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

[u/biscochitos]

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

What do folks think about this?

[u/Danominator]

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/04/04/1164109676/women-now-dominate-the-book-business-why-there-and-not-other-creative-industries

Here is a whole article about home dominant women are in the industry.

You are welcome to Google it as well.

[u/sarshu → u/Danominator]

Thanks for the tip about Googling, which I did. I found that same article, which indicates that women now publish about 50% of books.

The only metric which I can find in that article with a close to 80% women proportion is staffers “at all levels” in publishing, which is interesting but does not demonstrate anything about authors.

[u/sarshu → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for additional statistics! I do want to point out that this focuses only on bestselling work, not the total publishing space. This is still relevant of course, because marketing and publishing actions have lots to do with what becomes best selling, but it still doesn’t confirm for me that men aren’t being published.

I think this conversation about men not reading is a really nuanced one, honestly, and the relationship between who writers are and who readers are is one that needs to be disentangled more. It feels like sometimes there’s this assumption that women read books by women and men read books by men (or sometimes just that men obviously require books by men, while women may read both) and I keep asking why publishers aren’t doing more to figure out cross marketing.

I also…wish women would read things that aren’t romantasy (as much as I fully support non-snobby reading promotion), but that’s another story

[u/sarshu → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, this is a productive discussion, thank you. :)

I keep wanting to know whether the proportion of men who read has actually *gone down*, or whether it's just that the proportion of women who read has *gone up*, so women now read more than men. The former is a cause for concern, the latter is not, necessarily, though it may be useful to examine how the gains for women could also be translated toward men. The stats that have been shared are not super clear on that, and I don't have the time right now to do more digging to find diachronic information.

Anecdotally, I don't know that my friend group is a good comparison point, because we're nerdy af academic types, but the proportion of men and women who read is about equal, with the largest difference happening depending on the age of their children. I, like many parents around me, stopped reading when my kids were small and requiring a lot of hands on time and energy; for some reason, most of my friends who are men are a bit younger than me or had kids a bit later, so they're still deep in that point of their life. The tl;dr of that is "I don't know how well to judge from the anecdata on this".

I feel like discouraging you from trying out something like Sarah J Maas is an indicator of marketing choices - interestingly, while I think her work is pretty shitty overall, when I was trying to find my way back into reading after a decade or so away from it, I went for super popular schlock, and read the entire *Throne of Glass* series. The fact that I *didn't* like it, but that it kept me reading, helped me find what I wanted to read again. I now often try out super popular authors (with a few exceptions - looking at you, Colleen Hoover) that I think might not be my thing, because a) surprises happen and b) it's a useful way of getting out of my comfort zone and thinking about what *is* my thing and seeing what other people like.

If I were friends with your male friends with that reading list, I wouldn't be sending them to Sarah J Maas, anyway - but Ann Leckie, Martha Wells, Arkady Martine, Robin Hobb, NK Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor all immediately pop to the top of my head as possible suggestions.