The following is the script for the above video.

 

In the publishing and literary world, over the last few years, there has been an ongoing discussion about why men don’t read and write as much as, it seems they once did. And many people claim that part of the reason for this drop-off in male writers could be due to a deliberate misandrist bias from the publishing business. 

Popular articles have titles like “The Vanishing White Male Writer,” “Why Don’t Straight Men Read Novels?” and “How Women Conquered the World of Fiction.” In 2022, Joyce Carol Oates said, “A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers.” 

A new independent publishing house called Conduit Books will focus on publishing stories by and for men, hoping to publish books that they claim are overlooked by traditional publishing houses in favor of books by female authors. 

And when you consider that 71.3% of the people who work in the publishing industry are cis women, you start to wonder if these articles could have a point.

Is there some sort of conspiratorial bias against men in the publishing industry? Is that why it seems like the Ernest Hemingways and the David Foster Wallaces have been replaced by Sally Rooneys and Ottessa Moshfeghs?

R.F. Kuang, the author of Yellow Face made the point that the question isn’t who can write what, as you can express yourself creatively however you feel. The question is who gets paid to write what. Because ultimately, the publishing industry is a business. And when it comes to the great American novel type of book, the contemporary literary fiction, mostly women are reading those books. In fact, women read more in general. A little under half of all women report having read a novel or short story at some point in the last year, whereas about a third of men report having done the same. And unfortunately, it seems like there are fewer and fewer readers in general every year. Teens’ and children’s enjoyment of reading has hit a record low with 39% of girls saying they enjoy reading and only 25.7% of boys. 

And we could leave it at that. We could say: There aren’t men reading fiction, so publishers don’t want to take a financial risk publishing a male writer if there isn’t an audience for it. Case closed.

But I think that would be a mistake.

The demographic of young people who enjoy reading the least is young boys from low-income families. In the writing world, women make up about 59% of professional authors and writers, while men make up about 41%, so there is a gender discrepancy there, but I would argue that it’s not as egregious as these articles would have you believe. 

At the same time, one study found that only 8% of professional artists come from working-class backgrounds. And that study was done before artificial intelligence got to work decimating entry-level writing and editing positions. So it seems like every few months or so, we have this same discourse about male writers vs female writers, but I worry that until we address class disparities, then we’re just going to keep arguing if rich women should get book deals or rich men should get books deals, meanwhile, just statistically speaking, both rich men and rich women are disproportionately represented in the world of artistry. And considering that most people on earth are working class and 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, then isn’t that a more significant untapped market? And considering that boys from low-income households are the ones least likely to enjoy reading, making this an intersectional issue, then wouldn’t addressing the lack of art created by and for working-class people kill two birds with one stone by getting more working-class kids interested in reading and more boys?

Novels have been considered “feminine” since their very inception. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when novel writing became more popular and we had stars like Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, fiction writing was considered feminine, and as a result, it was also considered vapid and frivolous, even if the authors were, in their novels, writing about complex political and economic themes. 

So this discourse of whether or not writing a novel is macho or girly pop has been around for as long as novels have been around. And we’ll address it; I want to get into that discussion in this video of why there are so many women who are writers, and if I think there is a bias against men. But I worry that on a macro level what’s going on here is that there are greater societal factors at play working to diminish the value of art in general and we’re using women as a scapegoat when what we really should be doing as writers and readers is finding a greater sense of unity and defending the value of our craft, together. 

