Only Men: Is The UK’s Newest Publisher Necessary?

A new publisher in the UK is causing a bit of a stir in the book world. Conduit Books will publish exclusively male authors with the intention of reaching the increasingly elusive male reader.

Conduit Books is part of the general cultural hand wringing that boys and men are in crisis. And well…when it comes to reading, that is certainly true. Women read at several percentage point higher rates than men. Worse is that men’s fiction reading in particular has stumbled from an un-respectable 33% of men in 2012 to a dismal 27.7% in 2022 (women now read at under a 50% level, which is impressive only by comparison). As a result there seems to be an op-ed every few months that points out why reading fiction is beneficial and how it makes you a more empathetic, well-rounded person (no arguments there).

These op-eds and the conceit behind Conduit Books as a men-only publisher seem to suggest that men reading books is a supply-side problem. That there are not enough men writing books and not enough publishers publishing books specifically for men. As someone who is down in the trenches of publishing, considering projects and watching many publications, this does not seem to be the reality. And stats back this gut feeling, informed by experience, up.

Authorship by male authors is not down. As recently as 2021, there was near parity in authorship, with a slight edge to women (50.5% vs. 49.5%). As recently as 2016, men still had more New York Times bestsellers than women did. If you just take a quick snapshot of this week’s bestsellers, the edge men have on the bestseller list remains true despite the explosion of heavily-female weighted genres like Romantasy. 12 of 15 nonfiction books and 7 of 15 fiction books are authored by men, or 56%, and that’s not counting co-authored books as two authors, which would add a few more male authors to the mix. What is surprising about this gender parity on the bestseller list is that it does not match reading demographics (here’s a more detailed, extremely interesting breakdown of bestsellers by genre + gender), where women are several percentage points beyond men. This backs up the common understanding that women will read books by men but men generally won’t read books written by women.

The gender imbalance in the publishing workforce (71% of book publishing professionals are women) is often cited as a reason that book publishing puts less effort into marketing and publishing for men. This also feels untrue. The reason relatively less energy goes into capturing male readers as an audience, especially for fiction, is that they are a highly unreliable reading demographic—demand, not supply. Given the number of successful male authors, it does not appear that men reading is a top-down problem.

Publishers target women as a demographic more often because there are double the number of avid women readers (people who read more than 31 books a year) than male readers. Meaning they are probably far beyond their double-digit reading level ahead of their male counterparts when it comes to buying power. Book publishing is a business, and we can simply not spend time chasing men as readers when they tend to make up a larger portion of one-off book buying audiences. Especially in fiction where the demand for fiction among men is declining and editors are looking for repeatable success, it is often madness to make a sales plan fully dependent on a group that can’t be relied on to show up or, even in the best case scenario, come back.

That doesn’t mean we don’t try, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we stop publishing books by or for men, as the bestseller list demonstrates. Luckily for male authors, female readers and editors seem to show no bias against supporting them. And yet, where there are reliable readerships of men, we do make plans around publishing to them. Whereas there are a myriad of women focused chunks of core reading groups — book clubs, cool literary girls, true crime readers, romance lovers, cozy mystery fans, historical fiction aficionados — the avid male readers tend to have interests that are generally narrower and quite predictable.

Happy Father’s Day

The history dad archetype is still the most reliable male reader. These dads come in all political stripes and sizes, but they read biographies, are interested in current events, and, like a guy I talked to recently at a dinner, might literally go on a solitary fishing trip and always keep a book of Hemingway short stories going at his side. Bookshop.org served me a Father’s Day ad and the recommendations are spot-on to what our avid dad reader might like: a biography, a topical current events book, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a classic Boomer-man beach read.

They may not read as much, but they sure are easy to target

There are also plenty of times when publishing markets to one-off book readers that are primarily men. I’ve never seen a longer line of young men in my life for a book event than when sports writer Shea Serrano did an event at The Strand for his book Basketball (and Other Things). It is an ungenerous but honest assumption that these were not avid readers. We may not know which exact men will show up because they aren’t usually repeat book buyers—they may not be our ideal dad readers for example—but since the underlying philosophy of male readers is the same we can often learn to repeat one-off successes.

Hemingway trying to figure out how to get more men to read—add more giant marlins??

Utility vs. Enrichment

The gender divide in reading might also be described as a difference in reading ideology. Most men often read for the explicit purpose of improving themselves. It’s why fiction reading rates for men are low and have steadily declined—the utility proposition of a novel is rarely clear-cut. It is why men vastly prefer nonfiction, where the idea is explicitly to learn and improve, like with self-help, or the subject is telling them what new form of expertise they are gaining, whether it’s history, sports or technology.

When men do read fiction, the safe bet is that if you ask further questions, is that it will be primarily prize-winning or classic fiction. These barely count for book publishers and editors, as they are essentially nonfiction stand-ins—reading Dostoevsky serves the same purpose as Sapiens: a chance to get smarter. It’s why it is so easy to poke fun at their David Foster Wallace- and 48-Laws of Power-filled bookshelves.

When men do read for entertainment, it’s often in genres like science fiction, as there’s usually a technological, intellectual underpinning, which can explain the success of bestsellers like The Three-Body Problem series, Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, and Blake Crouch’s novels. There are pure entertainment exceptions like spy novels and crime thrillers, two genres that have seen a decline as their primarily male readership has shifted even more strongly to reading for utility and/or has stopped reading new fiction entirely.

