I donāt know how to feel about that. In my darkest hours I feel that sort of doom though.
Keep writing, gents! I agree that itās swung too far to the distaff side. I love getting all points of view, female though I be. Yāall start a masculinist movement in publishing, Iām a fellow traveler.
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There is a biased selection of authors based on their sex or whether they belong to a social minority. In addition to that, what worries me most is the current censorship to avoid debates or controversies. I believe that everyone is and should be free to express their ideals in their works. Even if this goes for or against current conventions or trends.
Although my novels belong to the genre of fantasy literature, I touch on quite raw political and moral issues. I am currently revising a novel that I am looking to publish traditionally. In fact, I fear facing serious difficulties for extra-literary reasons.
Major publishers are interested in what sells. Current trends are trendy because they sell.
Reading has been coded as a āfeminineā activity for decades, both in the US and globally. Which means that women read more, which means they have more influence over what gets published.
If you guys want more books by and for men, form book clubs with all your male friends. If your sons would rather read than play sports, let them. If the audience is there, the publishers will come.
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If I recall correctly those that screen what is and what is not to be published are also women. They have their own biases, we know which ones they are. I, personally would never let one of them edit my work because they would want to make it agreeable to certain audiences. Something that I have no interest in.
My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but it was done to last forever.- Thucydides
I will self-publish instead and by pass the feminist gate-keepers.
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From Why boys donāt like to read
Why donāt boys like to read?
Choice of Reading Materials
Differences in genre preferences are frequently cited as an explanation for differences in reading performance between boys and girls.16 While girls generally like to read narrative fiction, boys typically enjoy a wider variety of genres covering a broader range of topics. A number of studies have shown that girls prefer texts such as horoscopes, best-sellers or popular fiction, romance
stories or novels, modern or classic fiction, plays, poetry, song lyrics, and books about contemporary issues. Boys are more interested in cartoons, comics, news,
sports pages, science fiction and fantasy stories, hobby, craft, and special- interest books.17,18A recent study in the United States found that the genres preferred by boys were available in only one-third of classrooms, in part because teachers and librarians
disapprove of them as appropriate forms of school-based reading.19 Others have claimed that these genres do not usually find their way into classrooms or library shelves because teachers are predominantly female and teachersā own reading preferences are reflected in the books they select for their students.20
Hmmm, now we know why the Chinese are replacing female teachers with male teachers in primary and secondary schools. If you ignore the bias in this article youāll see what I mean. China promotes education drive to make boys more āmanlyā
This one is more academic āSaving Our Boys!ā: Do Chinese Boys Have a Masculinity Crisis?
āThe society that emasculates its men will be taken over by one that doesnāt.ā
Public libraries exist, too, and both the one I used growing up and the one where I live now have very large holdings of science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels, sports, and on and on and on. Iām sure the one near you would be delighted to host a men-oriented book group and to consider any suggested purchases.
Latest issue of the New Yorker: Eight male bylines, including three significant pieces of reporting, a short story, and the cover illustration. Five female bylines, including two poets and two critics.
Latest issue of the Atlantic: Five out of seven features are written by men, including the cover feature. Two of the four critics are also male, as is the featured poet.
Five of the current NY Times top 15 hardcover bestsellers are by men, as are 11 of the 15 non-fiction bestsellers. (The NY Times list is uncharacteristically female at the moment: James Pattersonās current opus is non-fiction, George R. R. Martin still hasnāt finished The Winds of Winter, and Stephen Kingās last release was in 2021. All three of them are reliable bestsellers.)
So, again, the idea that āmen canāt get publishedā is ridiculous. If the audience is there, the publishers will come.
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Editors who want to stay employed are more interested in sales than the gender of the author.
āMore agreeableā = āsells more copies.ā Being uninterested in sales is certainly your right as an author, but I wouldnāt expect most editors to share your views.
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Has anyone checked to see if any of this is actually true. There might not be more female authors, it might just be that between them, Agatha Christie, Barbara Cartland and Enid Blyton wrote a flip load of books!
A quick check of my goodreads list (which I find is far more representative of what I like than any bestseller list), I can see books by men, books by women, books by men and women, books by women and women, and books by men pretending to be other men who are dead.
Anyway, whoever it is that is doing all the writing and doing all the hard work of getting that writing in my hands ā thank you!
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Itās also useful to remember that pseudonyms exist. Literary history also includes women pretending to be men, men pretending to be women, and mixed groups writing under a single collective name.
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And now machines pretending to be humans.
