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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 agree with Opt-out here. It's easy to point fingers at woke or DEI, but I think the cause is really just prosaic capitalism. Acknowledging I'm in a filter bubble, plenty of men in my orbit read; they just don't do it in a way that makes money for traditional industry.
They read Substacks, or they read Royalroad/web serials/fanfiction, or they "read" manga/indie narrative video games/visual novels, or they pirate all of their literature and the classics from Libgen and Anna's Archive. It's much easier than it's ever been to self-publish or release your work online without going via Big Publisher.
The difference is simply that female writers are disproportionately interested in the prestige of going via traditional Big Publisher, and female readers actually spend money with publishers and bookstores, driven by BookTok or whatever, and hence those industries move increasingly towards catering to the female userbases that actually make them money.
Trying to make men read in the same way that women like to read seems to me much like trying to make sports gambling appealing to women; perhaps in the interest of the industries trying to increase their profits, but honestly a waste of time for society at a whole to try and fit a square peg into a round hole.
I'm not actually blaming Woke, for the record-- that's why I put that whole spiel about this NOT being a conspiracy. But I am convinced this is very much a supply issue, not a demand issue-- I stopped pirating music when spotify got easy and good enough to be a better deal... (well in point of fact I stopped when grooveshark got DMCA'd, but didn't feel the need to find an alternative given that spotify was just *there)-- and I'll stop pirating books when...
Okay, maybe you have a tiny point. TBH the cause is probably at least somewhat bidirectional. But while I acknowledge that I'm getting into bravery debate here... I feel like the impact of the pressures on men are dramatically underestimated compared to the impact of the pressures by men, when it comes to the publishing industry. (And maybe also in general but that is a way larger discussion that I have the time to have right now) As a baseline estimate, since we see much more comparable reading rates for younger vs older children...
ref-- https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/feb/22/teenage-boys-reading-books-research?CMP=share_btn_url
1.4x vs 1.8x
I would guess that at least half of those boys are "lost" because of an insufficient supply of books. If the proportion at age 14-16 was 1.6x, we would see ~11% of boys reading. That doesn't sound like much, but that's 10% more male readers! And we should expect that this effect is actually cumulative given decreased rates of reading with age. Given the relationship between reading ability, educational attainment, and professional success, this difference in reading ability likely has massive downstream effects on the total number of men making it through to elite positions. Correcting that deficit is the opposite of a "waste of time." We could have-- at minimum, at an estimate-- a minimum of 10% more male doctors, lawyers, and engineers just by making sure more male-oriented books are published and promoted. Even ignoring the negative effects of the disparity between male and female achievement, the absolute effects of so many missing elites is likely to be significant and negative.
(Unless you believe AI will solve everything, but that's a fully general argument for not caring about anything.)
IMO there's plenty of supply if you know where to look, frankly way more supply that any human could engage with in a thousand lifetimes, between the classics, modern web fiction, and non-traditional mediums (narrative indie games, graphic novels, visual novels etc). If the claim is more narrow that there's a supply issue within modern traditional publishing then I agree, but it seems like neither male producers nor male consumers as a whole are particularly interested in filling the gap, so it seems like a bit of a dead end. I'm not convinced that specifically lack of modern traditionally published books is why boys are reading less, when there's so much else available to read for those interested.
Those are some interesting stats, but I'm not convinced that less boys reading is causal to reduced male educational / professional success (although it does seem likely that there are other factors of modernity causal of both less reading and less success).
The era where every upper-middle class man received a traditional liberal arts education and was conversant in the classics is decades past; nowadays your doctor's favorite movie is the Avengers and your lawyer plays Fifa in the one hour free he has every week to unwind. The pressures behind competitive careers nowadays don't really align with developing literary taste; I've had much more interesting intellectual conversations with underemployed third-world internet anons compared to the vast majority of the magnet school strivers that I went to school with. I'm not convinced that more reading would lead to more men in elite positions at all.
The operative words in your post are
That is a very high barrier to entry, and one I think you are inches away from recognizing given your later comments about marvel doctors and fifa lawyers. Men have to take an active and concerted effort to find fiction written for them, much less high quality fiction. Goodreads has an abysmally shit book recommendation system and its top-lists are all voted on overwhelmingly by women. Fanfiction sites are full up on sludge written by middle schoolers and without deep knowledge of which fandoms to read and what tags to look for you will find yourself running into works that may initially seem compelling but invariably devolve into fluff/romance/angst slop. Royal road is... royal road.
In the meantime, women have booktok influencers and glistening werewolf abs on every supermarket shelf. Overabundance leads to interest leads to consumption leads to overabundance, in a virtuous cycle.
Yeah that's fair enough, I agree that booktok / romantasy slop is now aggressively marketed to women in a way that reading is no longer marketed to men.
Still, I'm not really convinced this is a problem per se; on an individual level there's plenty of avenues for men to read and write literature if they so desire, and on a societal level would we really be better off if the romantasy equivalent (Dungeon Crawler Carl?) was getting marketed aggressively to men?
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