Artificial intelligence still can’t write as well as the best human writers, but it is nonetheless being used to diminish and belittle our work as writers, being used as a justification to pay us less or for fewer hours. The United States has very few safety nets compared to other countries, such as public healthcare, affordable housing, and art subsidies, which are necessary for people pursuing the arts who often get paid per project and go through periods of feast or famine financially. Many people, including teens, are addicted to social media because social media companies have been allowed to hardwire their algorithms to promote addiction with little to no regulation. On top of all that, you have these famous images of masculinity, such as the president, who don’t read or promote an active hostility toward reading. A journalist named Michael Wolff, who wrote about the Trump White House in a book called Fire and Fury, shared that Trump didn’t read or even skim documents directly related to his job as president of the United States. The journalist also wrote, “Some believed that for all practical purposes [Trump] was no more than semi-­literate.” So it makes sense that there would be fewer people reading in general, and I think that’s a serious problem, but I also feel that blaming misandrist women in the publishing industry is missing the mark, and neglecting to mention larger, and, I would argue, more important factors at play in the downturn of people reading and writing in general. 

That said, more people reading, male or female or somewhere in between, is better. Reading fiction makes you more intelligent, more empathetic, and even improves your social skills. So if there are men expressing that they feel alienated from that world, I’m willing to examine the possibility and see what we could do about it. 

Part I: Racial Bias

Before we discuss gender, I want to address this question that I’ve seen come up a lot in these articles: Is there a bias against white people in writing and publishing? 

I do see why people might kind of come to this surface-level conclusion that there’s a bias against white writers, because around 2020, there was a huge push for books about race or books written by black authors. I remember seeing an interview with a literary agent saying she had never seen public events more directly impact the publishing industry than when the Black Lives Matter protests were going on in the U.S. Book clubs prioritized reading non-white authors, and agents encouraged non-white authors to pitch them. Books like How to be an Anti-racist, So You Want to Talk About Race, and Me and White Supremacy were very popular. 

There was also a lot of discussion in the fiction world about whether or not it is appropriate for novelists to write stories about characters of different races– that discussion was largely brought on by the backlash against American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. So although over 75% of the people working in the publishing industry are white, there were many initiatives such as the #Ownvoices movement, which pushed for books written by people writing characters of the same demographics as themselves. 

Another experience I had while querying my novel was that I would go to a certain publishing company’s website, and it would say, “We are not accepting any queries this month from white authors.” Or, “We encourage LGBTQ+ authors to query us in honor of Pride Month.” The publishing industry definitely skews left politically. So I can understand why seeing that could leave some white people feeling as if being white could hold them back from being an author, but if we zoom out and look at the numbers, the claim that white people are being discriminated against in the publishing industry just doesn’t really hold up. In 2021, Penguin Random House did an internal audit and found that their authors still “skew heavily white.” 

Also, a statistical analysis by the New York Times at the end of 2020 also found that about 89% of writers published by Simon and Schuster are white, with all other races being relegated to that 11%. This is despite the fact that white people make up only 57% of the United States.

And these analyses were carried out at the peak of the push that I mentioned earlier for more books written by nonwhite authors. 

So, as for the bias against white writers discussion, while I see how people might come to that conclusion when you’re in the thick of the query process, I just don’t see it as an argument that holds water when you really get into the numbers. The United States and even just the market for books written in English is huge, and even if it seems in your insular circle in person and your Internet bubbles that everyone is talking about race and prioritizing nonwhite writers, that doesn’t mean that those discussions have impacted the entire country or the entire industry. So that’s all I have to say about the race aspect of this, but let’s examine gender bias.

Part II: Systemic vs Cultural Bias

For the sake of this video, we’re going to split gender biases into two types: systemic biases and cultural biases. 

By “systemic biases,” I mean systemic forces, like laws or institutions, that place people in certain categories and roles and act to keep them there. 

Biases of social systems can be much slower to change. Up until 1974, women couldn’t get a credit card or loan without a male co-signer. Up until the 1990s, women “of childbearing potential” were excluded from medical clinical trials, meaning there’s still a lot we don’t know about how certain drugs or behaviors affect the female body. The Equal Rights Amendment, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex, was actually just never passed. All of these structural biases were still in place even when social opinion didn’t necessarily align with these structural biases, but it takes a long time to change the law. 

