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Notes -
Traditional publishing is definitely a very progressive industry, but if they could sell 5 million copies of rip-off Tom Clancy schlock to young men they’d absolutely hold their noses and do it; after all, almost all the big publishers have conservative non-fiction imprints for basic economic reasons.
One of the most startling aspects of the woke revolution is the way select companies have chosen to just leave money on the table and abandon profit. Disney has been the most obvious example of this but it's pretty common in nerd hobbies and you see a lot of it in the comic book and video game industries.
With respect to publishing you'll hear anecdotes of male authors with a good idea being told that they just "aren't looking for your kind of book" right now or whatever.
Authors in the PF/LIT RPG genres often have massively profitable Patreon's indicating that the market exists, but struggle to get published using traditional methods. It's stupid but it is the same mistake a lot of business entities are right now.
Somehow what is happening in video games and comics is even worse however.
That there are popular Patreons doesn’t mean publishers aren’t being smart. How many guys are out there writing this kind of stuff? Tens of thousands, and maybe a handful are making decent money. If you were a book publisher, do you really think you could pick out hits easily? Also, men who read them online wouldn’t necessarily buy a ‘traditional’ book even if their preferred genre was better represented in bookstores.
Tons of ink and YouTube hours have been spilled about the difficulty in getting male themed products out there, and the removal of male appeal from existing products, and the way Asia doesn't do this and a single Manga has more sales than the entire Western comics industry, and how companies are losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in sales by doing this....etc. I think you'd have to make a case for why this would suddenly not apply to this niche the all these other things are having the same problem.
It's hard to find specific articles in the moment because this finding is against the narrative, but over the years I've seen tons of complaints from male authors (some of who have published with success) about this.
I did find a Huffington Post article from 2010 which may as well have been from 1872 in Culture War years commenting.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-men-dont-read-how-pub_b_549491
I cannot imagine how much worse it has gotten since then.
It’s actually a very simple explanation, which is that men play many more video games for many more hours than women do. Men spend roughly double the number of hours per week playing video games than women do. That extra leisure time goes somewhere. What changed since 1970? Video games. It’s really that simple.
The men who have entirely stopped reading and replaced it with video games are equally matched by the women who have stopped reading and replaced it with social media.
The men who would be traditionally reading a lot still read a ton it's just been replaced with non-fiction and stuff like this. Reading forum posts and /r/HobbyDrama or whatever is reading, it's just not fiction. And again, there are still large communities of men clamoring for fiction that appeals to them just a lot of them are looking at Royal Road or other stuff outside of traditional publishing.
Demand exists, supply is constrained. And again we see this in other markets impacted by wokeness.
Overall reading is down but as suggested in my link by someone who knows more about this than either of us, that doesn't need to be gendered.
HobbyDrama, 4chan, this place, celebrity gossip, AskReddit, WSB and most of TikTok are all nonfiction, so men and women are well-represented as readers there.
What’s the male equivalent to the fiction that women read? Well, porn in some cases, I guess. But in most it’s the fiction in video games, it’s Stalker, it’s Assassin’s Creed, it’s Dead Space, it’s The Last of Us, it’s Baldur’s Gate, it’s Red Dead Redemption (obviously all these have women players, but the the majority of playtime by hours is men).
Licensed fiction. I’ve probably read more Star Trek, Star Wars, movie, and video game adaptation books by volume, plus fanfiction, than original works.
Same here. And it’s not like I avoiding physical reading. Just…once I had an unlimited backlog of interesting media in my pocket, it became a very easy leisure activity.
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I know that this is a trite comparison, but even so... I think that viewing wokeness though the lens of religion helps to illuminate why this happens. Imagine you're in 17th century Europe and someone comes to you wanting to print a book that alleges that Jesus was a rapist or something equally blasphemous. Even if you thought you could make a ton of money off that book, you would probably turn the author down due to the immense social blowback you would receive.
Publishers (and video game companies, etc) today are in a similar situation. Even if an individual is sympathetic to your pitch, even if they could make hella money, they are going to be reluctant to publish something which is blasphemous to the religion they have to work with.
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