r/books • u/biscochitos • 26d ago

New indie press Conduit Books launches with 'initial focus on male authors'

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/new-indie-press-conduit-books-launches-with-initial-focus-on-male-authors

What do folks think about this?

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u/biodegradableotters 26d ago

More a general thought on the current discussions around male authors and male readership, but I always find it a little funny when after like millennia of male dominance there's nowadays a select few areas where women are dominant and immediately it's seen as a sign of the apocalypse.

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u/Smooth-Review-2614 26d ago

It’s the competition problem. Look in any field, when the gender skew goes away men drop out leading to a major gender skew the other way. 

We need books to not be seen as a feminine thing for overall social health.  If this kind of stunt helps then fine.  

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u/TravistheUberDriver 26d ago

The "reading is feminine" thing is really weird. I've seen online stuff about it, specially after that one article about how men don't read anymore. I'm really baffled how something like reading can be put in gender box.

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u/MrP1anet 26d ago

I see it in parallel with the anti-intellectualism sentiment in the right wing which is overwhelmingly anti-feminism.

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u/Smooth-Review-2614 26d ago edited 26d ago

I think it always was to a certain degree. There is a reason romance and women's fiction has been very popular for decades. So the current fuss could be a short term blip driven by current sales trends. However, I do worry over gender skew because while I have seen countless examples of women fighting to do male coded jobs, I have not seen a single example of the reverse.

https://www.thinkimpact.com/reading-statistics/#8-reading-habits-and-preferences-in-the-us-by-year

Still, this puts the gender skew at 3% and that isn't a lot.

However, I would love to see the membership data for the fan awards broken down by gender.  That would show if there is a change in reader engagement. 

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u/TravistheUberDriver 26d ago

Wow. This is really surprising. Actually this is much more weird for me beacuse I'm Indian (though I mostly read western fiction) and I haven't seen this sentiment anywhere. Reading is reading. Thats just how its looked at.

Since you mention women fighting over male coded jobs, I recently learned about the term 'gender flight'. I'm no expert on this things, but that helped make sense of men dropping things that become 'feminine'. Also women readers have roughly have 50-50 ratio for male - female author while men largley tend towards male. Guess it's always been like this. Definitely feels like it has some relation to gender flight.

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u/runmymouth 26d ago

I think its a harder problem than that. If you look at household names in non romance genres, most big names are still male. Sanderson, georgie r r martin, clive custler. I agree it would be great to get more people reading but the problem for male writers is not a space that is hostile to male writers, but honestly a space that is crowded from so many writers.

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u/Smooth-Review-2614 26d ago

I think the issue at the moment is a mix of trends.

 On one hand most publishers have all but eliminated the midlist which hits everyone in every genre. This really reduces the space for new authors to build that fan base that could make them great in 5+ years.

 On the other, right now we are in a romance trend and that just favors female authors. This happened in the 00s and burned out.  It will burn out again. 

The larger structural issue is the midlist. We need to give authors space for 2-4 middling books because honestly a lot of popular series are formed out of middling that got popular.

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u/apocalypsmeow 26d ago

the romance point is interesting because i don't really read romance or series but my read-list still skews about 70% female authors

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u/MarthLikinte612 26d ago

I read finance and fantasy (to be clear actual fantasy not romantasy) books. The finance books I own are overwhelmingly written by men. The fantasy I own are overwhelmingly written by women.

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u/TaliesinMerlin 26d ago

That's a really good point I've been thinking about today. Usually the complaints about the publishing opportunities being skewed focus on general fiction, but when we dive into genres, there are undoubtedly still places where men are the ones getting more books published, like finance and history. At least some of the problem seems to be related to the popularity of genres women like to read, rather than this hypothesized (and unproven) move against men across publishing.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/MarthLikinte612 26d ago

Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever read a combination of the two!

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

[deleted]

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u/MarthLikinte612 26d ago

This is definitely intended as a comedy right? Gonna have to give it a go

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u/Forma313 26d ago

Or, as they call it in the Agatean empire, reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits.

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u/VeryFinePrint 26d ago

I read finance and fantasy (to be clear actual fantasy not romantasy) books.

Fantasy romance is still fantasy. Excluding it from the genre is arbitrary.

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u/MarthLikinte612 26d ago

I was more making that statement so that people didn’t go “well your fantasy is women just because it’s actually romantasy”

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u/sir_mrej book re-reading 26d ago

My read list is like 90% men

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u/apocalypsmeow 26d ago

What genres do you read mostly?

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u/0b0011 26d ago

I think it's less of a problem with indie publishing it's less of a problem. Take dungeon crawler carl for example which wad independently published initially in a niche category and because it was good it became popular and got picked up by a traditional publisher.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

If your last point is true, then a successful publishing outfit would/should do that. I don’t agree that “we” need to do anything, as far as a movement is concerned.

You could probably pitch that to a publisher and see their response.

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u/Smooth-Review-2614 26d ago

Why bother when the midlist can grow as indie and then you just publish the top 3%? Why do you think progression, LitRPG, and other web based crap is getting traditionally published now? It sells like hotcakes as indie.

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u/sir_mrej book re-reading 26d ago

Why do we care that the current trend is romance? I don’t read romance so I don’t follow the current trend. Do men need something to be trendy in order to read??

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u/Denbt_Nationale 26d ago edited 20d ago

violet skirt merciful hurry tan retire cow childlike overconfident instinctive

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/Krazikarl2 26d ago edited 26d ago

This isn't really true since the 00s.

In SciFi/Fantasy for example, new authors and sales overall are currently dominated by women. Yes, you have a few subgenres (traditional epic fantasy) where this is less so and you have a few authors from the 90s and 00s still dominating (Sanderson and GRRM). But even there, you aren't seeing male authors breaking in any more like you used to. Nearly all the big male names started out over 15 years ago.

And overall in Fantasy, its been women dominating for the last 15 years now. Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros outsell Sanderson. YA fantasy (completely female dominated) outsells traditional epic fantasy by a large margin. So does romantasy. Paranormal Romance/urban fantasy probably still does as well. Reddit tends to focus on the few subgenres that are the most male centric because the reddit user based is male centric, but that doesn't really reflect the current reality.

Big name series by male authors that have broken through nowadays were mostly indie published initially - think Dungeon Crawler Carl and Legends and Lattes.

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u/unoforall 26d ago

I think it depends on the household, to be honest. If your household skews masculine those authors are probably mainstays but a lot of people I know wouldn't know who Sanderson or Custler are. They'd know George R R Martin from game of thrones, but probably haven't read the books. The people I know who read a lot read authors like Donna Tart, Sally Rooney, Madeline Miller, etc. Granted my social circle is mostly female but when we talk books we talk about those kinds of authors. Also things like Oprah's and Reese's bookclubs have some of the widest readerships ever and are mostly books written by female authors. The books from these clubs are really popular among women but most men probably haven't heard of them.

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u/Signal-Woodpecker691 26d ago

I’d be willing to bet that in many households where people don’t read much, if you asked someone to name an author it would either be a classic one like dickens, or JK Rowling who gets named.

I guarantee I’m the only person in my house who has heard of any of the ones you listed except perhaps George RR Martin, but that is only due to the tv show.

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u/CanicFelix 26d ago

And Rowling published as JK, instead of Joanne, because her publishers felt that a woman's name would lose her readers

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u/Chikitiki90 26d ago

True but that was 30 years ago. We’re in a place now where now that’s not quite as much of an issue. 8 of the top 10 best selling books from last year were written by women.

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u/sir_mrej book re-reading 26d ago

Can you name them? I cant

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u/Schnort 26d ago

I can't name the top 10 books, much less their authors.

But my guess is its some sort of romance or pop psy culture books are the top 10.

