You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Shanahan discusses launching the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction to kick off M&P conference
Claire Shanahan, executive director of the Women’s Prize Trust, discussed launching the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024 during a keynote speech that kicked off The Bookseller’s 2023 Marketing and Publicity conference.
The new non-fiction prize, Shanahan said, is "borne out of research that demonstrates that female non-fiction writers are less likely to be reviewed in the media, less likely to be awarded prizes than their male counterparts". She went on to add: "The gender pay gap for non-fiction writers has widened in the past five years; we think we’re making progress, we’re actually going backwards.
"This prize will help to amplify women’s voices as experts, as change-makers, as thought-leaders. The day we find ourselves out of a job at the Women’s Prize will truly, truly be a happy one. But for now, we’ve got plenty of work to do."
During her talk, Shanahan also touched upon the history of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 1992, publishers, journalists, reviewers, librarians, booksellers and agents got together to consider why there had been no women featured in the 1991 Booker Prize shortlist. In response, she explained, they decided to start a new prize that celebrated women’s creativity.
Of the prize today, Shanahan said: "We are really comfortable where we sit in the prize landscape, and that is spanning a large spectrum. I’ve recently been told that our prize selections have become too commercial, perhaps even we’re dumbing down. Another person in the very same week told me that Women’s Prize books were too literary, that they weren’t the types of books that supermarkets want to stock.
"We revel in the glorious richness of our longlists and our shortlists each year; we can’t be all things to all people. The multiplicity of voices and the different types of reading communities drawn in are what’s important to us."
She urged listeners to take time throughout the publishing process.
"We tend to think that first to market is everything and it can be critical, but it can also be beneficial to sit back, watch and learn from others." Shanahan also highlighted the importance of using data to understand audiences, explaining how this helps the Women’s Prize to assess its work.
Meanwhile, in her keynote speech, Jendella Benson, author and head of editorial at Black Ballad, discussed the things that often surprise authors about the publishing process. Although this varies from author to author, Ballad said that what took her by surprise was how many people are involved in picking the cover and title of a book.
"Fundamentally, publishing is a team sport, authors and their publishing team want the same thing: an amazing book that will sell as much as possible," she said. "But perhaps it is important to point out that we’re not just passing around an inanimate ball, but we’re passing around our precious stories and ideas."
Authors can find it difficult to hand over their book to a team of experts, Benson explained. "Remember that you are also storytellers," she told the room. "The type of storytelling that you do is no less magical because it’s told in synopsis or perfectly written cells, because the stories that you tell will be a bridge, a conduit that brings the world of the reader and the world of the writer together, providing a point of connection that hopefully, quite possibly, will change all of our lives for the better."
Benson also addressed the topic of readers in her speech, saying that there are issues with how books are marketed and sold to audiences on the basis of their "collective trauma". Readers are tired of this, she explained, pointing out that it is a problem when stories by authors from marginalised backgrounds are marketed with narrow narratives.
"As audiences do grow more savvy, the fatigue grows thicker, but this also presents an opportunity," she said. "The old, the tired, the tested is no longer necessarily true, it’s a new dawn and audiences are still hungry for new stories [...] these audiences are as smart and as engaged as ever."
