There has been much discussion on ‘Book Twitter’ over the past months about the so-called ‘death of the male reader’. Indeed, given that teachers are arguing that The Hobbit is far too complex to be a children’s story, while Literary Humanities students arrive at elite Ivy League colleges having never been required to read a single book in all their schooling, there’s a fair case that readers are dying out across the board. On the world’s single biggest bookselling site, Amazon, audiobooks (i.e., adults being read bedtime stories) make up 15 per cent of sales, and it’s growing.
Why are readers, men especially, abandoning books in droves? Well, they’re not, exactly: they’re abandoning traditionally published books. Independent publishing – what used to be condescendingly called ‘self-publishing’ – is growing rapidly.
Why is indie publishing exploding? Peruse the social media of the tradpub industry insiders and you might begin to understand.
In an infamous series of posts, various literary agents listed the types of manuscripts they wouldn’t even consider: “Books with eating disorders, unchallenged fatphobia or unchallenged diet culture. Stories featuring Nazis, Zionists/Zionism, ICE, republicans, police or military. As a lesbian, I’m also pretty sensitive to the lesbian character being killed off at the end of the book.” This makes one wonder: just how often are authors killing off lesbian characters at the end of their books? Is ‘Dead Lesbians’ a niche genre I’m simply unaware of? Are there books titled, The Lesbian Dies at the End?
Another agent made absolutely clear that, “I’m not currently taking queries for Picture Books, Middle Grade and Contemporary YA. I also don’t represent Non-Fiction... Military SFF, Literary Fiction, and non-speculative Historical Fiction in any age category.” This begs the question: what does she take queries for?
It will surprise you not at all to learn that both these publishing execs are women. Indeed, publishing is an industry almost entirely dominated by women. And it shows.
Perhaps the tradpub industry is dying simply because the market for contemporary adult genderqueer urban pulp fiction is a mite limited?
Meanwhile, the sort of books men, especially, read and enjoyed for centuries have all but disappeared.
The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure fell from 28 per cent in 2004 to 16 per cent in 2023.
A National Endowment for the Arts survey lays it out plainly. Fewer than half of adults read any books in 2022. The top seller last year? Some Hunger Games sequel. The Count of Monte Cristo this is not.
Men in particular have checked out. Why slog through another sermon on identity when you could be reading Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes or something with actual stakes and heroes who don’t spend chapters navel-gazing about their pronouns? The old canon – The Iliad, Beowulf, Treasure Island, Conrad, Burroughs, Hemingway – built boys into men. Today’s offerings berate them for existing.
Hollywood piles on. Lupita Nyong'o recently taunted Homer himself for not giving the women of The Odyssey enough screen time. The sheer cultural illiteracy is staggering, but it fits the pattern. Classics are rewritten or ignored unless they can be bent into the latest approved narrative.
The liberal dragons at the publishing gate… deplore their masculine heteronormativity.
Exactly. Tarzan, that toxic white male hero swinging through Africa, inspired generations. Today he’d be cancelled before breakfast. The femcel-industrial complex that dominates tradpub would rather push romantasy slop for women (That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf – yes, that is a real title of a real ‘contemporary fantasy’ book) and lectures for everyone else.
The result? A feedback loop of declining quality and declining readers. Independent publishing is filling the gap because it has to answer to the market, not the commissars. Men are still reading: just not what the gatekeepers offer.
This isn’t inevitable. Boys still crave adventure, heroism and stories that speak to the eternal masculine. They always have. The West was built on such tales. Handing boys nothing but guilt and gender theory is a civilisational own-goal.
The good news is the old stories endure. Indies are keeping the flame alive. Real readers, male and female, are finding them. The tradpub death spiral is self-inflicted. When your entire industry treats half the population as a problem to be fixed rather than a market to serve, don’t be shocked when they walk away.
The male reader isn’t dead. He’s just stopped paying for sermons.