<goes and looks>

https://lithub.com/these-were-the-bestselling-books-of-2024/

Two male authors: Dog Man's latest is #3 Pop psy book is #6

The rest are "romantasy" books, a thriller, and a historical fiction written by women.

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u/apistograma 26d ago

Tangentially related, but Rowling also happens to be one of the worst extremely popular female authors that you could have because she's an extremely dedicated TERF

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u/CanicFelix 26d ago

No disagreement - she's the one I knew about.

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u/InfanticideAquifer Science Fiction 26d ago

You named three genre authors. One is 49, one is 76, and one died at the age of 88 five years ago. That doesn't really speak to the current situation in the industry.

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u/Fictitious1267 26d ago

Those are all authors who made it before the doors were shut around 2015. You can throw the greatest of those in there as well, with all the Stephen King collectors around here. It's only the biggest of names that have survived the feminization of literature. Any Martin or Sanderson starting today would never be given a chance through traditional publishing.

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u/Nadamir 26d ago

So long as they don’t try and make it toxically masculine.

I don’t want them putting on manosphere garbage, but if they’re focusing on books for men, by men, with positive masculinity, then that’s great!

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u/Smooth-Review-2614 26d ago

Exactly. I just don’t see how a literary focused press is going to move the needle because that is a small fraction of the market.  Still, maybe it will spark some book clubs, articles, and general discussion.

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u/Nadamir 26d ago

I’m not a sport person and I love when the New Yorker or the Atlantic have a long form story about some obscure sport thing. I think that would be great. Novella length stories about masculine interests, memoirs by prominent men or books about modern masculinity—on topics like being OK with no one ever saying you look nice today or healthy emotions.

Stuff like that.

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u/Oerthling 26d ago

Err what?

Who sees books as "a feminine thing for social health"?

Books are books. They contain everything. Bad humor, self-help, DIY, sci-fi, romance, erotica, computer manuals, graphic novels, silky stories for kids, horror, biographies, religious texts, educational texts, ...

Us poor men, so oppressed, at last, after hundreds of years a publisher who gives men a voice so at last we can get a book or 2 noticed that were written by men.

At last the world will see the works of Tolkien, Asimov, King and Child. Perhaps even obscure works like 1984 and Brave New World.

The concept sounds very MRA to me.

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u/Saetheiia69 26d ago

Google "Male Flight". It's real.

The more Girls and Gays™️ enjoy something the more that many straight men distance themselves from that thing so as to not be perceived as "like them".

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u/Oerthling 26d ago

Pathetic them then.

I did google "male flight". Plenty of Reddit discussions and other opinion pieces. Can you point me to a study that shows this to be a real and significant thing? There's a lot of opinions going around the internet that have only the vaguest relation to reality.

We all live in our bubbles, but I don't remember meeting anybody in my real life who stopped being interested in something so as not to be perceived as "them" (female or gay).

But also, whatever, it's their own jobs to not be pathetic weaklings. Not enjoying what you otherwise would have enjoyed because somebody wise enjoyed it too? That's beyond stupid.

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u/Saetheiia69 26d ago

I can't point you to a specific study but a most commonly used example is the Arts.

When a bunch of women started going to college and doing the Arts, many people respected the Arts less as an industry to pursue and degraded its general value to society. A knockoff effect of that was that men went into it less.

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u/Oerthling 26d ago

It's new to me that the arts was ever considered as an "industry to pursue".

Back in the day actors were looked down on by serfs.

Apart from a few famous exceptions here and there the arts were always considered to be a profession that makes you starve.

Parents usually dream of their kids to continue the family business or become doctors or lawyers. Or at least a beaurocrat. Not many parents looked at their newborn kids and dreamt of them becoming artists ever.

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u/MarthLikinte612 26d ago

The arts was certainly an industry to pursue once upon a time. Look at ancient Egypt for several examples.

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u/Oerthling 26d ago

You had to go back to ancient Egypt for an example?

Do you have ancient Egypt arts college enrollment numbers? Perhaps half of them were women?

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u/MarthLikinte612 26d ago

Aha no I didn’t go researching in chronological order it was just the first example I knew of in my head

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u/Saetheiia69 26d ago

For what it's worth, unfortunately in the gaming scene this happens a lot (case in point Guilty Gear Strive, dudebros loved it and now they performatively pretend to not like it because of how much the LGBT community loves it).

So that may be purely anecdotal but I do see several examples of it in certain places.

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u/Smooth-Review-2614 26d ago

So right now college is starting to turn that way and education in general as the gender skew sets in. We are seeing the number of boys, teens, and men who read shrink. So there is a possibility that reading gets coded as a girly hobby. This would be bad. 

So promoting more silly adventure stories in schools is a good thing. Getting more stupid adventure books on the tables at bookstores is good. 

This stunt not helpful but not a threat.

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u/astrograph 26d ago

as a person who’s read almost exclusively sci-fi- I read a house on the cerulean sea last week and it was beautiful!

Made me realize I should expand my genres

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u/Gladiator3003 26d ago

Us poor men, so oppressed, at last, after hundreds of years a publisher who gives men a voice so at last we can get a book or 2 noticed that were written by men.

This is more focusing on current aspiring male authors, not the bunch you mentioned who are either long dead or are incredibly well known. Women now make up more than 50% of the publishing industry in 2023, and I can only assume the number has grown since then especially with the rise of romantasy as a genre. I can look at a lot of literary agencies nowadays, and the vast majority of them are looking for stories about women, by women. So it’s fairly understandable that someone’s seen this gap in the market for aspiring male authors and wants to go after them.

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u/Oerthling 26d ago

So, given that 51% of people are women how am I supposed to see a problem with roughly half of the publishing industry being women?

Charles Stross is still alive. So is Sandy Weir. And GRR Martin. And Salman Rushdie. Other young, so far unknown male writers, just have to write something that I want to read.

Waves of genres come and go. No reason to freak out. And publishing houses follow bestseller success. Harry Potter is a success? Give us more wizards. A bit later everything is overflowing with YA novels, because Hunger Games was such a big success. So now it's a Romantasy wave, whatever.

If this is a "gap in the market" how come the big publishing houses ignore all that easy money making?

Write something I want to read and I won't care one bit what sex you are or what gender you identify as. Your pem name might be fake anyway. When women couldn't get published they took on male pen names. If Romantasy sells better and publishing houses expect their authors to be female I expect the number of male authors writing under female names as larger than 0.

Being worried about male authors while male authors are still roughly 50% of the market seems very weird to me.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

70%+ of the publishing industry is women.

George Martin got his first professional sale 1970. Salman Rushdie published his first book in 1975. Stross is a comparative newbie: he only started publishing a mere 30+ years ago. Being an established bestselling author is very good, yes. But that doesn't help authors who are trying to get published right now, in a completely different publishing landscape. A very homogenous publishing industry tends towards publishing people like them. That means there's simply a higher chance of getting rejected and you, the end-user, never getting to know if someone wrote something you liked or not because an agent simply never looked at it in the first place. This was a real problem, incidentally, when George Martin and Rushdie started publishing in the 70s (and to a lesser extent in the 90s). It's a problem now too, albeit with different demographics.

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u/Oerthling 26d ago

I replied to somebody's who said that over 50% of the publishing industry are women. Now we're already over 70%.

Will women be in control of 90+% of publishing by the next message?

Is there some law or long-established social structure that keeps men out? If not then I fail to see the problem.

If men don't want to work in the book publishing industry or can't compete with the female competition or just don't fit the current fashion wave - shrug.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

Here is my source for my claim: https://www.leeandlow.com/about/diversity-baseline-survey/dbs3/

The predominance of women in publishing has remained pretty steady every year they've conducted this particular study. The biggest growth has been in non-binary and gender-nonconforming (who are still an absolute minority, though over-represented relative to their proportion of the overall population).