By “cultural biases,” I mean the opinions of a person or of their insular cultural group that haven’t necessarily boiled over into laws or institutional changes. These cultural biases are insidious and powerful, but they can also be more fickle. Especially now that many social groups are online, one nefarious social media campaign against a certain cultural group can increase cultural biases against them relatively quickly. That said, cultural biases do tend to align with systemic biases– if the state is oppressing a certain group, then that same group typically might find themselves oppressed or alienated in a social context.

But I wouldn’t argue that cultural biases always align with systemic biases. I say that because every one of us is a member of many different cultures, and those cultures can all influence us in different ways. The country you’re from, with its systemic laws, is just one of many cultural influences on your behavior and opinions. Your university might have a different culture from your nation, and thus, it might have different biases than the systemic biases in place in your country. Your group of friends might have a different culture from your university. A workplace is a culture. A family is a culture. Even a married couple is a culture. In 2016, Trump won the electoral college and became the representative of the American government, and there was no systemic bias, no laws against people with conservative opinions, or people who wore MAGA hats. But if you came to my university in 2016, where my group of friends and I all loved Bernie, then we would have had a pretty strong cultural bias against you if you were conservative. And that’s what I mean when I say the biases of insular social and cultural groups don’t always align with the biases of the system as a whole. 

In conversations that I’ve seen about whether or not publishing has a bias against men, I do sense a reluctance to say that a bias is even possible, let alone existent. And I understand that reluctance, because I think that people tend to conflate systemic bias and cultural bias, and thus think that the existence of a bias against men in one cultural group, in this case, the publishing industry, would invalidate the existence of a systemic bias against women. But I would argue that’s a false conflation.

Publishing could feasibly have a bias in favor of female authors. That wouldn’t erase the existence of a systemic bias or even other cultural biases against those female authors as soon as they step outside of the writing and publishing world. 

Part III: Ok. We get it. But what is the cultural bias of the publishing industry?

Now, I don’t work in publishing, but I do work as a copywriter and content writer for brands. And while I typically work with informative, long-form content like SEO articles, ebooks, white papers, and similar deliverables, I still work very closely with marketing teams to discuss messaging and sales because what we do does fall under the marketing umbrella. So in a way, I work creating media and content. 

I can see why someone could come to the conclusion in, say, 2020, that the Wokes won the culture war. I was a professional writer during that time as well, and it was common practice to have words you couldn’t use, very specific messaging to make sure that we were promoting inclusivity. But I can tell you, as somebody who is (sort of) on the inside, that that is no longer the case. Since Trump was elected for his second term, the culture has skewed toward the right. Now, copywriters and content writers still get lists of words we can’t use, but now those words are things like “diversity,” “race,” and other concepts that are designed to be excluded so as not to upset the right.

So I do believe that there were specific, niche circles that were anti-masculinity for large parts of the 2010s and even the early 2020s, I would say that now there is a strong cultural push toward tradition; it just might take the print industry a little while to catch up sometimes, but historically when this has happened, some star, macho novelist comes into the picture and fills that gap.

While it might appear that issues like biases against women are distant, there are still many women in poor or extremely religious parts of the United States and all over the world who suffer and die as a result of being disempowered. Evangelical and conservative think tanks that work closely with Donald Trump are barefaced about promoting policies that promote a patriarchal family unit. We’ve already gone backwards in terms of protecting reproductive rights. And now we commonly see influencers and even young people promoting the same hurtful, gendered, hierarchical model of family dynamics.

Maybe it sounds like I’m getting away from publishing. My point is that we shouldn’t let a cultural shift among certain internet circles or industries blind us to the long game – the long-term goal of a safer and more equitable society for everyone. 

But I think there’s a hole in my argument.

I had to ask myself, if there isn’t a bias against men in publishing, then how do you explain the fact that writing, reading, and publishing all have more women than men?

Part IV: Publishing Skews Heavily Female. Why?

