Ian McEwan is absolutely right:
Three years ago, McEwan culled the fiction library of his London town house, in Fitzroy Square. He and his younger son, Greg, handed out thirty novels in a nearby park. In an essay for the Guardian, McEwan reported that “every young woman we approached … was eager and grateful to take a book,” whereas the men “could not be persuaded. ‘Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks, mate, but no.’ ” The researcher’s conclusion: “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”
I’m certainly counting on women to sell my next novel.
What was on the front cover of said books? At the risk of sounding faintly mysogenist I can tell you now that it probably didn’t involve lasers/monsters/large planets exploding.
Maybe men are just naturally more suspicious of freebees?
That’s true. Even so, my recollection is that, stat-wise, more women read fiction than men (60 to 65% or something like that).