Sexism in publishing: 'My novel wasn’t the problem, it was me, Catherine'

Author reveals that submitting her manuscript to agents under a male pseudonym brought more than eight times the number of responses

‘No one mentioned his sentences being lyrical or whether his main characters were feisty’, says Nichols of her ‘homme de plume’, George. Photograph: Martin Rogers//Workbook Stock

Alison Flood

Thursday 6 August 2015  The Guardian

Almost 20 years after Francine Prose investigated whether “women writers are really inferior” in her explosive essay Scent of a Woman’s Ink, the author Catherine Nichols has found that submitting her manuscript under a male pseudonym brought her more than eight times the number of responses she had received under her own name.

In an essay for Jezebel, Nichols reveals how after she sent out her novel to 50 agents, she received just two manuscript requests. But when she set up a new email address under a male name, and submitted the same covering letter and pages to 50 agents, it was requested 17 times.
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