Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

The awesome Amanda, who has read about 500 partial manuscripts for Angry Robot, has blogged about her experience. Floor-to-ceiling books here

I’m amazed about how she has powered through the reading and assessing full manuscripts, works a day job and continues to write reviews, very impressive reviews too. Amanda did mention the gender of those she requested fulls for. I think I saw someone asking her on twitter. I probably have a breakdown, but will wait a bit. I’d have to check back.

Gender didn’t really come into the reading process from my perspective. If you check back to Blog post one you’ll see I uploaded about 5-10 partials on my ipad to read. So the file names don’t usually say, ‘Chicken’s roost by female author Chris Post’.  Some times the file names didn’t even say what the book was called, just something generic like ‘Angry Robot Submission’. Also, people like to disguise their names so it is hard to tell sometimes.  If I had read the query letter, it was a while before I got to the story. So mostly, it didn’t register for me until I wrote a rejection or a request for a full. Where it really hit me was when I was referring the full ms to Angry Robot and I’d think ‘Oh so it is a woman who wrote that (just once).’

So I’m up to full MS number 30 and that is out of 200 partial ms. I figure I was requesting more in the first half of reading than the second as I have 23 to go for the remaining 280 odd partial mss. Out of the ones I have referred nine up to Angry Robot, which  have been five female and four have been male. That thirty is approximately 16 female writers to 14 male writers. I was reading mostly fantasy, so I think (but don’t know) that there were a lot of female’s writing in that genre pile.

I will do a final tally when I’m done. Next post will be on assessing full mss.