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Hey, Kewms. It would be nice if this were the case. Sadly however itās really not. I have a background in trade publishing, and still have it on my blood. I was a core part of the team that brought to UK bookshops Cormac McCarthy, Don De Lillo and Bridget Jonesās Diary, as well as people like Colin Dexter, Ken Follet, and many others ā many of whom youād recognise, many more of whom are now forgotten. My wife ran the marketing department of the same company (Pan Macmillan). I still have friends there, although most of those old colleagues who havenāt since retired have moved on to the behemoth that is Penguin Random House.
For what itās worth, although Iāve since moved on to other fields of endeavour, Iām also a published novelist: two novels with Jonathan Cape/Vintage, six novels and one memoir with Simon and Schuster.
Publishing is driven both by fashion, and by luck ā or, more often, honestly, the lack thereof. Most books donāt make money. (Iām not trying to be superior, here: I never earned out an advance.) If sales were the primary metric, most books simply would never be published, including many or most of my own favourites. Most trade publishers who somehow manage to make a profit tend do so off the back of a select few bestsellers; often not the bestsellers the sales department had predicted. Such successes underwrite the rest of the list. Books are published because an acquiring editor loves them and believes in the author; because they might accrue prestige via winning prizes; because the writerās agent represents a major author whose three-book contract is about to run out; for any number of reasons, not all of which are strictly sales driven.
Iām not saying this is bad ā itās messy, chaotic and pretty wonderful, mostly. But even so, at any given time, a given kind of book might, for reasons unrelated to intrinsic quality, struggle to find a publisher. Certain kinds of book are simply in fashion, certain others are not. Great books that were published back in my day by then-scrappy independents such 4th Estate, Serpentās Tail, and Canongate might not be published. My own, in retrospect slightly deranged and deliberately extreme first novel, would certainly not now find a sympathetic publisher. Neither might wildly better selling books of that decade such as, he inevitably cites, Trainspotting. Maybe it would in 2025, or in 2030. But not in 2024.
Publishing may or may not have been ācoded as feminineā for decades. Honestly, Iām not entirely sure what it means so I might be wrong ā but from my perspective it seems that saying āwomen read moreā has some characteristics of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and represents therefore tacit acceptance of a status quo that, if one loves the idea of as many different kinds of people reading as many different kinds of book as possible, should not persist.
Men and boys simply arenāt going to read more books until they have a greater range of books they might be interested in reading. These books may not be books weād approve of. (In my school, we passed round copies of Richard Allenās Skinhead and Victor Headleyās Yardie like East German Samizdat. And letās not even mention Sven Hassel; but they were books, and we read them.) Recently, I found myself working with a highly literate young man who was re-reading Kerouac and Bukowski. He loved them, so Iām glad he was happy. But those are the same books that were being read by men his age when I was a Waterstoneās bookseller, back in the early 1990s. I find it sad that such a young man should have to go back three generations to find an author who speaks to him. And I find it sad to think of the books I would never had read, if I were his age today.
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Okay, here is where you lose me.
Iāll grant you that sales at a portfolio level is the metric, not at an individual book level (or even at an individual author), and although Iām not sure I buy the romantic idea that any publisher is risking their reputation on any book without an idea that a book can find an audienceā¦ I can put that down to differing perspectives and interpretations.
But the idea that there arenāt a great range of books for males is unsupported for several reasons:
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last I checked in a bookshop (which is very often) there are lots and lots of books for everyone and by everyone. Iām certainly not noticing a āfemale biasā at all in authorship - if anything, in the sections I frequent the most, Iād say theyāre pretty strongly male.
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the idea that an authorās gender defines the readership is highly flawed. Sure some authors write to a specific audience, and some genres have higher popularity in certain demographics (Iām not a big consumer of LGBTQ romance, for example), but as the late great Mitch Hedburg once said: āevery book is a childrenās book if you teach your child to readā. I like Agatha Christie. I like Lisa Scottoline. Iām very excited to start Lucy Barkerās āThe Other Side of Mrs Woodā. I also know of no childrenās books written by children.
For the avoidance of doubt to anyone who hasnāt met me - my forum name doesnāt say a lot - Iām an adult human male. I like sports. I like beer. I like talking about sports and beer. I read plenty, have no issues finding piles and piles of books to add to the tsundoku every time I enter a bookshop, and I havenāt noticed a gender bias towards women either in authorship or readership when in bookshops.
I have noticed that something like 70-80% of the people actively posting about reading and writing that I come across on Instagram are women ā but thatās more to do with the medium than the subject.
I for one am not worried(1) and reject the premise of the original statement in this thread.
(1) - about this. Other things terrify me.
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Provided that you (personally) were not responsible for bring the excrebale 50 Shades to market you are forgiven.