I almost wrote that women read more for entertainment, which would seem the natural opposite to utility, but that seems to fall into the trap of gendering men’s reading as productive and women’s reading as frivolous. As we know, this dichotomy is not really the case because women often do read the same kinds of things men do. In my head, often a “man book,” might more realistically be said to be a book that achieves gender parity in its readership, given how many more women read and buy books (with exceptions of course). Women perhaps have a broader definition of utility, more like enrichment. A difference in philosophy of considering both the hard and soft skills that can be gained by reading, the personal enrichment that comes from a novel making you think differently or picking up a little more about a setting or the human condition as an indirect result.

Down the Pigeonhole

Of course, these generalities about men don’t describe an entire and varied population (feel free to insert any demographic in place of “men”). Being one myself and working in book publishing, I know plenty of the rare birds — family, friends, colleagues and passing acquittances — that are men who read one contemporary fiction. Who read female authors. Men who read widely and voraciously.

Conduit Books is hardly the only casualty of seeing and treating demographics as a monolith. Book publishing is certainly not immune from affinity bias, the idea that people generally favor those that share identity traits with them. The supply chain is particular vulnerable to this thinking. Although I did not set out to publish books primarily by or for men, as one of the few men (2) who publishes fiction where I work, I get a deluge of male fiction writers in every genre sent my way. It is clear that I am the default choice if they are stumped, oftentimes for projects that are off the mark in terms of my personal interests (high fantasy, military thrillers).

I’ve talked to dozens of people in book publishing over the years about this subject and no matter what their identity is, this experience—with some irony—is usually universal. If you are [insert race, gender, sexuality trait], it is assumed that you will like and work on books by people of [insert race, gender, sexuality trait] about [insert race, gender, sexuality trait]. What invariably happens is you get offered the opportunities to work on all of the books that share your identity, you pick the best of the bunch, end up having success with those books because you had the most options to choose from (assuming you’re good at your job), and then get even more similar books as a result of your success. Suddenly you are trapped in a virtuous cycle that’s also a bubble.

A large portion of the submissions I receive are by men, and as a result I do publish a lot of men. But it’s important to note that for every man that I end up working with, there are probably 30-50 men rejected in their wake. Another irony being that because of this presumption that everyone has affinity bias, proportionally speaking, statistically, literary agents have a far higher percent chance of selling me a book by a woman than a man. It takes a tremendous amount of work and time to combat the tide of affinity bias. But it is necessary work. It was incredibly gratifying when an agent told me recently that I was the only man on a long submission list of editors for a female-authored novel.

The problem is that the pigeonholing of editors also results in the much more common pigeonholing of writers. The logic goes: if we have a male author we’re sending to a male editor, shouldn’t they write about something traditionally…male? Therein feedback loops and silos are created. All of which end result in much less creative freedom and less of a chance that people from different backgrounds work together. There is nothing wrong with working with someone who shares your identity, but what is instantly irksome about Conduit Books is that its mission is to publish at the exclusion of any other identity. As if a woman couldn’t write or publish books for men (incidentally, by far the best editor and publisher of fiction by and for men I know is a woman). To the frustration of many, Reese’s Book Club one of the most powerful sales drivers in publishing, has never picked a male author despite there being many male-authored books that are right for her audience and that fulfill her editorial mission of stories that center around female protagonists.

If everyone acts accordingly to what is generally true, then we create a feedback loop and one where existing biases and proclivities are reinforced rather than chipped away at. People are not statistics, and readers, writers, and editors certainly aren’t.

Our Diversity Problems Don’t Have to Do with Gender

Stats don’t present us with good solutions but they do show us where problems are. While gender in authorship, published works, and bestsellers are not as big of issues as the hand-wringing would indicate, it is clear that in other areas, like race, there are real problems on the supply side of book publishing. Here is a quick break down of the race of the US general population vs. the percentage of people of that race who are published authors:

Population vs. Published Authors – To Achieve Parity

White 57.84% vs. 76.58% – 20% Less

Black 12.05% vs. 5.93% – Double

Asian 5.92% vs. 4.93% – 20% More

Hispanic 18.73% vs. 7.62% – Near Triple

The gender imbalance on the supply-side looks relatively minor in this context, off by single, not double or even triple digits. Another struggle that’s harder to track is socioeconomic diversity—just pull some books off a bookshelf and read the author bios and you’ll see how rare it is to have authors from working class backgrounds. When you look at stats like these, a publisher dedicated to publishing Hispanic authors makes more sense than one dedicated to male authors by a pretty wide margin (Primero Sueño Press, which happens to be under the same umbrella as my employer, is just that—in fact they cited the same stat above in their press release announcing their founding).

When the imbalances are this egregious, clearly there is plenty of room to have a full staff of editors trying to fix it. But sans working at fully dedicated publishers, editors and literary agents must look to fix these imbalances actively (see again: affinity bias). What’s equally important is not to lose sight on the ground level that authors and their identities shouldn’t be reduced to stats. Publishing or not publishing a writer exclusively based on their identity is fundamentally disrespectful. Part of the work that needs to be undertaken in book publishing is not just increasing the number of authors of color and different backgrounds blindly, but in creating sustainable cycles and giving them the same level of professional care and efforts that they haven’t always been historically afforded.

Bottom line is that when it comes to men, we certainly aren’t always publishing to people where there is no demonstrated demand, but also, we’re not excluding them. As far as supply? There are plenty of book waiting for men when they are ready to join us back in the pleasure of reading.

Daunting Classic Tracker: The Book of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 328/992 (The Farthest Shore)