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Worlds Without End Blog

100 Women Authors Added for the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge Posted at 12:31 PM by Dave Post

Dave Post

Women of Genre Fiction Reading ChallengeOne of the motivating factors behind the Worlds Without End Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge was a desire on our part to improve our author gender balance on the site.  We built WWEnd around the big awards so we could get the most familiar books and authors into our database first.  While that was a solid strategy to get the ball rolling one of the unfortunate results was a real lack of women authors going in.  When we expanded to cover the “best of” lists like the SF Mistressworks we started getting more and more women into the site but it still didn’t do enough to right the ship.

The WoGF Reading Challenge is our concerted effort to do something positive to address the issue here and perhaps out in the community at large.  From the outset we set ourselves the goal of adding at least 100 new women authors to the site over the course of the year and we’re happy to announce that we’ve reached our goal already.

Better than 80% of these authors are the result of member requests.  We asked you who you wanted to see and you responded with well over 100 author requests in the first couple weeks (with more being requested all the time) and we’ve been plugging away at that list ever since.  The other 20% are the result of new awards and lists we’ve added to the site.  The Mythopoeic Award in particular was a big contributor.

We’ve still got a long way to go in our quest for gender balance but this is nice milestone for everyone involved in the challenge.  Thank you all for your support of the WoGF!

So, what do you do when you reach a milestone?  You set out towards the next, of course!  I think we can reach 150 for sure so let’s move the marker out to 175 to make things interesting.  So many more authors, so little time.  Wish us luck!


2 Comments

Kristine N   |   22 Aug 2013 @ 07:44

How do I request an author be added? I’m living in Australia and I keep picking up genre books by Australian authors and then can’t find them on the WoGF list. I’m going to request Angie Baron (author of the Anaswitch) and Sara Douglass (who wrote a bunch of epic fantasy novels) be added.

Thanks!

Kristine

Dave Post   |   22 Aug 2013 @ 07:52

Hi Kristine, there is a thread in the forum for making author/book requests. Just drop your requests in there and we’ll get them added to our updates list. Cheers!

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