Today, the majority of book authors are women, and among the fiction category, most authors are women.
- Why don’t straight men read novels? | Dazed – 80% of books are bought by women, it says, and that 55% of non-fiction titles are bought by men. Women read fiction and men read non-fiction.
- Almost all young adult fiction is “the domain of the teenage girl”.
- As of 2015, 78% of book publishing staff were women, and 59% of book publishing executives were women.
A consequence is most fiction (fantasy, romance, etc) is written by women, for women – and is pushing the book publishing industry towards creating even more content for women. A corollary is that men (and boys) are reading books less and less.
Why and how did this shift occur?
Decades ago, many of the “big name” authors were people like Hemingway, or Fleming, who wrote books with male dominant themes. In the 1970s, more and more women entered the work force, and it is hypothesized they pursued humanities studies such as English Literature and Creative Writing, and thus, gradually there were more women writers.
On my Travel blog, I spent over a year tracking stories about travel, and especially stories about those who moved abroad. Nearly all travel and move abroad stories are written by young women writers (20s and 30s), with degrees in writing and working as “freelance” writers or “content creators”.
There are almost no travel stories discussing travel from men’s perspective – instead, nearly all travel stories are written by young women travel writers, frequently based on their own experiences.
Summary
Women writers now make up a majority of fiction authors, producing titles targeting women readers. Women account for the bulk of fiction book readers and purchasers (women also buy more book titles than men). A consequence is that the book publishing industry is gradually becoming female centric – and pursing women customers more, and men less.
This bias is not just books either – almost all travel writing is by women writers and about women who are traveling. There are nearly no stories about men traveling solo or about men moving abroad on their own, except for gay men – that has become a staple of the female travel freelance writers. (Note – we have a gay marriage in our extended family, lost an extended relative to HIV/AIDs, I was a volunteer and leader of a support group for a big city annual AIDS walkathon, and I have hired and worked side by side with many gays and lesbians. I’m not anti-gay in case you were going down that path.)
Update November 27, 2024:
Update December 7, 2024 – The End of Male Literature
- “To be clear, I welcome the end of male dominance in literature. Men ruled the roost for far too long, too often at the expense of great women writers who ought to have been read instead. I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction; they don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured. Furthermore, young men should be reading Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante. Male readers don’t need to be paired with male writers.”
- Opinion | The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone – The New York Times
Update September 29, 2025
DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot. Part 1 of 7: The Gatekeepers – PJ Media
The numbers are stark. Over the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure in America has collapsed by more than 40 percent. Fewer than half of adults now read a book in a given year. And fiction in particular is bleeding readers: in 2012, 45 percent of adults read a novel or short story; by 2022, that number was down to 37.6 percent.
The losses are sharpest among men. A decade ago, 35 percent of men read fiction; today it’s under 28 percent. Women also read less than before — falling from 54.6 percent to 46.9 percent over the same span — but the male drop is steeper, and the gap between men and women has widened.
Why? The above column suggests this:
Today, agents and editors, the self-appointed gatekeepers of publishing, increasingly use submission guidelines not as a way to filter for quality, but as ideological purity tests. Want to query an agent? You’d better make sure your story features “marginalized voices,” that your characters are “diverse,” and that your personal identity matches the preferred checklist. Otherwise, don’t bother. Some agencies explicitly state they will not consider manuscripts by authors from “overrepresented groups.” Some agents state baldly that they will not be able to represent white males. Others signal subtly or overtly that unless your work advances the current ideological line — the one centered on race, gender, or sexuality — they are not interested.
From Part 2:
What began in science fiction did not stay there. As the 2010s wore on, nearly every major literary prize began to bend toward the same formula. It was no longer enough for a book to be well-written, imaginative, or beloved by readers. To be considered prize-worthy, it had to check the right boxes: the author’s identity, the characters’ demographics, and the themes of oppression and representation.
Prize committees formalized what the Hugos had shown informally — literature was to serve ideology first. Some awards now openly require “diversity statements” or mandate representation quotas on their juries and shortlists.
Book authors, now, apparently have to do their work to meet the needs of The Algorithm – alluding to how social media influencers all now design their content to feed The Algorithm of TikTok, FB, IG and so on, that choose what content is shared into your “news feed”.
It is as if social media – and now all media – has become a propaganda platform, used specifically to influence the public – and not to share general information.