A study by Joel Waldfogel found that by 2020, women officially write the majority of all new books, both fiction and nonfiction. The same study also found that books written by women tend to be more successful than books written by men, getting more readership, more sales, and more reviews. This makes sense when you consider that women tend to read more than men, especially fiction. And women aren’t just overrepresented among the authors and readers. Women also make up the vast majority of the staff of the publishing industry. A survey from Lee and Low Books found that the publishing industry is 71.3% cis women. 

This means writing stands out from other creative careers. Women make up only 12% of movie directors, about 7% of cinematographers, and around 30% of screenwriters. And those are just creative careers, you might already know that women are only about 27% of congress, 34% of all judges, 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, and so on. So why is writing such an anomaly in terms of gender?

If this increase of female representation is due to the success of the feminist movement, then wouldn’t it be more universal across all fields?

Well, I think that to say that the publishing industry has a bias would be to oversimplify the reasoning. I feel that there are other, more reasonable theories that we can make before concluding that there is an almost conspiratorial, widespread bias of the publishing industry against men. 

In the early days of social media feminism, there was a lot of discourse about the wage gap. The wage gap refers to the social phenomenon by which women, on average, earn less money than men. The current statistics in the United States estimate that for every one dollar a man earns, a woman earns 75 cents. The wage gap is larger in states that have more traditional gender roles and higher birth rates, with a woman in Utah earning about 61 cents for every dollar a man earns. In the feminist wage gap discourse, a lot of people attributed this discrepancy to societal bias– the idea that employers value women less, so they pay them less for the same work. 

There’s also the idea that jobs that are seen as more “feminine” tend to offer lower salaries, with one famous example being that computer programming used to be considered a “feminine job” and it was pretty low pay, until after WW2 governments recognized the value in computation, code writing, and codebreaking and made an intentional and documented effort to push women out of the field, and now, it’s a field that is 92% male and salaries tend to be pretty high. 

But if we’re going to explain the wage gap by saying there is bias against women and feminine jobs, I want you to first look at this graph. This is how much your earnings are impacted by having a child. As you can see, the man’s earnings are impacted a little or not at all, while the woman’s earnings drop significantly when she has her first baby.

This is a chart of the career earnings of women without kids and women with kids:

As you can see, the woman who didn’t have kids has a steady incline in her earnings, but the woman who did choose to have kids saw a significant decrease in her earnings when she had her first baby, and she never really caught up.

Before people have kids, men and women earn around the same amount of money. There is still a wage gap, but it’s slight compared to the national average. That means that the wage gap might not be due to just sexist biases, although that could play a role, but due to something that happens when people have babies. In other words, the wage gap isn’t so much between men and women as it is between moms and everybody else. 

A lot of moms report feeling very isolated when they have their first baby as if they’ve been removed from society or a significant part of their identity was taken from them. One study found that in heterosexual married couples where both partners work full time, the woman in the relationship, on average, spends nine more hours on household chores and childcare than her husband, which, over a year, equates to three months of a full-time job. Even if you hire childcare, or home cleaning services, which are exorbitantly expensive, there are still times when a parent has to be home, like if their child gets sick or if you need to participate in meetings with teachers. Also, many people want to spend time with their kids, and for that reason, might intentionally choose careers that give them the opportunity to spend more time at home. 

So it makes sense that research suggests that the gender pay gap is lower in industries that offer things like:

• Remote work
• Flexible scheduling, being able to work on your own time
• Output-based compensation, so pay based on completed tasks instead of hourly pay
• Autonomy over location

 

Studies show that in jobs where long, inflexible hours are rewarded (like law, finance, or corporate management), the gender pay gap is larger.

But in fields that give you more autonomy over when and where you get things done (like pharmacy or tech), the gender pay gap is smaller.

Even before the pandemic made remote work more common, authors could control when they worked and where they worked, and we’re compensated based on the tasks we complete, not how long it took us to complete them. That makes writing a very attractive career for a woman who is smart, creative, and driven, but maybe also doesn’t want to feel like she will be punished in her career for having children. Or maybe a woman is already a mom, and she can’t work in person at her law firm anymore, but she can write while her baby sleeps or plays with dad. That could be a reason why so many women are funneled or funnel themselves into writing as a career choice. 

