It’s a rainy Friday afternoon and I have been going through my folder of fiction reviewers, clearing out the deadwood (reviewers who are constantly late, never return reviews,  or somehow have fallen off the face of the earth despite my urgent emails and phone calls). What I noticed is how few of my reviewers are male. Of the more than 200 kind souls who review fiction for me, only 20 are men. Is this because men don’t read as much fiction as women? (In the recent round of newspaper and web stories regarding the failure of Jed Rubenfield’s historical thriller about Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Murder, to become a blockbuster, many agents and publishers cited the surprising success of Diane Setterfeld’s The Thirteenth Tale, which they noted was more of a woman’s book. Of course, this reminds me of my friend’s husband who refuses to see any movie based on a Jane Austen novel. “It’s a friggin’ woman’s picture”, he complains. 

The gender of a reviewer really shouldn’t matter when I am assigning books, but sometimes I am indundated with more testerone-laden macho adventure/technothrillers (think WEB Griffin, Nelson DeMille, Tom Clancy) than even my most tomboyish of female reviewers can handle. (If you think I am gender stereotyping, I’ll have you know that my sole reviewer of sports fiction was female—she burned out on too many bad baseball novels, and that for many years Westerns were reviewed by the legendary Sister Avila whose reviewer notes read: no sex or cussing, violence OK.)

So I am putting a call out to all you hairy-chested male readers. If you are not afraid to tackle fiction and can write well, prove your manliness and email your resume and a brief writing sample to me at wwilliams@reedbusiness.com.