LIke all producers/manufacturers I am sure that the bemoth and friends do (some) market research into what people both women and men want to read. When the male preference for reading matter is āPage 3ā (*) there is little hope that literature or even gutter fiction will appeal to them.
(*) For those not conversant with the UK news media tabloids used to publish photos of topless young women on page 3 (or page 5). Men could be seen turning straight there ā after they had read the sports stuff on the back pages.
This is just nonsense on several levels and I presume deliberately provocative.
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Hey PF
This is entirely without animus or snark, not least because Iāve been reading and enjoying your contributions to this forum since, it seems to me, I was using a white polycarbonate iBook. It might be worth pointing out that the last time I contributed to anything even remotely related to social media was on this forum, at least decade ago. I was chatting with the much-missed Vic-K, about a character of mine he particularly responded to.
(Wait! I just checked. It was July 2013)
I just signed up with a new account because I feel strongly about the state of the publishing industry, and this is a forum for writers.
Throat thus cleared : Of COURSE any book can be read by anyone, and of course the gender of an author does not, at least in theory, define their readership. Iād imagine the readerships of, say, Kazuo Ishiguro and Hilary Mantel is split somewhere neatly down the middle-ish. Since I believe Mantel to have been the greatest English novelist, certainly of the last fifty years, I certainly hope so. The same is probably true for, say, post Atonement Ian McEwan. Iād be interested to know if it were the same for, say, Sally Rooney. (Good money says its probably is, at least since they made the TV show.)
But your post contains a degree of sample bias: you are a man who reads a lot, you visit many bookshops and you donāt therefore see a problem.
But thatās because the problem lies outside the bookshops. The problem lies with men who donāt read a lot, who do not therefore step into that bookshop in the first place.
The statistics tells us that fewer men and boys are reading fiction, both in absolute and relative numbers. I donāt think it is good enough simply to say, in effect: the books are there. Anyone can read anything. Men just like to read less than women.
We would not accept that argument if we reversed the polarity on that particular neutron flow, and quite rightly so.
To match you anecdote for anecdote: I too am a middle aged man. I read, if anything, to an excessive degree. But I find the new titles section of any bookshop to be largely without interest, and am mostly to be found hunting around the backlist like a pig for truffles. Most new titles I read seem to be in translation. This is not a function of pretentiousness so much as engagement with subject matter and tone.
But I am old, or getting there, and I donāt matter. I donāt need new books for me. What matters is my sons, and their generation of young men. And the generations of younger men coming up behind them. These young men and boys need books that speak to them and their lives, or ignite their imagination, or show them the possibility offered by wider worlds and new ideas, whatever the hell else books do for usā¦ which is everything.
Men and boys donāt read enough books. I am puritan enough to say, I believe this to be a moral problem that needs to be addressed. I believe this because I believe books to be a force for good, both for the individual reader and the wider culture. Like Grass said: āEven bad books are books, and therefore sacred.ā
If not enough men and boys are reading books, I donāt accept that we should conclude the problem is theirs. Thereās an element of ālet them eat cakeā to that.
For what itās worth, I have disliked or been indifferent to the books of almost every male novelist who defined their decade. I loved Heller to the extent I named one of my sons for him, but I strongly disliked Kerouac. I preferred Moorcock to Tolkien. I think American Psycho is a fine novella grown fat on its own self regard. I thought Martin Amis wrote one very fine novel, and even that went on much too long. I did love Iain Banks very much, with and without the M. I had no interest in Fight Club or, sigh, Trainspotting. But a lot of men did. If there is no new Amis, no new Kerouac, no new Easton bloody Ellis, no new whomever ā and Knausgaard aside, itās hard to think of a male novelist who has caused much of a cultural stir in the last decade ā I donāt accept itās because those writers arenāt out there any more, or because a readership for that kind of book no longer exists. I think those writers, and by extension those readers, are simply not what publishers are currently interested in, and I believe that to be wrong.
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While I disagree with the premise underlying the original post (that commercial fiction publishing is an unfriendly environment for male authors), your posts are very thoughtful contributions. Fully agree re Mantel.
To pick you up on one point, these male authors have, it seems to me, moved the cultural dial a little over the past decade or so. Not to the same extent as Sally Rooney, but still. And perhaps they donāt qualify as theyāre not new to the last decade!
Colson Whitehead
Jonathan Franzen
Colm Toibin
John Banville
Donal Ryan
Martin MacInnes
Pig fender is right, in that thereās certainly not a shortage of books that would appeal to men of any age and to boys. If theyāre not reading, it seems to me that thatās a cultural issue rather than a choice issue, and one that needs to be tackled with home encouragement and education.
BTW, when I say cultural I donāt mean what was implied in the incredibly reductive post above, which I donāt want to quote.