This becomes cyclical as well; when a certain niche consists of almost entirely men, then there’s more of a chance of the few women there being sexually harassed at some point, more chance that she won’t get maternity leave or will be passed over for promotions because even if she has zero desire to be a mother the higher-ups think that at some point she might take maternity leave or become less committed to the company. This makes fields like publishing and writing with predominantly women very attractive to women as well, and thus the idea that “women work in publishing” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

As for reading more, I will say that most women realize a a young age that the world can be very dangerous and even hostile toward us, so maybe there are adventures that we would love to have or romances and sexual partners that would be intriguing to us, but in order to protect our own safety, we step away from those fantasies and dreams in real life. Fiction and books can be a way to explore those experiences and live out those fantasies without running the risk of getting hurt.

 

Part V: The idea that fiction is feminine is not new.

As mentioned earlier, in the 18th and 19th centuries, fiction writing was considered feminine. Do you know what was considered the masculine, intelligent alternative to writing novels?

Poetry. 

At the time, poetry was considered the highest literary form, requiring intellect, discipline, and control, and thus, it was more suited for men. We can laugh because now poetry is considered more feminine, but we still do this– we still separate people into different creative pursuits in accordance with their gender. It’s not that men are not writing or aren’t creative. I know plenty of fantastic male writers who are video game writers, screenwriters, or who write hip-hop, which is a form of modern-day poetry. And just because they aren’t writing books, that doesn’t mean they aren’t writers or that their work is any less valuable. 

But, especially as a writer myself, I still hate to see fiction writing belittled, and I don’t want to see men pushed out of the field because they could be mocked for it. 

Because, on the extreme misogynistic right, we see hustle culture and anti-intellectualism dismissing reading and writing as a waste of time. One tweet from famous human trafficker Andrew Tate reads:

Famed crypto fraudster, Sam Bankman-Fried also said, “I would never read a book,” and famed Nazi sympathizer Kanye West has also been quoted saying he doesn’t read any books. Of course, the attitude among the extreme online right is that reading is a waste of time because a man’s life should be dedicated to productivity for productivity’s sake, regardless of the morality of what you are being productive working on. It doesn’t matter if you’re trafficking and beating women, committing wire fraud, money laundering, harassing your ex-wife, or making trash Hitler music, just do more of it and faster! Don’t stop to examine your life and the morality of your actions, just be more productive, and that’s what will give your life purpose as a man. 

Still, many of the articles that claim there is misandry in the publishing industry don’t point to the extreme right but rather to the culture of the left when deciding where to place the blame for a decline in male writers and readers.

 

Jacob Savage writes: “The mockery of male literary ambition—exemplified by the sudden cultural banishment of David Foster Wallace—has had a powerfully chilling effect. Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them.”

 

To be fair, I have seen mockery on the left of men, even sometimes, specifically male writers. A famous Twitter account mocked “The guy in your MFA” and actually went on to become a book of its own. A recent article in Dazed listed “red flag books” and proceeded to tell women to run from any man who reads Lolita or A Clockwork Orange. A recent video criticized Anthony Bourdain, a travel writer and chef who normalized sitting with and breaking bread with colonized people, for “breaking how a generation of men eat.” And with behaviors like travel and reading being able to open our minds and make us more empathetic, I would advise these writers and commentators on the left against complaining that men are not more empathetic, then also mocking them when they engage in behaviors that make people more empathetic.

But even as I’m writing about these examples, I can’t help but notice how vanilla these comments are compared to the more direct and intentional anti-intellectual effort on the right to belittle reading and writing. It is, of course, the right that bans books from being taught in schools or included in libraries because they had a gay character in them, or because they acknowledged that trans people exist. I should also mention that the recent articles I mentioned, like the Red Flag Books piece in Dazed and the Anthony Bourdain criticism, were very unpopular. I don’t think they’re representative of how people on the left feel about gender and reading. 

