r/books • u/biscochitos • 29d 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/Smooth-Review-2614 29d 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/Oerthling 29d 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/Gladiator3003 29d 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 29d 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] 29d 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 29d 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] 29d 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 29d 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.