Why Traditional Publishing Is Bad At Men

You’re already offended. You might as well read on and know why you’re offended.

There is a cabal o

There is a cabal of women in publi

There is a cabal of women in publishing who refuse to publish male authors out of sp

There is a cabal of women in publishing who refuse to publish male authors out of spite and revenge. No, there isn’t. No coordinated, deliberate effort to exclude men exists. Traditional publishing’s inability or unwillingness to absorb and support new male authors is real, but the causes are subtle and complicated. I could list dozens; here are the top five.

Disclaimer: The following observations pertain to how people behave in society; no essentialist claims are made. I am a radical leftist and a hardline gender egalitarian. Still, my purpose here is analysis—I will discuss the society we have, not the society we should have.

1. Male Authors Are Harder to Market

The world is more visual today than it was fifty years ago, when most people had no idea what their favorite authors looked like.

Female beauty is something almost all humans seem to desire. In heterosexual men, this is sexual and obvious. In heterosexual women—and gay men, and asexual people—the craving seems to be strictly aesthetic. Still, it is one of the most powerful forces in society. Green paper and yellow metal have nothing on this.

An attractive, young woman can post bikini photos on Instagram and have 100,000 followers in one week. This is not an option for all women, of course, and I suspect most women find the notion of using sex to sell books abhorrent. But a literary agent reading queries does not know which women will refuse to do so. Consequently, when a young woman shows up in the submission queue, a literary agent assumes that, even if she doesn’t have a platform now, she can get one.

2. “Difficult” Authors

Survival in the 21st-century corporate world requires the social skill of serious nonseriousness. You must be punctual and deferential. You must be professional. In this way, you must be serious. However, if the system rewards your diligence with nonserious results—most traditionally published books, due to inadequate marketing and half-hearted publicity, fail—you must nevertheless accept them with serious gratitude. Who granted you the authority to just decide your work is important?

Authors seen as demanding or “difficult” by their publishers or their agents are quickly replaced by more affable ones who will fill publicity gaps with family money, thirst-trap photos on Instagram, or clever gambits to build a platform. These behavioral restrictions apply to women as much as they do to men, but the “difficult author” stereotype remains male, and so it is men who are most closely watched, especially early in their careers, for departures from the professionally mandatory serious nonseriousness.

3. Never Need Anyone

Dating apps, for men, are brutal; female users tend to rate 80% of men as unattractive (OkCupid, 2009). This is not because women are more superficial or unforgiving than men are—that simply isn’t true. In the real world, ordinary men pair up with beautiful women all the time. The issue online is that very few men can beat the stigma of being on a dating app in the first place. The harder one tries, the more pathetic it looks.

Society expects men—and this is enforced by all genders—to solve our own problems, not rely on other people or technology. Social inexperience and dependency can be endearing in women, but are found repulsive in men. The odds are not excellent for anyone, but a talented female author whose lack of financial and social resources forces her to use the query process might still get an unbiased read by a literary agent. If the author is male, this lack of resources cannot be looked past; society holds it to reflect on him as a person.

From a literary agent’s perspective, there is no “male author problem” in literature—men get published all the time. Franchise authors who debuted in 1978 are still getting published. Trust-fund boys whose fathers prepped with top literary agents are getting published. Self-help grifters with 850,000 social media followers are getting published. Why can’t you?

Don’t waste your time with a query letter. This is strong advice for women, but ironclad for men. The negative social inference of having to use one, you can’t write your way out of, not even if you’re Cormac McCarthy.

4. Decision By Committee

Gone are the days when a visionary editor could find a manuscript in the slush pile and, strongly moved by the work, demand an entire publishing house support an unknown author with a six-figure marketing budget and an all-out publicity campaign. Decisions are no longer made by competent individuals, but by committees and spreadsheets. To be properly published, a book must pass the filters of at least a dozen people: the literary agent’s unpaid intern, the assistant agent, the primary agent, the acquisitions editor’s assistant, the acquisitions editor, multiple senior editors, sales and marketing experts, at least one sponsoring executive, and so on. You can write novels that readers will love, and that might even work on occasion, but the best way to thrive in traditional publishing is to write books that people will share with their bosses.

Hardcore misandrists are rare in traditional publishing. I’ve met a couple, but I don’t think they’re common or representative. At most, they’re about 5 percent of the industry. Still, in a system that requires the say-so of 15–20 people, most of whom are focused on risk management rather than literary appraisal, before a serious book deal can be offered, this is a substantial disadvantage. Given the abysmal odds for any particular manuscript, as well as the sheer number of credible replacement authors in every query pile, the risk induced by an author’s being male is one that it is rational not to afford.

5. General Decline

Some take the emergence of figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate to suggest that we are in a “masculine crisis.” I do not agree. Our civilization is in a crisis, full stop. The “female privilege” argument is myopic—it focuses on upper-middle-class, non-racialized, neurotypical women and ignores the 90% of the world (taking a full account of human history, 99%) in which feminism is still desperately needed. Female privilege is an intra-bourgeois issue; within the proletariat, women are subjected to the same degrading survival pressures that men are.

Given that today’s crisis is so clearly a general one, why is it sometimes perceived as a “masculine” issue? I suspect the answer is this. In the American upswing—1940 to 1980—both men and women saw their material lives improve, but men’s well-being improved faster; they were better equipped to take advantage of new opportunities and upward mobility as the national economy improved. In today’s world of imperial collapse, women and men are both suffering, but men are in a free fall. The mythology of the self-made man—in need of favor from no one, living on his skills rather than others’ opinions—requires copious ambient opportunity, so abundant that people forget that it is there. Otherwise it falls apart. We no longer live in such a society. This is bruising for women, but it has left men without purpose. Still, it remains incorrect to claim that men have been singled out by broad-based institutional collapse.

In other words, traditional publishing isn’t deliberately excluding men. It is becoming more hostile to new male authors because it can no longer find ways to make them marketable, and this loss of ability is the first stage of its shutting down.

It Might Not Matter

It has long been said that good writers produce publishable work, while great writers produce unpublishable work—and somehow (may or may not) get it published. Infinite Jest is a 500,000-word encyclopedic novel full of shocking contrivances and orphan acronyms. A Confederacy of Dunces “wasn’t really about anything” until its author shuffled off his mortal coil. Or, to drop into real obscurity… Farisa’s Crossing is a sprawling psychological epic that changes its genre every hundred pages and seems built to piss the middle class off. You see the pattern. We celebrate the victories after forgetting how unlikely they were. And yet: maximal improbability is impossibility. When adversity becomes a featureless vertical wall, it is no longer exciting to see it climbed, because it cannot be.

Traditional publishing is no longer an important vehicle for discovering literary talent. That unprofitable service was quietly shut down. As a business, it will continue to thrive for celebrity memoirs, self-help books, and franchise authors. What it is doing well, it will continue to do well. We should not wish for its demise; this would put people out of work who did nothing to deserve it. It is contentious to observe that men, in most social issues the advantaged gender, are first to experience the collapse of opportunity, but it’s probably also irrelevant. I cannot imagine today’s publishing climate is favorable to a woman either, provided she has anything to say.

If you care about literature’s future: Read women and read men. Read young authors and read old authors. Read at least one book every year in a genre you thought you’d never touch. Most of all, read what is unpublishable. You’re 1615 words in the black. That’s admirable; keep it up.