I could also argue, if we take a step back and forget where the mockery is coming from, that anyone promoting strict gender roles or anyone mocking all men or all women for a certain behavior, is engaging in the same philosophy by working to uphold the gender binary, regardless of whether it comes from the right or left.

I think online discourse about gender too often turns into “Are you pro-men? Or pro-women?” Do girls go to college to get more knowledge, or do they go to Jupiter to get more stupider? When really, the entire argument should be misogynistic people vs. non-misogynistic people. As children, we are all curious and experimental and artistic, then when we get older, we are pushed into these two lines of male and female that supposedly dictate everything about our personalities, from what we read to what job we have to how we move our hands and how we talk and even how we piss. Even people who, on the surface, appear to uphold all of the masculine or feminine stereotypes often carry a tremendous amount of anxiety or shame around their gender and their body and their sexuality. When you see people like Andrew Tate speaking out against reading, understand that it’s not that he’s pro-men and feminists are pro-women, as those movements often get distilled to. He is pro-gender binary. If a man wants to read fiction or take care of his kids, or say, hey, maybe we shouldn’t sex-traffic young women! Then that man is just as much an enemy to misogynistic ideology as any blue-haired feminist. And if a woman claims to be a feminist but attacks men by body-shaming them or uses revenge porn to humiliate them, then she’s also doing her job to uphold the gender binary. This isn’t men vs. women, it’s all of us against restrictive gender roles that lead people to hold onto a lot of anxiety and shame about their identity. 

 

So if you’re mocking men for liking to read, then whether you’re on the right or left, you’re working to uphold the gender binary. Instead of turning this into a girls vs boys debate, let’s critique all behavior that tries to place the expanse of human consciousness, interests, and relationships into two neat boxes. 

 

Part VI: Women love men who read.

This is a short point, but I wanted to make this its whole section, just to really drive this point home. If you’re a young man, please don’t get dating advice from men online who have to kidnap or pay women just to be near them. Why don’t we ask women how they feel? 

One survey gave women a list of 74 hobbies and asked them to rank them in order of attractiveness, and the number one most attractive hobby in a man, considered attractive by 98.2% of women, was reading. 

The other most attractive hobbies in order were speaking a foreign language, playing an instrument, cooking, woodworking, painting, and writing. 

 

The least attractive hobbies were weed, funko pops, arguing online, porn, gambling, and manosphere, which is crazy. I really thought women loved hyper-masculine chads who bought courses about how to pick up women from Myron Gaines, author of Why Women Deserve Less, but apparently, women don’t like that?

The examples I found above of women mocking men who read or who have feminine hobbies were honestly difficult for me to find. It was much easier for me to find instances of women thirsting over guys who read. The Instagram account HotDudesReading has over a million followers. One eHarmony study found that men who listed “reading” as an interest received a 19% bump in messages from women. OkCupid also confirmed in the book Dataclysm that men who list intellectual or literary interests receive more messages from women than those who don’t. 

 

So, many signs are pointing less to the fact that women hate male writers and readers, and more to the fact that there are great cultural and sociological factors that make it harder for people to gain and maintain an interest in the written word, and we’re kind of just using women as a scapegoat. 

Part VII: Rejection is a Gift

In June 2015, I decided that my great life’s passion and the purpose of my existence was to be a writer. More than a decision, it was a realization. When Haruki Murakami realized he would be a novelist, he described this choice by saying, “Something flew down from the sky at that instant, and, whatever it was, I accepted it.”

 

After I graduated from university with my degrees in English and theater, I left the United States to work as an English teacher in the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. There, I had no internet connection in my apartment, I was inspired by unique and abundant nature, my Spanish still wasn’t good enough to be a social butterfly, and so I dedicated most of my time to reading and writing. 

