Orson Scott Card has pointed out that when you include all color language or so called “adult” situations in a book you will limit your audience. He’s right about this. What parent will hand their child a book with things in it that the child is not allowed to discuss out loud at school? Isn’t this habit likely to harm sales in the future as we’re inhibiting the current generation of readers of Sci Fi/Fantasy ( people like me) from introducing their favorite books to their children?

I would say that when I was a kid it wasn’t particularly harder to find books for boys than for girls, but I was mostly getting my books from the library, so I couldn’t really say whether or not it was true at the average corner bookstore.

By the time I was nine or ten I had already fallen in love with the fantasy genre and was reading primarily adult fantasy fiction. I pretty well skipped the YA genre except where I was assigned to read it by my teachers at school.

Looking back… There was certainly a lot of things pitched explicitly at the teen girl market, and not much pitched at the teen boy market, but I didn’t really notice because I was spending my time reading Eddings and Tad Williams and Raymond E. Feist and Stephen King and so on.

I read The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion and Terry Brooks’ Shannara work before most kids would be reading their first Judy Bloom books. So the YA genre seemed sort of condescending to me. That was an unfair assumption and in later life I read a lot of it and realized that a lot of the best authors actually write for the YA market, but when you’re 10 you’re sensitive to being treated like a kid.

Especially when you’re constantly having to prove to the librarian that yes, you can in fact read that book you’re checking out.

Looking back though, I can think of a few reasons why young males as a group would be somewhat less inclined toward pleasure-reading than young females. To start with, statistically speaking, the male of the species develops reading skills at a slightly slower pace than the female. Which means that more boys than girls get shamed and scolded for poor reading skills, and develop an aversion to the activity.

That easily leads to boys experiencing negative feedback from their peer group if they -do- read for pleasure, which further discourages it.

The old adage that girls will read books about boys but boys won’t read books about girls probably also holds some merit, though that seems like less of a reason to pitch books specifically to girls than a reason to write books about boys and get both markets.

But look at Disney, compare how many movies, tv shows, and physical products they produce for the female demographic as opposed to the male. Probably 80% of Disney’s products are aimed at little girls, and easily 95% of what’s on the Disney channel is. And it’s not like it’s hard to get boys to turn on the TV.

I think it’s probably true that it’s harder to get boys to read than to get girls to read -on average-, but mostly I’d imagine it’s simply that it’s easier to pitch a product to the young girl demographic than it is to pitch to the young male demographic.

That’s not specific to the literary market though

My apologies for being “late” to this discussion. You wrote:

“In my hometown there was a genre bookseller named Future Fantasy. Small store, off the beaten path, beside a coin collector and a funky, old taquería. When I finally learned how to read at thirteen, I used watch their author signing schedule and bike my fantasy paperbacks over to get signed by the likes of Robert Jordan, Ray Feist, Tad Williams, and Robin Hobb. The booksellers, noticing what I read, would point me toward other books. Recently I had cause to think back to who was attending those signings. Certainly there were “adults” (anyone over eighteen), but there were also a fair number of people my age, specifically a fair number of boys my age.

I’ve been thinking about this because at the past few reading events I’ve given I haven’t noticed _any_ young men.”

First, I’d like to point out that small bookstores (heck, even large bookstores) that host author signings (or that can get the publisher to pay for the author to go there) are few and far between, especially these days. You were very lucky to live near enough to bike to such a store (do “helicopter” parents still let kids bike to stores these days? I don’t see it much, personally). On top of that, out here in southern California there are now restrictions on when teenagers can drive and how many teens of a certain age can be in the car at one time, etc., so even if there was a desire to attend a signing/author event, distance, driving regulations and the time the event is held may limit the abilities of the teens to attend or may limit the abilities of parents to take the kids to the event. Second, your novel is only out in hardcover, which is not totally prohibitive, but I know when I was a teen reading sf/fantasy, I was reading books from the school library and buying paperbacks with my allowance and newspaper delivery money; no way could I afford hardcovers, even into early adulthood, so until you have a paperback body of work for kids to afford (or parents to afford, often) you’re not going to see as many boys or girls at your signings. Third, there are now tremendous amounts of juvenile (7-12) and teen (13-?) sf/fantasy books available that were not available when I was a teenager, so I read Andre Norton, Piers Anthony, Alan Dean Foster, just to name a few. In other words, I–and you–read “adult” sf/fantasy books, but kids these days don’t have to do that, so the odds are even greater against them finding Spellwright, buying it and getting to an actual Blake Charlton author event.

From my personal experiences and from what I’ve seen of children, whether a boy or girl is interested in reading will depend upon parents, siblings/peers, and teachers/librarians, in some sort of mix, and often that mix ends up favoring something other than reading despite everyone’s efforts (or, maybe, because of them . All you can do is continue writing cool stories and putting yourself in front of young readers, and all I or anyone else who’s not a writer can do is try to make a positive reading impression on whatever young people are around in our day to day lives…and hope that something sticks.

Thought it might interest you.

http://musetracks.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/writer-inspiration-b-a-binns/