Teddy Wayne argues that while life sucks for midlist authors of any sex, it sucks worse for men:

Both male and female midlist authors, by definition, get shafted by the mainstream media. The female midlister, though, still has a shot at gaining a foothold in book clubs, on the B&N front tables, and in the newly powerful Target Club, whose authors are almost exclusively women.

One major problem I have with Wayne’s argument is that it raises the specter of the Larry Summers controversy and the bizarre concept that women hug the bell curve when it comes to ability (and, deductively, success), while men tend to be outliers who either succeed spectacularly or fail spectacularly, due to their greater or lesser “intrinsic aptitude.”

Wayne even seems to concur with Summers’s notion of men being innately suited and/or attracted to “high-powered positions” by agreeing that male authors do indeed produce the highest-praised, most award-winning literary fiction, but that it is somehow “harder” for lesser-known male litfic authors:

For the majority of male literary authors—excluding the upper echelon of Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo and their ilk, plus a few younger writers like Chad Harbach who have scored much-ballyhooed advances—it’s actually harder than it is for women to carve out a financially stable writing career.

Two obvious problems with this. One: it’s harder for any literary writer to achieve success compared to any commercial writer. That’s why there’s a “commercial” in “commercial fiction.” It sells. It’s designed to.

The other problem is that Wayne is committing the same sin of conflation that Jennifer Weiner does: contrasting the success of literary fiction writers of X gender with that of commercial fiction writers of Y gender. Two variables are changing in each case: the genre and the gender.

When testing a hypothesis scientifically, one is obliged to keep all variables the same, insofar as possible, except for the variable being tested.

In Wayne’s world (no pun intended), male authors occupy both the highest and lowest rungs on the publishing ladder, while women dominate the many middle rungs. Except he demonstrates no empirical basis for this theory. Jennifer Weiner’s stats, pulled directly from the New York Times et al, only corroborate that male authors occupy the highest rung, where literary fiction authors like Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides get called Great American Novelists.

Here’s a fun experiment: name a female author called a Great American Novelist by the literary establishment in the past decade. Even Jennifer Egan, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has yet to reach the heights of regard of a Franzen or Eugenides, to say nothing of other female post-Millennial Pulitzer winners.

Roxane Gay points out that Wayne is arguing anecdotally, and that it’s both unfair and counterproductive to silence real complaints of sex bias in publishing by arguing, “Some male authors have it bad too.” Gay sharply observes:

Gender inequity in publishing is, I am guessing, not a favorite topic of [Jennifer] Weiner’s. I follow her on Twitter. Her favorite topic is “The Bachelor.” She may well have a chip on her shoulder and a certain amount of self-interest in wanting commercial and critical success. But let’s not pretend Teddy Wayne isn’t walking around with a chip on his shoulder, too. When a man has the kind of confidence to believe he should receive significant coverage in prominent venues, people generally don’t bat an eye. When a woman like Jennifer Weiner has that kind of confidence, she is ridiculed and belittled. Gender troubles are part of a vicious cycle.

Gay is savvy to link the treatment of female authors to pervasive social conventions. The problem isn’t just that female authors still aren’t taken as seriously as men by the literary establishment; the problem is that women are still seen as the lesser-abled sex by supposedly progressive societies in general.

• Pink = White
• Blue = Black
• Orange = Hispanic
• Green = Asian
• Gray = Other

Chicago is still a city very much delineated along color lines.

Rankin explains the map and talks about the way a dotted representation of data points is more accurate than solid color blocks here:

Then there is running from place to place, chasing something, a dream of what New Year’s Eve should be, a feeling that if we could somehow make the night perfect, we were capable of making the year perfect, life also.

—songs we used to sing

If I take 10 randomly-selected books from the bookstore and then I choose 10 random self-published books, I genuinely believe that the bookstore books will at least meet the standards for being well-put-together and, to boot, will be books I don’t like based on subjective definitions. But I’ll bet you that at least half of the self-published books fail based on errors that any C-grade writer or publisher should’ve caught and fixed.

This is a key point that often gets glossed over in the trad pub vs. self-pub debate. Traditionally published books must meet certain standards of technical and mechanical competence; self-published books have no such standards.

Trad-pubbed books are primarily criticized on a subjective basis: on an artistic rather than technical level. Twilight—or, in fairness, Freedom—may be the worst books ever written, but their problems don’t include things like verb tense disagreements or head-hopping.

Self-pubbed books often fail to make it past that first hurdle. Even when properly proofread, they fall apart at the gray middle levels between science and art: the places where editors and beta readers would say, “Jane is acting out of character here,” or “Cut this infodump,” or “The build-up to the climax needs more suspense.”

But it’s all moot, because the trad pub vs. self-pub argument has become so heated and so much about the writers that it’s forgotten what really matters:

This attitude is great for writers. “Who cares? Poop out a book!”

This attitude sucks for readers. “I just bought this book. And I think it’s made of poop?”

One Very Important Thing traditional publishing offers to readers is the assurance that a book has not only been proofread, but has received editorial feedback from several to dozens of readers before it’s launched into the world.

And as Chuck points out, there’s no evidence that the cream rises on Amazon. The great anarchic muddle of self-publishing is still at a loss for subjective quality filters.

Check out the rest of Ed’s gallery. Dude is damn good.