 

My novel, Equator, took place in the Galapagos, naturally. The protagonist was a 22-year-old girl. And Equator kept me company as I lived on the islands for a year, when I left to move to Buenos Aires when I met my husband, and all the way up until I was 27 when I decided to release my precious baby into the world and start querying literary agents. 

 

I thought finishing my novel would feel like a huge burden lifted, but instead, I experienced a sort of grief. When you are involved in a large creative project, it gives you immense purpose. Your life starts to revolve around this one work of art– everything that happens to you becomes simply fodder for story ideas. In that way, writing a novel is intensely personal. The query process is set up so that you have to go through this intensely personal experience of writing and finishing a novel before you can start to send it to publishers. 

 

If you want to query a non-fiction book, that doesn’t require a complete manuscript. Instead, you submit a book proposal to literary agents. If your idea is trash, they let you know before you write the book. But if you want to publish a novel, you have to write it first, which often takes years for a first-time writer with a day job, and then you can start reaching out to literary agents. So, by the time you start to query agents, you’ve already invested your heart and soul into this project. The novel, in a way, is you. It contains your most intimate thoughts and fears– it’s a vulnerable thing to hand over to a stranger.

 

Over the course of querying from the ages of 27-29, I got a lot of rejections (I stopped counting how many), but there was one that really stung. The agent of a well-known book that many of you have probably read, was interested in Equator after I sent him my query letter, which put me on cloud nine. In a classic rookie mistake, I told everyone I knew about his interest in my query letter before he even read the book. Then, when he did read the manuscript and responded to me, he didn’t just tell me that he wasn’t a good fit for my book; he told me that he couldn’t even finish the first chapter because it was so flawed. And I would love to tell you that this rolled off my back, but I was devastated by this rejection. This isn’t an inspiring, comeback-kid story; I ultimately agreed with a lot of the agent’s criticism, and, in the end, I decided not to publish the Equator. I figured my efforts would be better spent either writing the next novel or sharing my writing on my blog or on YouTube, and that’s how I ended up here. 

 

And I wanted to include this story so that you know that I’m not coming into this discussion with a holier-than-thou perspective. If you have felt rejected or isolated by the publishing industry, I empathize with that feeling, and I’m not going to criticize anyone for feeling that way or trivialize your frustrations because I know how it feels to give everything you had to a project just to be rejected. And it sucks. I understand feeling that sting and wanting to find some scapegoat, and I understand how tempting it is to point to a scapegoat, especially when there are articles or think pieces claiming that the reason for your failure is women. 

 

However…

 

It’s important to understand that failure is one of life’s greatest gifts, and protecting yourself from the sting of failure with your own emotional avoidance is like taking that gift and throwing it into a fire before you open it. If you blame your personal failures on minorities or women or Sally Rooney or even just successful people, then the only person you are hurting is yourself, because you’re missing the chance to reflect on why this project failed and what you can do better next time. Because, if I’m being honest with myself, when I went back and read my novel, it just wasn’t great. It wasn’t as great as it would have needed to be to be a fantastic success as a debut novel. And why would it be great? It was the first time I ever wrote a novel– I was learning. The fact that I ever thought my first novel could become a New York Times bestseller with some celebrity agent is probably indicative of some form of entitlement, to begin with.

 

Part VIII: You’re not entitled to a book deal. 

Here are some relevant statistics about publishing:

• Every year. Around 3 million new books are published. Of those, only 500,000 are published through traditional publishing houses. So only about 16% of books written get traditionally published. That’s not even counting all the books, like mine, that were written but never published in any capacity.
• If you do publish your book or if somebody published your book, there is a less than 1% chance that it will be stocked in bookstores. 
• And if you do get into bookstores, only 32% of book sales are new titles. Not new authors– new titles. The other 68% are classics, textbooks, and books that have already been out for more than a month or so. 

 

In other words, it is unlikely that a debut author’s book will get traditionally published, especially if you aren’t a celebrity or somebody who already has an audience. If your book gets published, it’s highly unlikely it will make it to bookstores, and if it makes it to bookstores, it’s highly unlikely that people will buy it. So if you’re crying about not getting a book deal, and again, trust me, I understand, then that sounds to me less like a women problem, and more like an entitlement problem. 

