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I've ranted about the problems with having a female-dominated publishing pipeline before... and I'll fucking do it again! I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I'd already written this all up for a submission to the /r/books subreddit so I figured I'd repost it here. (And the /r/books people made me take out all the links and remove the part where I used AI for a relatively unbiased analysis of manuscript wish list profiles so I wanted to repost this version to a place that would appreciate it.)
Anyway--
Why Boys Don't Read Anymore
I can't go into a supermarket novel aisle without seeing three full shelves of romantasy novels about plucky young women with magical powers drawing the obsessive affections of foreboding but ultimately caring men. So where are the novels about clueless but good-hearted losers reincarnating into rpg worlds with a special skill that makes them irresistable to a harem of ninja babes?
...okay, I see how that complaint can sound ridiculous, but I am honestly and totally serious. It feels like publishing companies are making absolutely no effort to find and print books young men might actually like, and very naturally boys end up drifting away from reading toward hobbies where they might actually be catered toward. Let me substantiate that by talking about my experiences a little...
I've always been a voracious reader. As a kid I was already addicted to The Magic Tree House, Redwall, Eragon, Warrior Cats, Percy Jackson, Maximum Ride, Harry Potter, Uglies, and so on and so forth. Entering middle school I transitioned quite naturally into reading and writing fanfiction. I focused mostly on male-dominated fandoms like Naruto, Pokemon, and My Little Pony, but still had plenty of exposure to female-dominated fandoms like Twilight and Harry Potter. A few decades on, it feels like the tropes pioneered in the female-dominate fandoms have graduated to the bookstores and awards lists: I don't have to look far to see Dracomione-alike dark academia or shifter romances with heat cycles. But where are the rewritten naruto revenge fics? Where is all the My Little Pony-inspired first-contact sci-fi? Why do none of the monsterfucking novels involve sick tournament arcs? LitRPGs have become by FAR the dominant genre on Royaload... but their only printed representative is Dungeon Crawler Carl-- which specifically avoids or subverts many of the tropes common to the genre. In the meantime, the other branches of the Progression Fantasy tree have remained completely neglected. The Xianxia fad rose and fell without publishers even noticing. Rational/ist fiction like The Methods of Rationality, Friendship is Optimal, and UNSONG inspired an entire generation of AI researchers. You are entirely likely to have your values forcibly re-aligned toward friendship and ponies because of a genre you never had the chance to hear about.
This isn't about the gender of the protagonist, either! Worm is incredibly famous online in male-dominated fanfiction spaces. So is A Practical Guide to Evil. Both those novels feature female protagonists, and both of these novels have dedicated fanfiction communities that reveal a substantial latent demand for retreads of the themes, plots, and character archetypes they feature. And while I wish I could blame this whole issue on male flight to video games, manga, and webtoons, that entire argument would instantly fall apart-- There is no shortage of yaoi manga, villainess webtoons, and cozy games to draw the attention of women, and yet all of those same tropes also make their way into traditionally published novels.
And finally, this isn't about fiction versus non-fiction. Nonfiction is stereotypes as being more appealing to men, but that's not actually true. Women tend to read different genres of nonfiction than men-- women's lit and spirituality in place of, say, popular history... but Women still read more nonfiction in total than men.
No, this problem is rooted in the publishers-- and in particular the preferences of the people who become agents and acquisition editors. I've been trying to get published lately*, and in the process had a look through manuscript wishlist, which is where literary agents and editors post their wishlists for what kind of tropes, plots, and characters they want in. Having read so many profiles... the gender ratio of agents, and especially newer agents/agents open to debut authors is incredibly skewed toward women. And, exactly as that skew implies, the proportion of profiles even hypothetically open to male-targeted books is a faction of the proportion of profiles open to women-targeted books. Similarly, even comparing within the same profile, agents and editors spend a greater proportion of their time soliciting women-targeted books as opposed to male-targeted books. (Excluding requests that are gender neutral in nature.) As an experiment, I filtered for profiles that were interested in sci-fi (to make sure they were at least in principle interested in a male-dominated genre) and copy-pasted everything in their profile into gemini with the following prompt:
Looking at alphabetically the first profiles--
65%5%Primarily Female-Skewing 60% – 65%
Gender-Balanced / Equal Appeal 30% – 35%
Primarily Male-Skewing 5% – 10%
Equally Popular Across Genders: 56% (9 out of 16 specific fiction requests)
More Popular with Female Readers:
38% (6 out of 16 specific fiction requests)6% (1 out of 16 specific fiction requests)More Popular with Male Readers:
(Feel free to try and replicate my results with other AI or just read through the profiles yourself-- I'm sure the percentages won't agree exactly, but I think the ratios between female/male appeal will be similar.)