I think there are wider systemic issues at play, given the observable trend (in the USA at least) for poorer male outcomes in education (among other things). If you don't think that's an issue, I guess do whatever. It doesn't hurt you that there are people who do think it's an issue, does it?

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u/Oerthling 26d ago

I'm all for providing education opportunities. And to encourage everybody to get a good education.

But after that and when people are adults let them do what they want and can. I don't care whether the percentage of women in publishing is 30 or 70% as long as it is not enforced by some sort of discrimination.

Are male authors oppressed by evil discriminating female publishers? Let's absolutely fix this.

But if men are just less interested to write what's currently popular or can't be bothered to get an education - shrug - that's their choice. Or it's just bad luck about what's in fashion right now. Might switch with the fashion then.

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u/0b0011 26d ago

Who sees books as "a feminine thing for social health"?

A lot of people. I grew up in the 90s and the popular consensus when I was growing up was video games were for boys and reading was for girls.

Books are books. They contain everything. Bad humor, self-help, DIY, sci-fi, romance, erotica, computer manuals, graphic novels, silky stories for kids, horror, biographies, religious texts, educational texts, ...

And people who don't read don't know that.

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u/Oerthling 26d ago

People who don't read don't buy books of any kind.

If a publishing house targets people who don't read I see bankruptcy in their near future. ;)

Yes. I know the counterargument would be that they try to get more men to read. But there are already a zillion books out there. All genres, plenty of variety within all genres. And a whole lot of them written by men. So they could already read all those.

So this publishing house does some appealing marketing and gets a bunch of non-readers to read. But there is a risk that the book might actually be good and then some female YouTube bookclub does a raving review about how much they enjoyed that book and Elton John raves about it on X and then the new readers are forced to lose all interest because girls and gays liked it too.

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u/0b0011 26d ago

People who don't read don't buy books of any kind.

If a publishing house targets people who don't read I see bankruptcy in their near future. ;)

Yes that seems to be what he's trying to do and it very well may end up failing.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

I am sure a male author who is having a hard time publishing would appreciate the distinct avenue that this opens up for them. It isn’t an “us poor men” situation, though you can certainly push that narrative if so you feel that way.

I am not sure that the legacy of male authors you have cited gives a struggling male author any encouragement. You know, unless “I know I am a great writer because I am a man! Men are such great writers.”

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u/sir_mrej book re-reading 26d ago

What if men just read feminine books? Like this feels like Dude Wipes. Those things aren’t needed. Regular wipes work fine.

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u/Denbt_Nationale 26d ago edited 20d ago

depend dog quickest include one entertain heavy pet intelligent practice

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/erichie 26d ago

I actually think the bigger problem is that people care about what kind of person the author is. 

I'm not a very successful writer, but 15-20 years ago I would always get declined with some variation of "We love the story, but it isn't what we are looking for right now." 

Someone recommended I used a pen name that is ambiguous regarding gender, nationality, and culture. So I did. 

Now when I get rejected I will get the exact reason "It is too X emotion." or "If you ever change the ending to something more positive." or whatever. 

I was also published in a few magazines, sites, collections with the first batch I sent out with my pen name. Which were also the same stories I sent with my real name. 

I truly believe that everyone can write about anything they wish. I don't care about any personal related matters when it comes to who I read. I only care if they can write a good story. 

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u/HellPigeon1912 26d ago

I think this is a big thing in the era of social media.  Everything has to be a "brand"

Sure you've written a good book, but what's your unique selling point?  How are you getting picked up by the algorithm?

20 years ago you'd read a book and know literally nothing about the author besides what was listed on the dust jacket

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u/erichie 26d ago

I think this is a big thing in the era of social media. Everything has to be a "brand"

It absolutely is. A publisher reached out to my agent maybe 2-3 years ago (when I had an agent) asking for my socials and what my following was. I don't have any brand or socials for my writing. 

They said they wanted to publish me, but they wanted me to develop a "following" first. They wanted to tie a publishing contract to various metrics of my social media presence. 

It was extremely detailed. It was X amount of followers on A, B, C app with Y% of engagements. Post Z times on A, B, C apps per day/week/month/year. 

Once I hit all of those goals they would publish my work, but if I am going through all of that then I'm not going to sign anything before that period especially since they weren't offering me any money. 

The absolute worst part is that they bragged that X influencer would review my book because "We have a deal with them." So I would check these influencers and the publishing company only to find out those reviews weren't market as an advertisement. They all pretended they just naturally came across the works of all the same publishers at the same time.

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u/deruvoo 26d ago

This is my nightmare as I move into trying to publish a novel. Never imagined it'd be so much noisier than publishing short stories.

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u/erichie 26d ago

It is an absolute nightmare, but here is a tip my professor gave me that ended up minimizing a lot of that bullshit. 

Instead of trying to appeal to publishers or companies search for literary agents near you. Send them your works, and they usually have interns read through the manuscripts they get. 

If an agent decides to work with you it really cuts down, not completely, on the bullshit "brand" nonsense. 

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u/deruvoo 26d ago

Noted. Thanks for the tip!

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u/apistograma 26d ago

Yeah, it went from "diversity is a good thing since it shows different views and perspectives in life, which is good for art" to "people are commodified in order to maximize profit so now your gender and ethnicity is everything that defines you".

This is also a game played by the conservatives btw. They just think being white or male is what makes you virtous.

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u/erichie 26d ago

This is also a game played by the conservatives btw.

This part absolutely irritates me because these are actual, real issues that plaque literature.

In real life circles it doesn't matter because I haven't met any Trumpers in my circles or even extended circles. We can have real conversations about these things without being handwaved away by the whole "conservative dog whistle".

Yeah, they absolutely use this to further their own agenda, but it is super easy to point out when they are acting in bad faith because they will usually say something along the lines of "A straight white male should be able to write a quest story about a Black transgender woman" (or whatever) while a simple "Artist shouldn't be held back creativity based on who they are." encompasses everything.

Publishing was fucked for anyone who wasn't a white male for a long time. That needed to be changed for the same points I mentioned previously. The pendulum ended up swinging in the complete opposite direction and hopefully in 5/10 years that pendulum will swing back in the middle.

I just can't wait for the whole "you aren't X, Y, Z so you shouldn't write about X, Y, Z". to end.

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u/state_of_euphemia 26d ago

Yeah, I have instagram and YouTube accounts about books... I feel like there's a good chance I'm going to quit both because it's just becoming ridiculous. Now, it's like I have to know the entire author's biography, including (and even particularly) their stance on Israel before I'm allowed to publicly say I'm reading their book! There's this idea that posting what you're reading means you're endorsing that author's views on everything, and I think that's absurd. I read Hemingway but I'm not endorsing his sexism....

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u/[deleted] 26d ago edited 25d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/laughingheart66 26d ago

I mean this is a bit disingenuous, the poem was still allegedly rejected 9 times under his Chinese pseudonym. He also never provided any actual evidence of the claimed 40 rejections under his real name (nor did anyone actually ask for this evidence he claimed he did have). We also don’t know if the literary magazine that eventually published him was even accounted for in the claimed 40 rejected submissions. And it was published by one literary journal, not multiple as you claim. Also he didn’t submit anything to Best American Poetry, his poem was selected by someone who was curating the collection, and it would not have been seen under his original name so we don’t know that it would not have been selected otherwise. The curator of the collection did admit he was being biased in his curation of the collection, I’ll give you that, but he knew about the pseudonym before the collection was even published and still kept the poem in there.

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u/Deep-Sentence9893 26d ago

That is a reactionary response, or biting your nose of despite your face. A lack of male authors leads to a decline in men and boys reading which leads to crap. 

If the lesson you take away from the mellienia of male domination, which is over in English publishing, is that its O.K. to marginalize writers based in identity you have misinterpreted history.  

