AN INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER OF UNIQUE BOOKS

There has been a lot of discussion lately about female to male ratios within anthologies, and a lack of female presence and diversity in general. Lisa Morton, president of the Horror Writers Association, recently recapped a study from 2010 of Women in the Horror Small Press, which is around the time Written Backwards first started publishing anthologies. This got me thinking about my own projects over the years, so I put all the data I have into a spreadsheet.

My goal with these anthologies has always been to find new voices (the reason I started the press in the first place) and to place them alongside legends, no matter the individual. For the last five years, however, I have consciously widened my scope, reaching out to more diverse writers from all genres, hopefully to bring you some amazing books along the way.

Anyway, I encourage all small presses to research their own data, to see how they’ve either progressed or retrogressed over the years. One thing I’ve noticed (at least with Written Backwards) is that the percentage of women submitting fiction has grown from 10.53% to almost 50% in the last 10 years, which would lead one to believe the amount of fiction we should be seeing in anthologies today should reflect such higher numbers.