I agree. 95% of my customers are men and I'm indie.
If a publisher puts out something men will want, men will read.
Period.
No man wants to read about the latest gender neutral, heavy-jawed lesbian with purple hair, massive glasses, and a nose ring confront her/its journey-struggles against discrimination, hate, and racism.
Real men would rather mow the lawn than read that crap.
This is the reason I just stick to manga, light novels or just go back to reading the classics. I have read more in the last year and a half than I have in over a decade by just reading books I have never bothered reading before like The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter. While publishers here have been avoiding for whatever reason the light novels of Gundam, I have been reading those and they have been excellent.
But I am not surprised they will double down on not publishing material for men because of how gatekeeping, nepotism and incestual the industry is. It is beneficial to them to make a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts where they basically will into existence an entirely female market and sell it that way to investors and continue to ignore the other half of the market until they collapse like the comics industry or someone comes in to fill in that void.
I have more on Substack every day than I can read. Don't really need the old system anymore. In some cases I would read my own work over the slop.
I agree. 95% of my customers are men and I'm indie.
If a publisher puts out something men will want, men will read.
Period.
No man wants to read about the latest gender neutral, heavy-jawed lesbian with purple hair, massive glasses, and a nose ring confront her/its journey-struggles against discrimination, hate, and racism.
Real men would rather mow the lawn than read that crap.
This is the reason I just stick to manga, light novels or just go back to reading the classics. I have read more in the last year and a half than I have in over a decade by just reading books I have never bothered reading before like The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter. While publishers here have been avoiding for whatever reason the light novels of Gundam, I have been reading those and they have been excellent.
But I am not surprised they will double down on not publishing material for men because of how gatekeeping, nepotism and incestual the industry is. It is beneficial to them to make a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts where they basically will into existence an entirely female market and sell it that way to investors and continue to ignore the other half of the market until they collapse like the comics industry or someone comes in to fill in that void.