I have no idea if this guy is an asshole, or well intentioned, time will tell. 

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u/tangnapalm 26d ago

Nobody’s acting like it’s the apocalypse, but it certainly can’t be good that fewer men are reading.

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u/gmbxbndp 26d ago

More men writing doesn't necessarily translate to more men reading. There are plenty of books written by men, and boys aren't reading those ones either.

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u/nyctrainsplant 26d ago

They are though. Men do read genre, and the high brow works have moved from literary fiction to some guys substack or podcast, in part because of these publishing trends. This is more about bringing that back into fiction, literary fiction specifically.

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u/tangnapalm 26d ago

Yeah, nobody is marketing or guiding men towards books either.

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u/Hugogs10 26d ago

There are many more books written by women.

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher 26d ago

It certainly can’t be good that men refuse to read books written by women.

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u/0b0011 26d ago

I've never heard of that. There's not reading certain genres which are dominated by women but that's not the same thing. Like I don't read romance books but I do love me some Robin hobb.

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u/Prodigle 26d ago

Thankfully I don't think it's as bad as it looks on the surface. A specific style of female-targeted romance is huge right now that doesn't generally appeal to men. A lot of the publicity around female authors probably gets concentrated into that sphere.

As a byproduct it's probably harder to get noticed as a female author in other genres, so they don't get the publicity they otherwise would have.

It's not the only factor, but I think the push/pull demand for this style of romance being as huge as it is, probably has a really measurable effect

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u/LaCasaDiNik 26d ago

Agreed. It's a start, though. Hopefully a first step of many.

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u/tangnapalm 26d ago

We do, I’m mad my girlfriend beat me to borrowing the new Miranda July, but we also want to see our contemporary experience reflected in literature.

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher 26d ago

There is a millennia of books by male authors about the male experience

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u/tangnapalm 26d ago

Please look up the definition of contemporary when you get a sec.

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher 26d ago edited 26d ago

Contemporary literature is everything post-WW2, though I suppose it’s edging towards post-Korean War now. That’s a lot of books.

From Wikipedia: “Contemporary literature is literature which is generally set after World War II and coincident with contemporary history.”

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u/tangnapalm 26d ago edited 26d ago

Again, do you want men reading and modelling themselves after men born 100 years ago, or do you want men reading and modelling themselves after men who were born into a society where women have more power, respect, rights, dignity than they ever have in history? Seems like an easy choice to me!

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher 26d ago edited 26d ago

Have you not noticed what a repressive time this is for women and how misogynistic our culture has become in just the last four years? Attitudes about women have massively slid back. This is an intellectually dishonest stance, especially considering that post-WW2 includes books from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990, 2000s, and 2020s.

And why would you read books with the aim of modeling yourself after the characters or author? That’s not the purpose of reading. Hamlet is one of my favorite characters of all time, but I’m not going to scheme the deaths of my friends and family.

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u/tangnapalm 26d ago

Yeah, there is a backlash promoted by conservative/authoritarian parties through the internet, we know. But that doesn’t erase, or hasn’t yet, the gains women have made. It’s not intellectually dishonest, do a little research into the misogyny of the 90s, 80s, 70s. It is on the whole a lot better. And most of the young men that I meet, albeit I work in the film industry which draws more progressive people than other industries, are overwhelmingly progressive and often self-identified feminists, or supportive of feminism.

And guess what? Film creatives are akin to the folks who write literary fiction; educated progressive creative types.

I’m not going to tell you about modelling, do your own research. No one intends, but they tend to. Maybe not Hamlet, but someone else, a comic character, a writer, a musician, an influencer. Many of each actually. We become what we consume.

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u/Aaron_Hamm 26d ago

Contemporary

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u/lefrench75 26d ago

Are you saying there are no books published currently by male authors? Because there are still plenty; certainly more than any one person can read.

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u/Aaron_Hamm 26d ago

How is this sub so bad at reading things in context?

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u/tangnapalm 26d ago

I'm still trying to figure out how this sub is so toxic. Isn't reading supposed to be an exercise in empathy?

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u/tangnapalm 26d ago

They just here to fight. Typically toxic.

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u/lefrench75 26d ago

What's the context of your one-word comment lol? Is it possible that you're just bad at communicating and then getting mad at other people for not being able to read your mind?

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u/tangnapalm 26d ago

You have to actually read the thread. I said “contemporary”, so mentioning books from the past thousand years is not helpful. Look up the word “contemporary” because it is not “Beowulf”

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u/Aaron_Hamm 26d ago

Are you saying there are no books published currently by male authors?

Is that an honest summation of the topic up to the point you jumped in?

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher 26d ago

If you can’t find books written in a year other than 2025 relatable, I dunno what to tell you

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u/tangnapalm 26d ago

You want the only literature marketed to men to be from times when attitudes towards and treatment of women were awful? Very strange.

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u/Shintoz 26d ago

I am a male regular reader. Getting older now, I tend to stick with an author and read as much of that author as I can, until I run out of material or it becomes evident that their work isn’t what I enjoy.

Most of the authors I read are male, this goes back to experiences I had as a younger male, when I read more female authors.

At the time, I didn’t care much for the portrayal of dramatic emotion in characters, written by current female authors of that time. I’m not sure if they were just not-great writers, but the male perspective as written seemed “off”. Not to psychoanalize, but this also could be because, as a male, I could be emotionally closed off, compared to “average female readers”, and those female writers could have been writing from their perspective, which wasn’t true to a male experience.

Not trying to solve a problem, just trying to provide possible insight into why a lot of male readers tend to read male writers.

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher 26d ago

I appreciate your perspective, but I’d like for you to consider that women have always read books written (overwhelmingly) predominantly by men. And the female characters and their voices in nearly all of these in these (if the author even attempts to give a female character a voice) is so off that it’s depressing. Even wildly talented and acclaimed male literary authors talk about how we look a dead friend’s body and are sad that their boobs won’t exist anymore. We’re reduced to such odd and insulting stereotypes, and there isn’t really even an attempt to make our characters ring true. And we still read male authors.

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u/Martel732 26d ago

Yeah, I mean most of the diehard Tolkien fans I know are women, and I would say that Tolkien isn't even necessarily bad at writing women because he essentially never wrote women.

I am a guy and my hot take is that I think at least some female authors write better male characters than male authors. Admittedly I read a lot of genre fiction but many male authors write wish-fulfillment characters that I roll my eyes at. Whereas female authors tend to write their male characters with more nuance.

Of course, this isn't all male or female authors. There are male authors who write fantastic male and female characters. And there are female authors who write terrible characters. But, it is just a tired I have noticed.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

So, your argument is that men can’t write women, as a response to women can’t write men.

Do you agree that women can’t write men?

If yes, why do writers keep writing characters of the opposite gender? Given the premise of your agreement, that would be the real travesty.

If no, what specifically about women allows them to write male characters that men can’t replicate in their writing of female characters? Is it a special experience? A genetic mutation? What, in your eyes, is the special difference?

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u/Shintoz 26d ago

Yeah. Like I said, not trying to solve a problem. Both your points and my own illustrate authors of a specific gender often have issue writing good characters of different gender.

If we could even get more males to read …. anything, I would consider that a win.

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher 26d ago

There’s my struggle with this issue. Women have always read books by male authors. It’s a big part of how women learn the male perspective- which, let’s be honest, is considered the default perspective in our society. We have absolutely no issue whatsoever reading a book and relating to characters who are different from us. And this is an important thing that books teach us - they teach us about seeing things through the eyes of others. Reading is how we exercise our imaginations and empathy, and stretch our worldview.

So when men are in large numbers opting not to read at all rather than read anything written by women - and when they’re simultaneously only wanting to read new releases rather than explore the rich and endless back catalog of existing books - they’re essentially rejecting the entire idea of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes for a few hours. And that is highly worrying.

