In July of 2022, Joyce Carol Oates tweeted that her literary agent friend told her editors are no longer interested in reading first novels by young white male writers, “no matter how good.” She was saying this in support of an article by former New York Times columnist Pamela Paul, who argued that the publishing industry is being destroyed by “illiberal scolds” keen to stifle free speech. Among Paul’s examples are the industry’s recourse to sensitivity readers, who ostensibly scold authors, and the backlash against 2020 bestseller American Dirt on the grounds that its white author Jeanine Cummins was not the right person to tell the story of poor Mexican migrants. Paul is implying, in other words, that calls for publishing to address its whiteness problem amount to a form of woke censorship. In sharing Paul’s piece and adding her own anecdote about young white men being overlooked, Oates was connecting their fate to Paul’s complaint: White men are the victims of the industry’s takeover by the DEI mafia.
The idea that white male writers today face diminishing opportunities has since occasioned considerable debate and several attempts to lay out in greater detail the forces behind their recent marginalization. Jacob Savage’s explanation is that they are “vanishing” because, having been castigated as toxic masculinists and told there are no “Good White Men,” they no longer feel that they are allowed to have a voice. Tim Lott argues that an industry now dominated by women editors and agents, who are naturally biased toward manuscripts that center their own experiences, is guilty of the same inequality that women once complained about, except now it is men who are excluded.
This kind of reversal leaves young white men with a dearth of literary role models to look up to and relate to, according to Jude Cook. This identitarian logic may sound familiar, but it has usually backed claims about why publishing needs to be more racially diverse and more attentive to the experience of people who are not straight, cis, and middle-class. (People need to see themselves reflected in fiction. They need relatable characters.) It is now being repurposed as a rationale for the establishment of, for instance, a publishing house devoted to releasing only books by male authors. I refer here to Conduit Books, whose founder argues that he stepped into action when he noticed that “narratives addressing fatherhood, masculinity, working-class male experience and negotiating the 21st century as a man that were simply not getting through to the tables of Waterstones and Foyles.”
Others fear that young white men without literary reading on their nightstands are being propelled instead into the arms of online misogynists like Andrew Tate—that one is more likely to fall prey to right-wing political sensibilities without the armature of deep literary thinking. A good novel might serve as a prophylactic against the barrage of other media experiences. Creative writing instructor David Morris, whose classes are increasingly made up of mainly women, argues that “young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally," a regression that “seems even to have been a significant factor in [the 2024] presidential election.” People like Morris are afraid for the souls of men today, Constance Grady observes: “They’re searching for spiritual solutions, and in a post-secular world, books are one of the few objects left that can summon a virtuous aura of salvation.”
In following this conversation, I have wondered how to connect it to another that has been happening at the same time, concerning how difficult it is now to debut and succeed as any gender of literary writer. Literary fiction has seen its “rise and fall,” Dan Sinykin argues. All the major industry monitoring organizations agree with him.
The Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society has tracked the decline in U.K. authors’ real incomes year after year since the early 2000s. Referring to “a profession struggling to sustain itself,” it finds that the vast majority of writers cannot make a living by writing alone. In 2006, median author earnings were £12,330. By 2022, this had fallen to £7,000, which is a 60 percent decline when adjusted for inflation. The situation in the U.S. and Canada is just as bad. The Authors Guild’s 2018 Author Income Survey, the largest survey of American authors’ earnings ever conducted, found incomes falling to “historic lows”—a median of $6,080 in 2017, down 42 percent from 2009. The Writers’ Union of Canada found the median author income to be $9,380 in 2018—a 27 percent drop since 2015, and down 78 percent from 1998.
There are related declines in library usage, especially in borrowing fiction and other literature, and there have been ongoing bookstore closures. Where stores continue to operate, it is often the case that the percentage of stock of non-book items has risen, or they offer event spaces that make money from café and bar sales—or, in a recent trend, they are dedicated to romance novels and marketed via BookTok. As for study of English literature in universities, there is a vibrant industry of commentary on “the end of the English major” and what might be done about it.
It is within these inauspicious conditions that women have come to “dominate” the publishing industry. We know from the sociology of labor that when the conditions in any field of work worsen, that work is more likely to be done by the people with the least power in the labor market. The least desirable, lowest-paying jobs go to the lowest-status groups. This is what has happened in publishing. The literary part of the trade has been collapsing, its profits and prestige undercut. With these declines comes the feminization of work, meaning both that women are doing more of the jobs and that the jobs are more likely to be casualized and badly paid. Contrary to the more exciting idea that an army of DEI warriors has forced men to the sidelines, what's really happening is that, in response to historic declines in literature’s value, the industry has itself become a site of more contingent and more precarious work that is more often done by women. If women have girlbossed their way to the top of this field, we should hesitate to call it a win.
To be clear, the gendered dynamics of novel publishing have never been particularly settled. When novel reading first developed into a regular pastime in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was considered a feminized form. It was women who read novels, probably badly. Men who wrote novels were not taken as seriously as those who wrote poetry. It was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the novel started to become a respectable and prestigious literary form. The conditions for the commercial development of prestige fiction were relatively short-lived, reaching a peak with the surge in university enrollments after World War II, when there was expansive state-supported higher education and high rates of secure employment in a growing economy. These are the days that are behind us, probably for good.
During this same period after World War II, when more women entered the general workforce, for those graduating with university degrees publishing held great appeal. The industry benefited because women worked for far lower wages than men did. Women often worked only until they left to establish families, and they were replaced with other low-wage employees. It has also often been more difficult for women to balance this kind of intensive work with parenting, as they have often been the ones doing much of the work in the home in addition to their jobs. Men found it easier to stick it out and move up the ranks, and this calcified into hiring biases preferring men in higher-ranking positions.
