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This feels like a theory that feels a just so theory that feels correct (DEI and women in publishing) that actually makes zero economic sense.
Publishing as far as I can tell has zero moat or at best a very small one. What does big publishing control that would make only their books get read?
Maybe something else changed and men just don’t read books anymore? The only thing I can think of that big publishing controls is the ranking lists of good books which school librarians then stock.
But as far as I can tell you can just publish books and sell them on Amazon. You need like a printer to make the books. Even assuming you want to do like 50k book runs and have some art how much does that actually costs like $500k. I do not see a barrier to entry into this business. But no one is entering. Writers can bartend and write their books in their spare time. Lots of people do that.
So then you don’t have a best books lists. I feel like you could create that easily. Spitballing maybe it would be good to have someone famous sponsor a best new children’s book lists. Like Mr. Beast?
The economics of book publishing makes me assume your theory is wrong.
Most books, and the most profitable ones, still go through traditional publishing. That directionally suggests that it does do some function. You could also argue that it selects for books that are high quality and will sell well and be profitable; but if it's purely selecting good books and skimming off the top, authors writing good books could skip publishers entirely and deny them their cut.
Publishing is somewhat like VC: most books will not make money when published. What pays the bills is runaway hits, which get you exponential returns. Once a book becomes "part of the conversation," it ends up self-marketing until something else displaces it. And if everyone else reads it, you have to read that new book from some Irish millennial woman whose entire plot is about a guy and a girl not knowing how to communicate or send a text message, all the fault of capitalism. Everything publishing does is driven to ride that dynamic.
And, because the readers who most flock to fads and a predictable style of book tend to be of a certain demographic, publishers select books targeting that group. Hence, no more James Ellroy.
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Print-on-demand services have reduced the cost of actually publishing a book on paper to nearly zero. Even if you get professionals to design your cover and typeset your interior, you're looking at single-digit thousands of dollars on the high end. The problem is getting people to notice your book, which is the main thing a publisher gets you these days. There is a decent audience of people who read books by traditional publishers, or follow critics that a traditional publisher can get you in front of, etc.
But if you already have an audience, paper books are not an especially good thing to sell them. Most authors would get more money from a $7/month Patreon or Substack subscription then they'd get if you bought all their books. So you usually see authors either treating physical books as a relatively niche merch item (like the paperback version of Unsong), or trying to leverage an online audience to get noticed by the traditional publishing industry's audience (like Fifty Shades of Grey or There Is No Antimemetics Division), and neither of those strategies involves becoming a serious alternative to the traditional publishing industry.
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Negotiating for shelf space with nationwide bookstores is definitely not "zero moat", and neither is the actual industry of getting a massive amount of books printed at economic scale.
What changed was the proportion of men involved in finding and publishing books, and the proportion, thereby, of men's book that were publishing. SEE:
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For a broke kid, buying books off amazon has a much higher barrier to entry than picking a shiny cover out of a lineup at their school library. Especially since if they're on a computer and don't have a pre-existing love of reading, it's very likely that they'll just do something other than reading instead of doggedly sorting through the monsterfucking romantasy slop on the amazon bestseller lists.
(I'm pretty sure I addressed all this in my post?)
...also, don't discount the value and difficult of professional editing and cover-design. Publishers certainly don't. Traditionally published novels have a far greater up-front investment designed to make them marketable and readable, and that pays on at the back and as it encourages people to start and keep reading.
Unironically a good idea, I was thinking of self-publishing my book anyway and it might be worth it to find and sponsor a few niche youtubers to promote it. Thank you!
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There is significant amount of routing around. Forget book runs, think ebooks and audiobooks and webnovels that have plenty to cater to men, but it's very much a "build your own publishing industry" situation.
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