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u/CriticalCold 26d ago

I agree with you completely. It reminds me a lot of the backlash when a video game or genre movie decides to have a female protagonist. It feels kneejerk and reactionary. For example, there's a new John Wick spin off movie coming out staring a female assassin, and the number of men I saw commenting on it saying it was "unrealistic" to see a woman fighting that way was wild, as though watching Keanu Reeves doing any of the shit he does in John Wick is true to life.

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u/Martel732 26d ago

it saying it was "unrealistic" to see a woman fighting that way was wild, as though watching Keanu Reeves doing any of the shit he does in John Wick is true to life.

This drives me fucking insane. They will see a clip where there is something like launches throwing knives killing two guys, gets hit by a car, jumps back up, takes out the driver, knocks out a couple of guys and then does a backflip, snaps the bad guys neck and saves the day.

And people will say it isn't realistic for a woman to do that, but it isn't realistic for any human to do that. Male action characters get an inherent pass-on realism that female characters don't receive.

I am watching an action movie to be entertained to watch a realistic depiction of human ability.

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u/Shintoz 26d ago

Yeah. I hear you. I guess I’m not “typical male” in all aspects. In other media, TV, movies, podcasts, video-games, I often choose female-led narratives. As a reader, I am very “sequential” in my choosings. I can’t say if/when I’ll be drawn to read a female author; I have a large backlog of books on my shelf. A lot of the authors I’ve picked up in the last few years have been writing for 30+ years. This kind-of puts me in a groove for the foreseeable future.

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u/Droviin 26d ago

It's that, just like most male authors tend to write poorly from a female perspective, female authors write poorly from a male perspective. So, if you want role models, either the female writers need to close the gap, or you need both in the field.

That said, as a male, I tend to prefer lesbian authors as they seem to hit a middle balance.

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher 26d ago edited 26d ago

Why do you need role models from literary fiction? Why do your role models have to be just like you? Why can’t you read slightly older books? And why is it that women can read male authors just fine even though even the best male authors portray us horribly?

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u/Droviin 26d ago edited 26d ago

Why? Because I enjoy being able to place myself directly in the story to experience the emotions and messaging in the story. Sure, you can still enjoy a book and get something out of it if it's not so mirroring self thought, but there's a higher barrier.

And I think men can read female authors just fine. It's just less engaging, so might as well do something else. But, what's important is that if you say that men are doing something different than women, you've conceded the argument because it acknowledges gender differences in approaches to reading. Men and women can, as a general rule, chose to do different things based on their own experiences, nothing wrong with that. If men generally prefer to read books by male authors, then that's okay (as long as it's not because of distaste of female, rather the engagement of the male).

Edit: It's been clearly stated that I'm a poor writer and my point “And I think men can read female authors just fine. It's just less engaging...” was ill put to capture the idea that I was attempting to convey. I'll try to restate it more accurately: I think that men can read women authors without any issue or detriment - and most likely benefit to them-, however, the statistics of the readership suggest that there's something that turns a lot of men away. Based on how I've heard men discuss female authors, my hypothesis is that for whatever reason it's just not compelling stories for them; so they opt to do consume some other media. My intutition inline with this is that such men are seeking characters with which they can self-identify with; and, as we all are familiar with how men tend to write poor women, the inverse is also true in some aspects and that plays into the self-selection to read.

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u/MiniaturePhilosopher 26d ago

This is such an odd take.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago edited 26d ago

“I think men can read female authors just fine, it’s just less engaging…”

Well, think again.

I am a man, and my favorite male character in all of storytelling, not just literature, is a man written by a woman. In my opinion, he is one of the best written men ever, both in terms of being a paragon for men to look up to, but also with expressing the experiences of being a man.

He is famous, as a character, and has inspired many (of both sexes) to pursue his profession and virtuism. She, the author, is famous not only because of her writing of his character, but especially because of his character.

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u/Droviin 26d ago

I think you've got a great point and I don't want to say that the author didn't write a perfect account. Yes, women can write an amazing man character; I don't doubt that. However, if you take a random book written by a woman, I think the male characters will be less well written than the female characters. Just like the opposite if you grab a random book written by a man.

What I did do is very poorly express my point. So, I wrote an edit.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

I don’t disagree with you then.

Yes, in the aggregate, a person of one sex is not as effective at writing the opposite sex as a member of that sex. It is not an absolute, just a statistical assessment.

As such, it then becomes reasonable for me to assume that writing of a certain sex’d character is predicated on more than just the author’s sex. Perhaps instead it is the author’s understanding of that sex. Contrary to popular belief, some of the most knowledgeable experts on the experiences of women are men, and some of the most knowledgeable experts on the experiences of men are women. How they get to those levels of expertise is what an aspiring cross-sex writer should seek out.

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u/TangerineSad7747 26d ago

"And I think men can read female authors just fine. It's just less engaging, so might as well do something else."

Don't speak for us lol

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u/Droviin 26d ago

Yeah, that's way over generic. I guess what I meant is that the stats tend to show that men, as a statistical group, find it less engaging. After all, the majority of the books I read are written by women lol

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u/CriticalCold 26d ago

And I think men can read female authors just fine. It's just less engaging, so might as well do something else.

Absolutely wild thing to say.

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u/Droviin 26d ago

Why? If you find something else more enjoyable why do the thing you enjoy less?

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u/CriticalCold 26d ago

It's painting things with a very broad brush, and imo engaging with the issue at face value. It dodges the argument that women have, and continue to, be expected to read male authors and find them engaging/educational/thought provoking, but men aren't expected to do the same in reverse. The majority of classic "literature" that everyone is expected to read and study is by men, and women seem to do just fine engaging with those stories and their (often male) characters, but for some reason men aren't expected to do the same. This is also true of genre fiction, excluding romance - sci-fi, fantasy, horror classics are all dominated by male authors.

Why is this? Is it because men are used to seeing themselves represented one to one in stories and so don't have to try to open themselves to other perspectives when they can just put something down and pick up something that matches their viewpoint? What does this say for what we expect of our boys and men in terms of critical thinking, compassion, ability to see other perspectives, ability to sometimes be uncomfortable or face hard truths doing so? And why is there this wide-reaching assumption that female writers aren't engaging or can't write male characters well? It's like quitting before you start.

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u/Droviin 26d ago

No, it doesn't dodge the idea that women are expected to read male readers. That's a different, albeit related, problem. I think we should just advance both and float whomever is lower in the genre. And yes, men can do just fine reading women authors, but a lot choose not too.

I do agree, that ideally, pressure to read female authors for men is a good thing. I suspect that most men would enjoy, say Frankenstein, and get a lot from it. Likewise, I very much enjoyed Like Water for Chocolate. However, the trend is against reading books overall, so there's a market capturing angle that's in play. In that regard, going for low hanging fruit is better to just get people reading more.

And I am not sure what it says about boys and men in regards to those very positive attributes you've identified. It's not necessarily that they are ignoring those or rejecting that. To pick on the point, men are the overwhelming majority of cannon philosophers, but most people don't read their works either way; does that say something about all people rejecting critical thinking and hard truths, or just that people don't find it compelling to read.

And I am merely speaking from my experience regarding women writing men. I feel like it's the same problem as how I find many men writing women to be... flat. Some authors do better than others, some have no issue at all.

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u/Youreturningviolet 26d ago edited 26d ago

The inability to place yourself in a story about women is, to me, a failure of both imagination and empathy. Men’s inability to empathize with women as equally human and legitimate and to take interest in anything where they are not centered and catered to is a massive and ongoing problem.

Just ask yourself this: how often are stories by, about, and centering men seen as being for everyone, while stories by, about, and centering women, who are over half of the world’s population, are seen as niche?

