Are people allowed to observe that the literary world is deliberately sidelining a certain demographic of writer — and to do something about it?
Are people allowed to observe that the literary world is deliberately sidelining a certain demographic of writer -- and to do something about it?
T he mortality rates of small indie presses and literary journals are a depressing feature of our cultural landscape. Normally, the launch of yet another one might not seem newsworthy. But the launch of Conduit Books in the United Kingdom is a slightly different case. Founder Jude Cook has started this venture with the explicit aim of promoting the work of male authors, a literary demographic Cook believes has had a really rough time as publishing swings ever more decisively in favor of women — nonwestern and nonwhite female authors especially.
Cook, who is himself a novelist and a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Spectator, and other publications, has said that the purview of his new venture may expand in the future. But for now, he intends to promote male writers, especially those who toil in the genre of speculative fiction (i.e., fantasy and sci-fi). Cook has gone out of his way to assure people that he seeks a pursue a “non-adversarial stance,” and that writers of different races, creeds, and sexual orientations are welcome to submit their work.
The press started out with a submissions window extending through all the month of May. But it then posted a notice on its website stating that, faced with a deluge of manuscripts, it has closed the window for U.S. and Canadian submitters for the time being. While it is not unheard of for publishers to receive more unsolicited submissions than they have the staff and resources to handle, the reaction to the press’s launch gives an idea of how many unpublished male writers are itching to find a publisher that will give them any consideration at all.
The decision to launch Conduit Books was sure to spark controversy. But it has not happened in a total vacuum. There has been much media attention of late to the decline of male writers as reflected in their increasing absence from bestseller and “notable book” lists in leading newspapers. Earlier this year, Jacob Savage offered a flurry of relevant facts and figures. No white male Millennials appeared in the New York Times’ “Notable Fiction” lists for 2021 and 2022. Only one apiece merited mention in 2023 and 2024. Not a single author from that category made it into the 2024 year-end fiction lists of Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, or Vulture. There is a near-total absence of white men among the recipients of major literary awards and prestigious fellowships. “Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of fiction in The New Yorker,” Savage pointed out.
In the New York Times late last year, David J. Morris came at the issue from a somewhat different perspective. He expressed concerns even while hailing the increasing female dominance of the publishing world. He proclaimed: “I welcome the end of male dominance in literature.”
Somewhat similarly, In The Guardian, Ella Creamer asked, “Do we really need more male novelists?” She suggested that the acknowledged drop in the number of men putting out novels may have to do with today’s book-buying demographics, or as she puts it, low demand from male readers. Citing NielsenIQ BooKData figures, Creamer notes that men made only 37 percent of fiction purchases in the United Kingdom in 2024. It does not seem to occur to Creamer, whose bias is evident in the title of her piece, that she may be putting the cart before the horse. In other words: The issue is not that, all other things being equal, men have little interest in books. Rather, men feel put off because authors they feel they can most directly relate to personally, i.e., fellow men, are so woefully underrepresented. The trend Jude Cook decries has fueled low demand, not the other way around.
The decline of the white male author, especially the younger kind, is a widely acknowledged fact across the political spectrum. Concern about the trend has come from some surprising places. In July 2022, none other than Joyce Carol Oates weighed in with a tweet stating, “A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. this [sic] is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’” This is the same Joyce Carol Oates who has gone after Robert Frost for alleged sexism and racism and who has publicly lambasted Ernest Hemingway for misogyny. (Did you know that Hemingway called male characters “the man” and female ones “the girl”?)
Amid all the trends that commentators and journalists have, with dismay or delight, documented, the launch of a press dedicated to male writers might not seem like the most sinister development. Even so, much of the online fallout has been remarkably nasty, in revealing ways. A few female literary agents and writers politely acknowledged the rationale for launching Conduit Books, while many others took to the online arena to blast Cook’s move.
On May 6, James Kinsley attacked Cook and Conduit books in a lengthy piece in The Independent, in a way that will be familiar to those who have followed the exploits of race hustler Ibram X. Kendi. “We all know . . . that if you give everyone the same leg up, you’re not creating parity, you’re preserving the status quo. The only way to argue otherwise is to deny that privilege exists,” Kinsley writes. It’s an echo of Kendi’s claims that ostensibly color-blind policies and laws actually buttress a racist system, and that real “antiracism” requires evaluating all actions and decisions on the basis of whether they help the oppressed.
Kinsley makes a surprising admission. “Unlike Cook, I don’t believe for a moment the pendulum has swung so far that I’m now some marginalized minority. Even if the evidence of my own writing career might suggest otherwise.” Even in a publishing world where he and countless other male writers languish, while the likes of Emma Cline and Nicole Krauss enjoy the lifestyle of the literary celebrity, Kinsley still believes that systems of institutionalized oppression benefit male writers at the expense of women in the same field.
Another lengthy response, from James Folta on the website Literary Hub, acknowledges that a woman, J. K. Rowling, is the richest author in the world today. Yet Folta sounds quite like Kinsley in taking Cook to task for daring to stand up for male authors. “So the data seem to back up Cook — female authorship is on the rise, especially recently,” Folta writes. “But to conclude that men therefore need an urgent champion seems naïve and near-sighted.”
Does Folta’s logic convince you? Perhaps a sounder approach would be to wait until men have completely vanished from the “notable books” and bestseller lists and as recipients of all the prestigious awards and fellowships.
Are people allowed to notice that the literary world is deliberately sidelining a certain demographic of writer — and to do something about it? However Conduit books fares in a thoroughly woke industry, it has already revealed a deep rot in the literary world — one its leading lights largely refuse to admit is even a problem.