I think these results are pretty clear: the people in charge of finding publishers new books are mostly women, and as a reasonable consequence mostly interested in women-targeted content. I'm not proposing that there's any secret conspiracy to suppress men's voices... but conspiracy isn't necessary to prevent men's voices from, in effect, being suppressed. The modern crop of editors and agents simply largely lacks the lived experience required accurately identify literature boys and men find interesting, and similarly lacks a philosophical commitment to identifying and elevating a new generation of agents and editors who will.
So what can we do?
The publishing world won't fix itself. A lack of male-oriented books means a lack of male readers means a lack of sales means a lack of male-oriented books. Similarly, a lack of male reader means a lack of male writers and editors means a lack of male-oriented books means a lack of male readers. And at least speaking personally, I'm against DEI in general and for men in particular. But where does that leave us?
With slop.
No, seriously. If you feel like you're a guy, and you don't read enough, stop forcing yourself to read highbrow literature or books like you feel you should read, and track down some lowbrow junkfood. I suggest /r/Romance_For_Men , /r/HFY , /r/ProgressionFantasy , or anything on the royalroad front page. If you're a parent of one or more boys, point them toward the pig food dispenser. And I need to clarify that I am not being hyperbolic here. Just like babies have to eat mashed-up food before they can chew through steaks, young men need a regular diet of sophomoric fantasies before they're ready for Asimov or Murakami. Yes, there's a certain risk that the Heinlens and Ayn Rands of the world will feed them masculinist fantasies incompatible with the feminist-egalitarian view of the world you might prefer to instill... but hey, at least that's better than whatever the TikTok algorithm would have done to them.
And then...
Pay for the slop. Talk about the slop. Write your own slop, just for fun. We live in the internet age-- a problem created by gatekeepers can be solved by realizing that mass mediate makes even the tallest walls a short fence that you can simply hop over, and encourage others to do the same. Online-first publishers like Aethon are already in the process of bringing out the proverbial literary wrecking ball-- all they need is some momentum.
*necessary coda-- I haven't managed to get published because my book simply isn't good enough. I know what my problems are and they're largely orthogonal to this rant.
edit: my post just got removed from /r/books again! And this time I removed all references/use of llms and links, which is what the moderator told me got me removed last time. Now I am suspecting a conspiracy.
I enjoyed Battletech slop for the longest time. Then at some point the embezzlers at Catalyst Game Labs decided the only way to keep not paying authors was to lean into turning Battletech in a gay brand, and the rest has been history. Now the IP I've been a 30 year fan of is fake and gay at it's root source material.
Piranha Games doing a bang up job on the video games not withstanding.
The most depressing part about being a fan of anything male coded, is that for reasons that are beyond my ken, activist feel the constant need to invade the space and smash your toys right in front of you. The He-Man Woman-Haters Club or NO MA'AM aren't going to somehow seize the reigns of the Twilight IP and start "subverting" it by having Bella eventually chucked onto the street in the reboot for being a washed up ratchet whore, and dying of an overdose in the gutter. Only to be replaced by some boring new submissive eyecandy that raises the male main characters children while they go off on adventures to space.
And yet that is precisely what has happened with virtually every male coded IP, ever? I'm drawing a blank, truthfully.
I would love to support slop I can trust. I would love to have an IP I could point my little boy to, that I know won't break his heart around book 4 (or 40 RIP Battletech), when the crazies took it over and humiliated and murdered his favorite character.
Alas. They'll even pillage the estates of dead authors, just to keep the humiliation ritual going. Poor, poor Tolkien.
Battletech was my first introduction to table-top wargaming. I remember playing with it as a kid, with the battlemech setup sheets that, uh, were just a little bit litigatious.
Years later, when I finally get a bee in my bonnet and start looking into painting miniatures, I decide to cut my teeth by purchasing a box of Mechwarriors and start looking into see what's been happening with the IP lately...
...only to find that it's decided to go a similar route as Warhammer 40K and go woke and gay.
For fuck's sake. By this point having anything you love become widespread and popular is a curse rather than a blessing.
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I mean if I had a nickel for every time I found a genderswapped rewrite of the twilight series designed to cater more towards men I would have three nickles, of which one was given to me by Stephanie Meyer herself. (The other two nickels come from a smut fic on QQ and a male-oriented-romance fic on SB, both abandoned but otherwise very solid.)
...I always knew Stephanie Meyer was a basedlord. I just wish she put more energy towards though-provoking sci-fi than lowbrow romance-- The Host was actually kind of goated.
Yeah, The Host was massively underrated.
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I am beginning to think that retrospectively de-canonizing the Star Wars EU was actually one of the best things Disney ever did for that universe. Because it's now non-canon, they don't have the incentive to go back and inject this sort of nonsense into it all.
If anything, I almost wish they had de-canonized it earlier. I already pretend everything published after the Unifying Force in 2003 was just a bad dream (Shadows of Mindor excluded. Stover can never not be good). Jacen eventually takes over as Grandmaster and leads the Jedi into a new golden age, I don't care what Troy Denning has to say.
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