Jojo Moyes Hits Out At ‘Pink And Glittery’ Covers For Female-Penned Novels

The publishing industry has come up against allegations of sexism before, but now, one writer is speaking out about how being a woman impacts your career as a writer.

Speaking to theBBC, Jojo Moyes, the author of best-selling novel Me Before You, highlighted how the term ‘chick lit’ demeans the seriousness of certain literature written by women and therefore turns potential readers off. ‘So many women who write about quite difficult issues are lumped under the 'chick lit' umbrella,’ she told the BBC. ‘It's so reductive and disappointing - it puts off readers who might otherwise enjoy them.’

Indeed, the term chick-lit is in itself problematic, gendering an entire genre of books as if men aren’t interested in female-centered romance plots and thereby reducing all female-written or audience-based books to frivolous reads. However, the publishing industry takes this one step further, by grouping female-written books together within the chick-lit genre. This means that we assume that any female-written book only deals with playful romance storylines rather than taking on serious issues and this translates into how they market the book.

It's something various successful novelists have spoken out about before, including The Storyteller author, Jodi Picoult. In 2014, she blasted the publishing industry for not taking female authors seriously, far too often pigeon-holing women into one genre of literature.

She told The Telegraph in 2014, that had a woman written The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides then it would have had a ‘pink fluffy cover’. She said, ‘when people call The Storyteller [about a former Nazi SS guard] chick-lit, I actually break up laughing. Because that is the worst, most depressing chick-lit ever’.

Her sentiment is confirmed my Moyes, who continued to tell the BBC that books by female authors are always presented in the same way, with ‘pink and glittery’ covers. ‘Supermarkets wanted things that are easily categorised’ she said, ‘but people don't want to read something pink and glittery.’

‘My favourite covers are just words on the front cover in very nice fonts, with just a tiny image,’ she continued, ‘and it's no coincidence that I have a lot more male readers who aren't being put off.’

While Moyes is certainly right that novels with hard-hitting plots shouldn’t be given ‘pink and glittery’ covers, the assumption that this turns off only male readers only reinforces the idea that women are attracted to covers such as this, which are more aptly described as childlike than they are feminine.

Moyes states that female authors are ‘lucky to get a wider audience’ because of the way their books are marketed, saying ’the boundaries are being blurred with women writing domestic noir and thrillers. I want to see covers that are a bit more gender neutral.’

Her point certainly stands, hard-hitting novels should surely not have juvenile, lighthearted cover art simply because the author is a woman. However, assuming it’s a gender issue, and that seemingly ‘feminine’ covers turn men off is just as problematic as assuming more serious covers turn women off - which is the exact opposite point she is intending to make.

The more prevalent issue seems to be that publishers assume women only write, and want to read, romantic comedies with frivolous plot lines that are sold in a less serious way. In reality, thriller and detective novels now outsell all other genres of fiction, with 53% of those readers being women.

Therefore, the publishing industry is missing out on a whole host of readers purely because they market them in an archaic way. So how can this be rectified? Changing engrained gender assumptions takes more than just a few authors speaking out, however the statistics showing that more women than ever are reading crime novels serve as hard evidence that women are not the delicate, love-obsessed readers publishers think we are.

The more statistics and sales-based evidence to show that marketing towards women in publishing is outdated the more likely capitalist-minded publishers are to take note. So, keep reading those murder plots we seemingly love, you might worry you’re simply feeding your inner thirst for horror, but you’re actually doing more for women than you think…

Click through to see books written by women of colour that you need to read...