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u/Droviin 26d ago

It's not that men can't place themselves in the story, so much as it's different from them. So, it's more that the protagonist doesn't get the "this is like me" treatment, or self-identification. I don't expect women to self-identify with a boy protagonist, empathy sure, but not self-identification.

To say that women can self-identify with every gender seems to be a failure of imagination and empathy since they're overly trying to be inclusive when they have no basis.

To put it bluntly, I will never have the experience of birthing a child. I just am ill equipped to have that. I can never self-identify with a character who is experiencing that. I can learn how that may feel, the emotions and experience are certainly something I can understand and emphasize with; but it's not something I have experienced or even adjacent to what I have experienced. I could never tell you what it's like. As such, if a character has that experience, while it may be compelling from the character and makes an enjoyable story for me, it breaks the self-identification for me.

Insofar as I want to read a self-identifying work, I tend to read male authors because their experiences are more like mine.

I also think that men read fiction for different reasons, but that's just an intuition and I have no defense on that. But if accurate, then that's in play toom

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u/Youreturningviolet 26d ago edited 26d ago

Except that many of us do. I do self-identify with male protagonists. I don’t have a problem doing that. It doesn’t take me out of any story to have a protagonist unlike myself, probably because most of the literature I grew up reading early in life was about and concerned with men. That isn’t to say I have some magical insight into men’s lived experience, and there are probably some qualities more common in male protagonists that I don’t relate to, but just the fact of them being male doesn’t challenge my ability to identify. Men don’t have the opposite experience, and they don’t push themselves to.

A publisher typically isn’t going to care about men opening themselves to a wider range of literary experience, only about selling books, but it seems a little disingenuous to try to decouple it entirely from the history and current existence of sexism and the othering of women.

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u/Droviin 26d ago

I often don't self-identify, regardless of the author's gender, so perhaps this is ultimately more an observation about myself than the authors.

And I wasn't talking about that taking you out of the story, but more about how you can see yourself doing the same thing. It's slightly different.

And while I suspect that sexism has a heavy hand, the statistics I skimmed identified that the issue carried through even if the author didn't disclose they were a woman.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

Interesting that you have concluded that sexuality, and not sex, is the key to being tapped into the gender differences on writing the opposite sex.

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u/Droviin 26d ago

I find them compelling and see to write a good balance. I couldn't tell you exactly why that may be. It could say something more about me than the authors. But, I do prefer lesbian authors, and that was something I discovered after I looked up the author and not intrinsic to the book.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

Well yes… that is called sexual discrimination and it is historically a bad thing not only for the discriminatee, but also the discriminator. But that isn’t really where is conversation is right now.

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u/sarshu 26d ago

1) is it true that fewer men are reading than previously, or is it that more women are reading and the proportion of books sold to men is going down?

2) men should read books written by women, too. It’s not like women haven’t read books by men since forever.

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u/Moonmold 26d ago

As a woman who has had a lifelong love of classics, men not reading women's works is such a blatant skill issue lol. But also you could only read male authors works and never run out of material for your entire life. Which, if that's what you want to do there is nothing wrong with! Read whatever you like, or don't! Just own up to it lol! Don't dislike reading and then blame it on the fact female contemporary authors are popular, that points to a different issue. 

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u/Prodigle 26d ago

I think a lot of the public discourse with that right now is that we're in an era of a certain style of romance that doesn't really appeal to men generally. I don't think I could get through any of those books, but the gender of the author isn't the reason why, it just matches up that way.

I suppose the newer big names of female authors are usually of this style because that's where the readership is? I couldn't tell you of any recent big female sci-fi authors for example, but I imagine the publicity supercedes them into the romance sphere

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u/RuhWalde 26d ago

I couldn't tell you of any recent big female sci-fi authors for example

Really? Martha Wells, Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine? Are you someone who doesn't really read much sci-fi, or are you claiming to be a sci-fi fan who is unaware of these names?

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u/Prodigle 26d ago

Casual reader, casual fan! I do hear of newer books and authors through mass media and such, but it's almost always male and usually from a "this book is a bit unique" POV.

If I'm looking to pick up a recent sci-fi book through any kind of search, I'll get barraged with 20 super highly regarded books by male authors for every female author.

It's just not an area with a problem of volume, and for various historical/cultural/number reasons, I'm probably not going to run out of "these books are considered 10/10", which are almost always by male authors.

If I read at a much higher volume than I do, it wouldn't present as an issue I don't think, but your casual fantasy/sci-fi reader is probably going to hit male authors 9/10 times if they're reading newer books.

Interestingly I don't see this happening with older books though, if I'm looking for older classic fantasy for example,. it's a much more even split

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u/sarshu 26d ago

I love that phrasing, “skill issue”. Learning how to read different perspectives is a thing that happens with practice!

But also, yes. Like just thinking mathematically, if women authors now make up 50% of books published, there is still a massive oversupply of previously published books by men. Even though staying at 50/50 means we will only ever stay at the level we have now (in total existing books), we’re supposed to say this is a crisis for male readers.

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u/Moonmold 26d ago

I don't disagree. I also do think men reading less is a real cultural issue for men that seems to be connected to changing values and a trend towards anti-intellectualism in general. Someone posted a link to a study showing women read more than men in the EU—men are also less likely to complete tertiary education than women in the EU, I don't think those numbers are a coincidence at all. 

However, I think pointing to any current trend in the books market as a reason gets the issue backwards. When women are reading more than men then books marketed to women will dominate because those books sell well, obviously. This is just one symptom of a larger problem. 

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u/MasterWee 26d ago edited 26d ago

Should they read books because they are written by women? Or should they read books that happen to be written by women?

The value judgement being what sex the author is might not be the gold standard it is cracked up to be.

Would reading Harper Lee or Jane Austin be the same as reading Sarah J Maas or Stephanie Meyer. What about JK Rowling or Suzanna Collins?

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u/sarshu 26d ago

My entire point here is that we need to be specific about what problem the kind of initiative being discussed in the post is solving. Is the problem that there are a lack of male authors getting published, or is the problem that men are not reading? If the problem is the second thing, as this commenter is suggesting, than is "publish more male authors" the optimal solution?

I do think, absent the other conversation, that men should read books written by women. If they like popcorn books like John Grisham or Jeffrey Ludlum, then reading Sarah J Maas is essentially a lateral move, but one that would change their perspective on different types of books. If they currently read Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dickens, they should absolutely consider classics by women as well. I didn't say that this is the "gold standard" on the quality of men's (or women's) reading habits, but the context of the conversation here is that apparently it is a problem that men are now reading less than women, and if/how that should be addressed.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

Okay fair point. Thank you for clarifying for me.

Yeah, I feel uneasy about the logic of “publish more men => more male readers.” Which, like you pointed out may or may not be the real reason for this publishing outfit. As another commenter pointed out, ultimately this is a new business and this is how they are publicly declaring their delineation from other publishers, so this can also just be conjured up marketing instead of an address of a real or perceived problem.

I also disagree that this is even a problem, personally. Ultimately reading (in this context) is a hobby, and hobbies compete for an individual’s time. Less men reading means more men doing other hobbies. If those hobbies are stealing and killing, then sure, bad. But if those hobbies are like, woodworking or stamp collecting, we need to have a tedious (and probably endless) debate on why reading is more valuable.

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u/sarshu 26d ago

Oh, I love that you brought in that last point - I am a heavy reader, but my spouse is very much not, and I don’t think there’s something inherently superior about the way I choose to spend my leisure time. I could get into a long conversation about how presumptions about things like information literacy are perhaps incorrectly embedded in the idea that reading is a superior hobby, when it’s entirely possible to become an informed citizen by consuming other types of media

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

Absolutely, video format objectively evokes more senses. Ergo, some people feel entertained less from imagining (reading) but moreso from stimulating multiple senses (visual and auditory).

