Traditional Publishing's Problem Isn't Gender—It's That No One Leads
All this other shit? Just distractions.
Two discussions dominate traditional publishing in 2025. One is AI. I’ve covered it extensively, so I’ll skip it here. The other is an exhausting gender war, a depressing distraction from publishing’s real issues. Young white male authors seem to be discovering for the first time that publishing has deteriorated to a state their grandfathers would never have accepted. This is true, but the long slide has been hurting everyone, not just them, and has absolutely nothing to do with DEI. Women didn’t steal the golden age of publishing and use it to enrich themselves. It’s just gone.
The worst thing about it is that some of these young men are onto something few are willing to talk about, though it has nothing to do with gender. Publishing’s culture of conformity, mediocrity, and serious nonseriousness is real, but is this a failure of “masculine energy,” as has been asserted? No. There are plenty of men in charge who aren’t fixing anything. And there are plenty of women—Toni Morrison, who fought for authors in a way that does not exist anymore, comes to mind—who have the necessary inclinations. What’s missing in publishing is leadership.
The entire industry, when it comes to book publishing’s present-day mediocrity, shifts blame upward. Agents refuse to sign serious writers because they don’t know if they can sell their books, so they pick celebrity memoirs, quickly flipped, instead. Acquisitions editors cite marketing executives for their inability to offer meaningful deals to the best authors; it is not their fault, they remind us, that we no longer live in the 1970s when books were published simply because they were good. Decisions are no longer made by individuals who have read deeply, but by committees of people who have skimmed, if that. At the top, publishers say fast-fashion junk is what readers want, so it’s what they give the most support. Traditional publishing has completely forgotten that, if they market serious work, people will in fact want it.
Instead, we have a world in which marketing departments influence acquisition decisions, as opposed to the reverse. We have a world in which a book by a new author exceeding 120,000 words will probably never be seen, because no agent has faith in the ability to get anyone else to read anything long or ambitious, and because every publishing house seems to have that one executive who makes up for his twenty-years-and-going lack of original ideas by bringing up printing costs in every meeting, because it gives him something to say. We see copies of copies of copies of what sold in the past. We have TikTok’s algorithm deciding what the future reads. As a result of all this, the industry’s slow decline continues.
More broadly, publishing is succumbing to a threat that is inescapable whether one self-publishes or uses a traditional publisher: enshittification. Online, good writing used to be found. That’s no longer the case. Noise dominates. The omnilateral desperation to “build platform”—that is, consume attention for its own sake, which every author is forced to do now, because curatorial institutions do not do their jobs—has turned the informational commons into a hostile neon junkyard, a million people screaming for attention. Platform turns everyone into the worst versions of themselves. Build a platform, says publishing. Engagement (rage and addiction, yours and others’) will set you free.
This, for the record, explains the fucking gender wars. The reason there are so many young white men claiming that publishing is full of “woke” misandrists at every level is that one of them is going to get a seven-figure book deal and become “the voice of young men in publishing.” The other contenders will amplify misinformation and ruin their lives. It’s a desperate platform play, but so is fucking everything.
We live in a world where query letters exist so agents have an excuse to ignore excellent work (it wasn’t pitched right) and in which people say and do stupid shit because publishing no longer believes in text—only reach. We live in a world where no one with sway ever does any homework because it’s so much easier to copy someone else’s notes, never mind that those notes were also copied.
When people are led, they respect it. Publishing has forgotten this.