Statistics Canada reported that in 2023, the majority of female publishing workers were employed part-time, and they worked part-time in greater proportion than their male counterparts. Women in Canada and the U.S. continue to be massively dominant in the jobs at the lower work tiers, and there is a greater percentage of men in the highest ranks than can be found at other levels. An Australian survey found similarly that "as respondents’ job roles move up the ranks of seniority, the proportion of men increase.” Still, in conditions of declining profits and prestige for literary books, where already feminized, denigrated niches like romance and young adult fiction are the main growth areas, men have been able to follow their inclination to exit to compete for better opportunities. Women have not. They have stayed and taken men’s places.
These are the forces that bring us to where we are now. Women constitute nearly 80 percent of the U.S. publishing workforce; the figure is 60 percent at the executive level—a sea change since the 1970s, when women were hard to find in high-ranking positions. A 2021 Publishers Association U.K. study reported that 63 percent of industry employees were women, and that women are now also becoming a slim majority in executive leadership and senior management positions, at 52 percent and 56 percent respectively.
It is no surprise that these changes have real implications for the publishing landscape. In 1960, women authored only 16 percent of the books published in the U.S. They now write more than half. In Australia, where women make up two-thirds of book authors, respondents to a 2022 publishing employment survey were overwhelmingly female. In Canada, a 2022 survey found that three-quarters of industry employees identified as female. That same year, a Writers Union of Canada report indicated that approximately 62 percent of authors identified as women. This is because feminists have been relegating toxic male voices to the sidelines, right? Not at all. It’s more correct to note, as Katherine Bode says of women’s fiction in Australia, that growth in women’s authorship is inextricable from the “diminishing cultural value of novel writing as a career.”
These shifts have emerged hand in hand with a variety of new pressures on writers, most of which stem from the incursion of digital platforms into publishing processes. Digital platforms are technologies of precarity; they are profoundly economizing. They are a means for publishers to scout talent, meaning writers who arrive with an audience already formed. They also make it possible to place a lot of the work of marketing on a writer’s own shoulders.
Writer Amy DeBellis recently shared with her Twitter followers the email she received from an agent she had approached with a manuscript. “I wish I could pursue representation,” the agent wrote, “but unfortunately the larger publishers with whom I work require a more fully developed platform.” They offer the advice that her best bet is “taking another year or so to share your message while building your social media numbers, at which time you could have a shot at a major publisher.” Stories like this are proliferating.
Veteran publicist Paul Bogaards told journalist Kate Dwyer that when head publishing house editors meet to discuss a submission, their keyword is “platform.” He describes this as a “seismic difference” in the book world today. Editors ask, “What is the author going to bring to the table?” The answer used to be “the work itself.” Now, it is their platform, which is often built through personal disclosure and active self-branding and self-promotion.
These pressures are showing up in novels, including in works by young white men who feel their force and want to push back against them. In Jordan Castro’s playful autofiction The Novelist, published in 2022, the narrator skewers a woman editor who has tweeted about eating shrimp chips while working on a manuscript. She represents everything he hates: overly confessional about the mundane aspects of her life and unprofessional about the work itself. The editor’s ostensibly gluttonous eating habits become a sign of how unsuited she is to anything like real literary evaluation. “I imagined the editor smacking her lips together, like a cow chewing cud,” he writes, and “I felt disgusted.” He laments that the literary world is now “full of poisoned people … totally unconcerned about the issue of their own unseemliness,” and because of social media they are constantly in your face. He doesn’t want to have to work with people like this! He certainly doesn’t want to use his traumatic story of drug addiction and recovery to build an online fanbase—he barely wants to use it as material for his fiction.
I have argued that the movement of the white male writer out of his former central position in the literary world is more a matter of the industry’s collapsing social value than it is of feminist or woke ideology. So, how should we understand the more common story of his demise that has been circulating since Joyce Carol Oates got that ball rolling? Here is where Castro’s novel is useful.
Castro's narrator, who is working on his debut, knows that he has a hard row to hoe. Many of the new writers who come to our attention today are working a kind of middle job between writer and influencer. Visibility is a precious commodity in a cultural marketplace glutted with free and cheap content, and a lot of other things to do with your leisure hours. If you don’t want to tweet about your snack foods, and disavow the online performance of selfhood—and there is some evidence that straight, working-class white men are among the most likely to—you are at a serious disadvantage. If you do manage to find a publisher despite the odds, failure to play the game may mean your work sells less well and is less visible, which makes it less likely that you will get another contract.
In this light, the genre of complaint about the marginalization of men—in The Novelist, in Jacob Savage’s clickbait article, on Tim Lott’s Substack, and so on—is a way of fostering an audience. It does so without recourse to the more blatant forms of self-disclosure and self-selling that are associated with the industry’s feminization, and the decline of “real” high-minded literature. The culture of male grievance is its exercise in platform building. It ultimately validates the formation of new outlets such as literary Substack, or Conduit Books, or Cluny Journal, which Castro edits, and which is affiliated with an institute that is funded by the Catholic University of America and the John Templeton Foundation. These are spaces where young white male authors can find common cause and cultivate an ethos against the literary mainstream. Railing against the industry’s changing gender composition—as an “unseemly” perversion or feminist hypercorrection—is a way of attracting attention to their developing literary networks while also making claims to aesthetic distinction protected from concerns like sales, or diversity. Good luck, babes!
