Do Fewer Men Read Novels Than Women Do?

The short answer seems to be yes. I don't know where I first heard the point being made. However, I can see this trend reflected at my Goodreads dashboard where my novels and short story collections are flagged as read by more female than male readers.

"We see it every time in our store," said Carla Cohen, the owner of the Politics & Prose Bookstore located in Washington, D.C. in an NPR article printed in 2007. "Women head straight for the fiction section and men head for nonfiction." I live just outside of Washington, D.C.

While I was writing my early hardboiled P.I. Frank Johnson series titles, I also wrote stories for the ladies' confessionals, the TRUE magazine line from Dorchester Media before they were sold. I learned the hard way through trial and error the sort of stories their editors liked and bought for their predominantly female reading audience. I also began a small town cozy mystery series featuring a pair of senior sleuths (the first title is Quiet Anchorage).

My point is I felt compelled to expand my fiction writing to include a subgenre for a largely female readership. I have enjoyed my time at writing both the soft-boiled and hard-boiled crime fiction. The range of my fiction writing can be found in the short stories I included in my latest collection Smoking on Mount Rushmore.
   
Here's the link to the NPR article cited in this blog post: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14175229