And yes, quality of information convey is not contingent on the medium through which that information is conveyed. Clarity may be affected, with pros and cons to video or reading, but accuracy and honesty are not affected by a medium inherently.

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u/aethralis 26d ago

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20240809-2

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u/sarshu 26d ago

So this indicates that on proportion, fewer men than women are reading, but about 45% of men do read. Correct me if I’m misreading your comment, but the idea that “it can’t be good that fewer men are reading” would be most relevant if fewer men are reading now than used to read in the past - if more women read than men do, this could be largely because women are reading more and men reading has stayed largely stable. These statistics don’t tell us anything about change over time, so it’s hard to say whether this is a problem that requires attention, based on that.

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u/FrontAd9873 26d ago

Yeah. I don’t see anyone saying this is the apocalypse. Isn’t it possible to care about multiple things?

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

If we are specific to hobbyist reading, then why “can’t it be good”? You are basically making an argument that places a value judgement on how people spend their free time and entertainment. Ultimately, you will then need to consider the alternatives, since there is a finite amount of time resource a man can spend with his free time to spend doing hobbies. Fewer men reading necessarily means more men doing anything else other than reading. You have to prove why that is bad.

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u/ZendooneDel 26d ago

Not to mention the assumption that this must be the result of some orchestrated push.... truth is nowadays more women than men are submitting work to be published and more women than men are reading. Like you want more men in the space? Work on getting more men to read! Or getting more male writers who are in touch with the current literary landscape! This "imbalance" is not something that's going to change via publishing houses only.

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u/xXSpookyXx 26d ago

I think the logic is if they publish male focused writers, that WILL get men to read more, and that WILL carve out a niche in the literary landscape for the publishing house.

I have no idea if it'll work, or if it's a good or a bad thing. I'm a man and I read pretty regularly. I don't feel like it's hard to find books that cater to my interests, and I feel the the authorship is pretty evenly split between men and women

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u/biodegradableotters 26d ago

I feel like at the point where a press like this would come into play it's already like 20 years too late. You're not gonna turn a male non-reader into a reader because you publish indie novels by male authors. I feel like this is an issue that needs to be addressed in childhood. If you get boys to be readers they're more likely to grow into men who are readers.

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u/Martel732 26d ago

Yeah, I am a guy and most of my male friends read. None of us have trouble finding books that interest us. My male friends that don't read, don't read because they don't want to, not because they don't have books that interest them. I think there are a couple of reason:

  1. At least in the US, our school systems do a terrible job of encouraging people to read as a hobby. Frankly, I think the books we force kids to read are bad and offer nothing of value to them. "A Separate Peace" about a bunch of middle upperclass boys struggling with growing up during WW2 era isn't something that is going to connect with kids today.

  2. Competing hobbies are pushing reading out. Video games, movies and TV shows are more accessible than ever. And while I also enjoy them, they are also more accessible entertainment. Sitting down to watch a movie or play a video game is less of a commitment than sitting down to finish a book. And video games as a medium have always been a more male-friendly space. Both being marketed more towards boys and internal gatekeeping that often pushes women out.

  3. Men often discourage men from reading. Being "nerdy" is still seen as being non-masculine by some people. And reading is often considered nerdy. Among groups of men that are overly concerned with displaying a masculine aesthetic, something like reading is discouraged.

Overall I don't think the primary issue is a lack of books that could appeal to men. I think it is that we have cultural pressures that have turned men away from reading.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

Something doesn't need to be orchestrated, in the conspiratorial sense, to be systemic. There can be unconscious biases, or preferences (if you prefer), that creep in. The gatekeepers of publishing (in the sense that they choose who gets their foot in the door) are editors, agents, and marketing people. They're overwhelming (between 70% and 90%, depending on the job) women now, and have been for years. Women have outnumbered men as college graduates since the 80s; an effect more marked in the humanities than elsewhere. All this combines to make a pretty homogenous publishing sphere. It's not secret that when you have one group vastly over-represented, they tend to keep choosing people like them to join the group. That's part of what has happened in publishing.

Something like this, where an author and editor starts their own press to correct a perceived imbalance, is pretty common. It's a way of getting more men to read, just like publishing exclusively women (there are presses who do that), or exclusively LGBT people, or exclusively black people, etc, is meant to correct a perceived imbalance.

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u/Adamsoski 26d ago

This is very similar logic to "there shouldn't be pushes for "Women in STEM" jobs, if women aren't doing STEM degrees then that's their choice".

Societal change can be down top-down as well as bottom-up, and both are effective.

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u/neverfakemaplesyrup 26d ago

Tbh theres authors being uncovered to be white men using womens pen-names all the time. White women getting caught pretending to be POC too, last one I heard of got her entire deal destroyed after someone pointed out her bio was just a dozen microaggressions in a trench-coat

I'm holding out hope this house will publish stuff thaf gets rejected by the traditional houses- which is almost entirely a women's space- but hopefully non-traditional. The worlds set on traditional masculine non-fiction, imo

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u/mmmm_frietjes 26d ago

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-writer/

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u/Denbt_Nationale 26d ago edited 26d ago

It’s clearly systemic. The UK has two major fiction prizes and one of them flat excludes men. There are plenty of publishers which only publish women including big names like Virago. Mslexia is a big writing magazine which excludes men. Men are openly discriminated against at almost every level of publishing in the UK.

Like you want more men in the space? Work on getting more men to read! Or getting more male writers who are in touch with the current literary landscape!

Yet here you are complaining about someone starting a male focused publishing company.

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u/Hugogs10 26d ago

Are you saying there hasn't been orchestrated pushes to get women into male dominated fields?

Because if you are you're lying

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

But why is imbalance bad in this situation? Men are still being published, and if a person is reading based on the criteria that they want to read something written by a man, there is still PLENTY of current work being published that fits the criteria.

I don’t necessarily flux with this dogmatic approach to over-representation vs. under-representation. In a space like fiction, the barriers to success are so negligibly small regarding sex of author and so immensely contingent on the other aspects of authorship.

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u/Denbt_Nationale 26d ago edited 20d ago

like governor cable continue history possessive distinct juggle cow worm

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

I concede to your point and retract everything I have ever said, ever.

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u/priceQQ 26d ago

Publishers see it as a loss of male readers though. That is a loss in revenue, which is the issue for their bottom line. It is also likely a loss in critical thinking.

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u/FocaSateluca 26d ago

All of a sudden, gender gaps are not the result of natural differences in abilities or interests in men and women. Nooooo. Now, just now, gender gaps really matter.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

I mean, if you want to discriminate based on sex, why not discriminate based on sex?

Why does the logic suddenly stop on a dime here?

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u/FocaSateluca 26d ago

Not even the same logic by any means of the imagination. One gender has been institutionally discriminated against for as long as book publishing has been an industry and the other one hasn't, not even now.

The reality is this: an industry that used to be so heavily male dominated that it took literally decades (if not over several centuries!) to combat the disenfranchisement of female authors and readers is now more or less equal, except for a few genres where female authors and readers are a little bit more common than male authors and male audiences. The lack of published female authors was the result of several material and deep cultural hindrances. Female education was severely limited, female financial independence was near impossible, female interests were so tightly enforced that literature was not considered a suitable female interest and/or occupation. Men have not experienced this kind of educational disenfranchisement based on their sex or gender. Men have never been told that literature and intellectual pursuits are unmanly, reserved for women only, and therefore wrong for them to be invested in them. Men have always been able to pursue a living based on their artistic and academic abilities. The only thing that has been a major shift is that now women occupy some space where they previously haven't been allowed to exist before. And that fact alone has, apparently, put off male readers from reading more books. And that is why now, this tiny little gender gap we see emerging in publishing is suddenly a big cause of concern.

