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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3779 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I have often read on The Motte (and believe it to be true, myself) that fiction publishing and reading have become heavily female-coded and -dominated in the Anglosphere.

Are there places where this is not true?

Two things are happening at once here:

-Traditional publishing is pushing men out, likely for culture war reasons. Unsurprisingly this has resulted in a huge bloom of non-traditional publishing for masculine focused genres (ex: Patreon and Progression Fantasy). The readers are still there, just the big publishers are mostly not selling to them and are confused why they aren't buying.

-Reading in general is down, less so in women's genres. Women still buy romance books for instance.

So if you want to see more reading by men you can look at the male genres (again Progression Fantasy, LitRPG are BIG right now).

The rest of the west has less of the general anti-intellectualism and therefore more reading so you can look there.

Something I've noticed in my social group is that the majority of men who still read are reading non-fiction for life improvement or knowledge development. I bet this group is mostly unchanged from the past it's just the fiction guys have been chased out or fled.

it's just the fiction guys have been chased out or fled

My social circle is staying out of the culture war and the guys are heavy fiction readers. I'd say they pretty much all are unaware about the more recent developments in the publishing world. It just doesn't affect them. Because if you like to read about sword fights or space ships, there are already more high quality books to read than you can fit into a lifetime.

Same thing if you are more literary-minded and like to read fiction about Russian nobility, or German interwar drama. In that genre, you could also argue that nothing worth reading has been written for the last 30 years anyway.

If you are talking about the backlog than sure, but the vast majority of the books I've read in the last 5 years have been self published/online and while a few legacy authors are still around there isn't an abundance of new appealing stuff.

I'll admit that having a friends group that is interested probably helps, none of my IRL contacts really read fiction so I have to go off of reddit etc fro recs and /r/fantasy for example is pretty fucking woke.

I don't think I've seen a book recommended on /r/printsf that was written in the last 5-10 that wasn't by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Yeah, that was my point. Normal male fiction readers really don't care that much, because the backlog of good fiction is absolutely massive anyway.

Really sucks for young authors today, of course.

...and for people who read way too much and who have worked through most of the backlog.

Nope not me.

Me neither, unironically. Got a little bored of swords and space ships and started with Russian literary fiction. Just Dostoevsky, Tolstoi and Chekhov seem to be a life-long project...

Yeah I read those guys in High School and College because it seemed like The Thing To Do and so on but these days I just switched to lowbrow book-crack since I have to read so much non-fiction for work.

Ideally later in my career I'll switch back.

Last week, a lady at work asked me to read The Brothers Karamazov with her. Perhaps we could get some Motte book club action going.

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