The Disappearance of Male Authors

Gen Z doesn’t have a ‘Book’ problem. It has a ‘Man’ problem.

Standing in line at a Target, I glanced at the books for sale. Every work of fiction, with the exception of those two elderly stalwarts, James Patterson and Stephen King, came from a female author. While older male writers still have a large presence on bestseller lists and in the book world, newly published male fiction authors have become rarer than blue moons.

This phenomenon reported on in stories like NPR’s “Women Now Dominate the Book Business” and “Women Are Now Publishing More Books Than Men” (which describe it as a sign of progress) helps shed light on another phenomenon that the media has been rubbing its head over in articles like The Atlantic’s “How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time” and Psychology Today’s “Why Aren’t College Students Reading?”

There is a generational decline in reading across Gen Z, but it’s also a gender divide. While there’s always been a gender reading gap, by 2018, 44% of girls loved to read, while only 24% of boys did. One study found that adult women were reading 39% more than men did.

Publishers may argue that there is a chicken and egg phenomenon. Men read fewer books and so publishers take fewer books by male authors with male characters that are aimed at male audiences. Readers and editors become almost universally female. And men disappear.

But did men stop reading for some mysterious reasons or because publishers excluded them?

The bestseller lists are now packed with fiction novels whose readership is 81% female. The remaining, mostly older, male fiction authors are following suit by jettisoning male protagonists and writing books aimed at female readers leaving a marketplace with few male characters.

Women and men are different and there’s nothing wrong with a segmented marketplace in which everyone reads what appeals to them, but there is something deeply wrong when male authors and protagonists, along with readers, disappear from the culture.

How did we get here?

78% of staffers and 59% executives in the publishing industry are female. Much like their male counterparts in the past, they order books that suit their tastes. But where male editors in the past understood that they also needed female customers, the publishing industry has all but written off the male sex. And that’s because it isn’t just female: publishing is very woke.

Wokeness treats the disappearance of men in publishing as a triumph of diversity.

It also ensures that the vast majority of books, whatever the sex of the author or the readership, are woke. Diversity, representation and woke messaging now drive much of publishing. And men, who are more likely to be conservative, are no longer reading or buying books.

Diversity surveys celebrate a publishing monoculture composed of woke white women living in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but that monoculture is hollowing out the larger culture of reading. Gen Z is the most affected because it has the least awareness of books that existed in the past and is the most exposed to current publishing trends through pop culture, schools and libraries.

And the numbers show quite clearly that Gen Z boys and men are opting out of today’s books.

You don’t have to be Gen Z to spot the problem. It’s been years since I’ve checked a book out of the library or bought a new copy of one in a chain bookstore. Or even set foot in one. After decades of making bookstores like Strand and Barnes & Noble a second home, I have no interest in navigating through displays of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the 1619 Project, woke outbursts, apologetics for Hamas, calls for destroying America and sexual fetish celebrations.

And the fiction sections have become no better.

The vast majority of books I read today were published before 2006. Gen Z is less likely to have that option. Gen Z boys grow up with educational books that unsubtly scold them for being white men, advance girls as leaders, and humiliate stand-ins for their race and sex at every turn. By the time that they’re ready for YA books, they’ve already checked out and are no longer reading.

But this same woke publishing marketplace does girls no favors. By the time they reach college, they may be ‘reading’ regularly, but the YA safe space materials they’re ‘reading’ leaves them unprepared for serious literature. In college, they demand trigger warnings and can’t cope with books whose purpose is exploring larger philosophical questions or the human experience rather than narcissistically pandering to their manufactured politics, identities and complaints.

And so colleges introduce trigger warnings and replace Shakespeare with Audre Lorde.

A woke publishing industry has trained Gen Z men not to read because of identity politics and Gen Z women have been trained to only read for identity politics. Or as the industry calls it “representation”. Gen Z women arrive in college complaining that too many of the characters in Shakespeare are “white cis men” and they don’t feel represented. Meanwhile their male counterparts are not reading because they actually don’t see representation in today’s market.

And so college students come to college unable to read a book.

Publishing, like every business, worked best when it pursued the market rather than the politics. When politics defines the market, as it invariably does in culture industries, a small wealthy woke demographic controls the market, which caters to its every whim, while alienating everyone else. A small fanatically loyal base with lots of spending money can be profitable in the short run, especially in culture industries, but it hollows out the industry in the long run.

Reading, unlike music, TV and film, is a more difficult habit to start and an easier habit to drop. The competition of constant smartphone browsing, often blamed for a decline in reading books, creates an easy substitute, and so once readers disappear, they may never come back.

I have spoken to plenty of men whose reading has sharply dropped off. Those who read, often tend to read articles, biographies and classics, but rarely any new books and even more rarely new fiction. And while the classics are great, a literate society produces new works or it dies.

Literature is disappearing before our eyes. And though it may not be obvious now, our culture will have good reason to regret its passing.