Thursday, June 9, 2011

Interesting.

Check out this article, The 10 Most Powerful Women Authors, from Forbes. Notice which authors have sales data and which do not. The next time someone tries to tell me that lit authors and genre authors are held to the same standards, I'm going to smack 'em on the nose with a rolled-up copy of this article.

Theresa

5 comments:

Dave T said...

How could anyone possibly judge genre and lit authors by the same standards? It’d be like saying the Hangover II was a better film than King’s Speech because it grossed more $$$ at the box office. Any "Top 10" list that includes BOTH Danielle Steele and Joyce Carol Oates is clearly using very different metrics to judge their careers.

veela-valoom said...

I'm not saying that anyone should've been left off, but form a journalistic standpoint (and just to be consistent) I feel like sales data should have been included for all.

Julie Harrington said...

If you're going to compare and give criteria... you should have to give it for all. But then I've never, ever found there to be "equality" between Lit and Genre writers. Heck, Lit and Genre stories. There will *always* be that snobbery and it's ridiculous.

JT

green_knight said...

David is neither saying 'sales don't count, critical acclaim does' or 'critical acclaim is irrelevant when you don't reach large numbers of readers'; she says that both touching a lot of readers and touching readers deeply matter, both in their own way.

I would have made different choices, but I very much like the concept of this.

Sylvia said...

Actually, what jumped out at me was the lack of sales data for the non-white authors. But then Joyce Carol Oates broke that trend.