to be found occupying decision-making posts as editors, executives, etc. here than anywhere else in Big Business, perhaps because publishers selling to a largely female audience saw it as advantageous to hire more women for the job, all as (however much the identity politics-minded may be resistant to any such admission) the output of a "feminized" publishing scene skewed that much more female. Certainly it does not seem completely irrelevant that works by, centered on, aimed at, consumed by young women much more than men dominated the young adult boom earlier in this century (Stephanie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, Victoria Roth, all as even John Green's The Fault in Our Stars seems worthy of mention), while at the more adult level there was no male equivalent to the successes of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, or the E.L. James' phenomenon, or more recently, the popularity of Colleen Hoover.

Still, it would seem that whether the supposition is accurate or not any female preponderance in the book-buying public today likely matters less than the continued digitalization-audiovisualization of culture. Certainly as I look about my very strong impression is that across the lines of gender people generally are doing less reading on the whole, and less long-form reading, less leisure reading, etc. especially, with the younger cohorts in particular forsaking the printed word, and even the digital word, in favor of the audiovisual, all as there is no end to the trend in sight. Amid that, if there was anything to the claim that women do eighty percent of the book-buying, fiction-buying, etc. this may well remain so--but that eighty percent will be eighty percent of a very, very small book-buying public as reading continues to wane.