Who's missing?

[coalescent]

[Poll #1046886]

Actual answer here. Vote before you click.

EDIT: See also jlassen's two entries, and Andrew Wheeler here.

FURTHER EDIT: Commentary from rosefox here and cristalia here.

Comments

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I think the logic was probably "put the biggest names on the cover". Whether or not the names chosen are indeed the biggest names, or whether it might have been better to sacrifice one or two of them to avoid leaving half the audience feeling shut out, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

"put the biggest names on the cover".

This was how I voted.

[matgb]

Me also. But I really show my ignorance in that, I ought perhaps to be more aware of who authors are...

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

You could have guessed three more! Come on, you know how polls work.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

That brings me back to my comments to Jo Fletcher at that Eastercon panel, if you only promote the men they will always be the biggest names. Its self-fulfilling.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm sure it was about "the biggest names," but if you're doing that - in my opinion - you have to include Maureen McHugh. That, combined with the half-and-half women-and-men authorial ratio, um....

[twic.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

it might have been better to sacrifice one or two of them to avoid leaving half the audience feeling shut out

You seem to be implying that women only read stories by women authors - or at least strongly prefer them. That seems like a rather patronising attitude. Is it true?

-- tom

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I'm not implying that -- I was suggesting that the number of women who will be put off buying an anthology by an all-male cover is large enough to put a noticeable dent in sales, and larger than the number of men who would be put off by a cover with some women on it. A big part of this debate comes down to whether or not that is, in fact, true; there are at least quite a few women, in the comments here and on the other posts, who have said they look for women's names on the covers of anthologies, and would buy this anthology on the base of the full TOC but not on the basis of the cover, not because they only read stories by women, or even because they always strongly prefer stories by women, but because they prefer to read books where they at least feel that women are included in the conversation. Whether or not they can be scaled up, well, your guess is as good as mine, but it points at the real issue, as outlined in rosefox's post, which is that the cover just doesn't do that good a job of showing a potential customer what the anthology is like.