Monday, December 14, 2009

Big Announcement

Great news! My latest book is out and available on Amazon.com. They even have the Search Inside feature turned on already. I didn’t expect it so soon, but I’m thrilled.


And Thy House Book Cover
And Thy House

What’s the book about? It’s about an ordinary guy who has little use for church and has raised his daughters outside of church. He has kept them away from their mother, who is the church secretary. But one day, this ordinary guy realizes that he is going to hell and his daughters are going there too, all because of him. He tries everything he can to persuade them that what he taught them was wrong, but they are even more against church than he was.

Something’s Not Right

I knew there was disparity between men reading fiction and women reading fiction, but I didn’t really see the situation for what it is until I saw a statistic the other day. Publisher’s Weekly was quoted as saying that of all fiction sold, 55% was bought by woman and 45% was bought by men. I really expected the gap to be much wider. Walk into any Christian bookstore and you’ll see a sea of pink. Walk into nearly any bookstore and books for women will get preferential treatment. Look at the faces of most authors and you’ll see a lot of makeup. Talk to most men and you’ll hear them say, “I read more non-fiction than I do fiction.” Put that together and the picture you’ll get is that fiction is primarily a woman thing. We’re going all out to sell fiction to woman and still men buy 45% of the fiction sold. On top of that, many men don’t buy fiction because they read whatever their wives have around the house.

Consider that there are millions of book buyers in America. Now, if we take 45% of that, millions of those book buyers are men. It makes you wonder why publishers aren’t doing more to attract a male audience.

Question: What do you think? If publishers turned their focus toward men, do you think men would buy more books than women or is the gap going to be the same no matter what they do?