Joanna Brody
(310) 582-0085
joanna@brody-pr.com

Jennifer Heinly
(949) 716-9829
jjconsultin@cox.net

The genesis of our study has roots in two observations:

1. Women buy a lot of books, fiction and non-fiction.
2. Very few female authors make it to non-fiction best-seller lists.  (Fiction is another story; they seem to be much better represented.)

We began by pondering if there is a cause-and-effect relationship between these two observations. Could it be that women who buy non-fiction, and thus influence the best-seller lists with their purchases, have a preference for the writing of men? Or do they have a subconscious bias against women authors? Or maybe there just aren’t enough women writing, or enough publishers signing and promoting women who write non-fiction?

Answers to some of these questions can be hypothecated by carefully reviewing book- industry statistics on books published and sold, and we are in the process of doing that. But we also wanted to talk to women and explore their attitudes, preferences, intentions, and demonstrated behaviors. It’s not practical for us to conduct thousands of personal interviews, so we decided to create a comprehensive survey to serve as the foundation of the study.

We created a beta version of the survey in the Fall of 2006 to insure that our questions were clear and precise. At the close of the beta, we conducted two focus groups with 12 women who had completed the beta survey. The goal was to insure that we had the best survey instrument possible before going to a much larger audience.

The result is a four-part survey that runs from March 8, 2007 (International Women’s Day) through May 13, 2007 (Mother’s Day). We’re reaching out to women’s groups and individual women in an effort to aggregate thousands of responses. The survey will be administered to a non-random sample. (It would be prohibitively expensive to execute random sampling.) We’ll also be conducting virtual focus groups with small groups of women who complete our survey.

We plan to announce the results at Book Expo America in New York City this summer. We’ll also be publishing our results in the Women and Books 2007 Report, available at the Book Expo. Every woman who participates will get a copy of the report.