Every year VIDA Women in Literary Arts conducts a survey to count female author representation in major literary periodicals. This survey isn't about quality or good reviews, but just about the representation, number of reviews or general press coverage that women authors are getting. The results can be viewed through a wide variety of lenses, but the graphs are admittedly a little shocking.
It would be interesting to know how the publishing numbers break down, but a quick peek at the New York Times Best Sellers hardcover list of the top 16 titles shows an exact 50/50 female to male representation. Which to me (unsing completely unscientific methods) shows that books written by women are just as popular or being read in the same numbers as books written by men. Read more »
Not only do I spent a lot of time reading books, but I spend a lot of time reading 
This novel examines the writing process itself especially that nerve-wracking period when an author first shares her work with other people. Nancy writes for a medical newsletter for a living; how ironic, she often thinks, that a doctor's daughter researches articles about prostate health, skin cancer, even empty nest syndrome, and then makes pronouncements about them in the voice of a medical practitioner rather than her own. Her novel is a deeply personal story, one that imagines her father’s life beginning with the night he watched a couple say good-bye to their newborn daughter. Nancy has waited until after her father’s death to imagine his story. And as in all fiction, the bare biographical facts are merely a springboard to the tale, not its actual foundation.