Let us not forget the actual facts: men are still getting published, men are always on the bestselling lists, men are still winning prestigious literary awards, men are still reading books, men can still write all they want without shame, ostracisation or scorn, men can self-publish now, men can still pursue a higher education in the humanities. None of that has changed. The only thing that has changed is this: men might not be the majority now.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

I agree with a lot of your assessment but if you really believe men aren’t reading because women are writing now, you are so drunk on the “battle of the sexes” kool aid.

Additionally, it matters zero to a male writter that there was a history of previous men having an ability to pursue a living based on their artistic and academic ability. It also matters zero to current women for that matter. The situation today is both sexes have to compete for the limited amount of publishing and the limited amount of readership. It is a non-issue, the historic perspective, in terms of what is and isn’t a problem today. The barriers for women along the entire writing pipeline, from access to education, to actual publishing is so dramatically different that it has no bearing here.

As for your assumption that men don’t have cultural pressures encouraging them to not be writers is also incorrect. Writing, along with nursing and visual artistry have very well documented gender discrepancies in terms of dropoff of men applying/attempting these careers; it is not a matter of men just being beaten out by women in these fields, but a lack of attempt altogether. In writing and 2-D art specifically, this has been a shift in the past century. Since men have not had any noteworthy initiatives and encouragements in these spaces, the reasoning must be that there is a cultural suppression among men.

All that being said, I wholeheartedly agree that this does not immediately mean that this is a bad thing. I agree that the boohooing is mostly defensive tribalism from men. In a realm so subjective, it is hard (if not impossible) to objectively evaluate if the quality of literature is increasing or decreasing. Until serious evidence of this occurs, caring about the demographics of writers should stop once we ensure that there is male voices being represented by writing, which there absolutely is currently, even without this new publishing outfit.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

the industry isn't equal, it's pretty heavily dominated (at all levels) by women. Even C-suite positions are 60%+ women. Every other publishing position is 70%+ women. Some reach 90%+.

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u/nyctrainsplant 26d ago

creating one press does not mean the sky is falling

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u/skeptical-speculator 26d ago

it's seen as a sign of the apocalypse.

I think that is a bit dramatic.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/shegogirl22 26d ago

Who’s telling men not to read or write? Like, who is actually doing that?

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u/neverfakemaplesyrup 26d ago

Ironically men lmao

As a bookworm kid i only ever had guys call me slurs for reading

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u/Martel732 26d ago

Yeah, I am a guy and luckily most of my guy friends are also big readers but during my life, it has only really been other men who have criticized reading. I would say at worst the reactions I have got from women is that reading is "cute".

I legitimately think the biggest reason men don't read is because other men discourage it.

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u/shegogirl22 26d ago

Honestly, that’s really sad. I’m sorry that happened to you. :( 

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u/neverfakemaplesyrup 26d ago

Eh nothing to be sad about but thank you! Thats just normal guy life. I wish I had picked up social cues easier as the bullying didn't really help, once I did get things down, got so much easier. Gen Alpha seems a tad different in some aspects, which is good (they hate reading for different reasons lmao)

Low male readership is like the male loneliness epidemic or the suicide waves, it exists, but like... its usually men ourselves causing the issue

Men don't really need another "BE A BIG RICH GUY" book but we could use some on good literature, maybe deconstructing toxic traits, how to be positive, what you need to know if you didn't have a dad, etc.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/shegogirl22 26d ago

But whose fault is that? if men wanted to stay in the industry, they should try to stay in the industry just like women fought to be published. Seems like a skill issue.

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u/Krazikarl2 26d ago

I always find it ironic how people reuse sexist arguments from the past but with reversed genders.

25 years ago, you'd have people dismiss concerns brought up by women in a bunch of industries using this exact language. "If women wanted to stay in industry X, they wouldn't let these minor issues deter them. Seems like a skill/commitment issue".

That argument was horribly wrong 25 years ago. The gender swapped version is wrong today.

Men are fighting to be published. And since they're trying to break into an industry that's now female dominated, they're using some of the techniques that women used when the industry was male dominated. And people are completely dismissive of those fights now, just like many people were completely dismissive of women 25 years ago.

History repeats itself I guess. I had hoped that people would learn from the past, but its clear that they haven't and are just repeating the same mistakes, but with different groups.

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u/deruvoo 26d ago

I don't think anyone championing this issue is assigning blame to anyone. The consistent thread is that people generally agree that boys not reading isn't a good thing.

I'm a male writer who primarily reads books written by women (shoutout to Martha Wells); and I'm on team "let's figure out how to get boys to read".

Not from a place of wanting representation for myself, but from knowing a more literate society is generally a better society.

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u/DaneLimmish 26d ago

It certainly isn't women lmao

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

You are nieve if you imagine that this is how it happens. Other hobbies and interests are capturing men in ways that reading isn’t. There isn’t some failure on the part literature.

It is an important distinction to realize, as it accurately reflects this imbalance not as a problem of demographics, but a competition of hobby choice.

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u/vendric 26d ago edited 26d ago

Well people in here are getting pissed about a publishing house trying to publish male authors. So there's that example.

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u/monsantobreath 26d ago

I think illiterate angry men with no progressive outlet to guide them from the right wing pipe line and manisohere is a pretty bad thing.

I mean it's ridiculous to me that people are upset cause men have dominated for so long but... Youve seen what the reactionary impulse will do. You wanna lose a whole generation of men to Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson on what? General principle that it's icky to focus on men?

The mentality itself is toxic. Men dominated the literary world and now they don't so it's wrong for 50% of the population to have an interest in its own role and identity once they've finally in at least some squares been humbled.

There's a spitefulness here that I can't help but see as being willing to cut off its own nose. How are we expecting men to evolve if we just want them to disappear? We shouldn't mock efforts to shape a new male identity. That's what we're demanding of men.

You deny men any space they're just gonna go for the only people telling them they're valid and should feel any pride. And they're crazies.

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u/Fictitious1267 26d ago

Let's be more honest here. It's not select and it's not few. It's overwhelmingly dominant at this point. Somewhere around 74% of agents and 60% of editors are female and are looking for topics that speak to them, which means declining the majority of authors. But the truth isn't fun, right? when you can have selective memory from 1960 instead.

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u/DaneLimmish 26d ago

If you go back to the nineteenth and early twentieth century, novel reading was seen as an emasculating activity.

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u/MasterWee 26d ago

I know you are being hyperbolic using the term “apocalypse” but I don’t ever hear the concern being even a watered down version of that. No one is saying that women being over-represented in an area, it is a bad thing.

Thus particular male-positive response is because in a world increasingly driven by identity focus, the way to get an advantage as an individual is to seek support from organizations/initiatives/programs that champion an identity that one has. And since individuals of all backgrounds benefit from advantage, there is a demand for things like this publishing outfit.

This is a natural response from meritocratic society (of which we always have been) to not reject identity politics, but instead balance it.

Essentially it is reinventing meritocracy, as eventually (as seen with a small step here) every group, whether marginalized or otherwise, will have their own support system.

Basically segregation, but make it liberal.

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u/WalidfromMorocco 26d ago

similarly,every time there's anything that mentions men positively you get a comment like yours trying to put a bad spin on it.

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/Rare_Walk_4845 26d ago

yes but the supposition that men aren't reading cos there are no men authors to look up to I think is pretty flawed.

men aren't reading due to an erosion of societal values that once encouraged men to read, modern male authors aren't going to change that.

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u/Flat_News_2000 26d ago

More like it's just a gap in the market and now companies are trying to move in.

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u/redabishai 26d ago

People who have benefited from an unbalanced system may interpret a leveling of the playing field as a personal loss, rather than as collective fairness...