Psychologists have found that when athletes come in third place after a competition, they tend to be much happier than the person who came in second. This doesn’t seem like it would make sense– a silver medal is better than a bronze. But the person in third place is just happy to be on the podium, while the person in second place is frustrated they didn’t get first. The person in second is left feeling, thinking they could have done one thing differently and been in the first place. It’s the same reason the person who misses a flight by three hours isn’t as upset as the person who missed it by a few minutes. 

And I bring it up because I think that you see this mentality among a lot of privileged people, especially among these predominantly white, North American, coastal, educated, upper middle-class groups who are very well-represented in publishing and MFA programs. These groups are not nepo babies. Maybe both of your parents are successful engineers, and they gave you a great, suburban lifestyle, but they can’t guarantee you a book deal or a modeling contract or a Broadway role the same way they could if they were in the 1%. The people in these privileged-but-not-nepo-babies groups didn’t grow up with that golden ticket to artistic stardom. But the trap is that they grow up close enough to the nepo babies to think that goals like fame and fortune are reasonable goals instead of what they really are, which are statistical improbabilities for the average person. Whereas if you have a more normal background, these goals are also statistical improbabilities, but you might at least recognize them as such. You see this a lot with college admissions. If someone grows up with a more average financial background, or in a very small town, or outside of the U.S., or with parents who didn’t go to university, and that person got waitlisted at Harvard, maybe they’re the only person in their circle who ever even applied to Harvard, and they could be thrilled. Meanwhile, a kid who grew up in Manhattan and went to boarding school is sobbing, crying about getting the same result and saying, But I deserved it. I worked so hard! And you kind of want to tell them, I can see that this pain is very real for you, but just statistically speaking, most people don’t get into Harvard, so maybe the issue isn’t that you didn’t get in, but that you thought you “deserved” it in the first place.

And although these people, especially young people, have a lot of privileges, I also think that it’s not a good position to be in, in terms of mental health, to grow up feeling entitled to something that, percentage-wise, essentially nobody gets. So, for some people like this, writing your first novel and not getting a publishing deal feels like a massive failure instead of what it really is, which is just what was most likely to happen. 

And I do think that a lot of the people who are writing these articles to complain about not getting book deals come from these privileged-but-not-nepo groups that I’m describing. While many articles are trying to turn this into a culture war by blaming women for taking more spots in the publishing industry, there is little to no mention in any of these articles of the fact that most of the people who find success in the arts and “take those positions from you” are people who come from wealth. I mentioned earlier that one study found that only 8% of UK artists come from a working-class background. Another study found that with every $10,000 more that a family earns, the odds increase by 2% that a child from that family will go into an artistic field, meaning that someone from a family worth one million dollars is ten times more likely to become an artist than someone from a family worth $100,000. In the article “The Vanishing White Male Writer,” we find a quote from an anonymous literary agent who says, “I think it’s harder for white men, In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience.” I think mentioning class in this quote was a mistake. If you’re bothered that white men aren’t getting as many book deals, then say that, and we can discuss it, but don’t try to shoehorn class consciousness into this conversation when only 8% of artists are from the working class. Doesn’t that seem like a discrepancy? The vast majority of the world population is working class, and yet only a fraction of artists are. If we want to improve the quality of the artistic canon and get better art in the world,  then wouldn’t it first make sense to address that major bias before we address a much smaller gender discrepancy? I wish I saw as much discussion about how to include artists from humble families in the creative industries as I do about how men are being passed over. The new publishing company that only publishes books by men that I mentioned earlier, Conduit Books, they have said in press releases that they encourage men from working-class backgrounds to apply, which I think is a step in the right direction, but did you know that women also sometimes come from working-class backgrounds and their odds are also unfair?

And again, I do believe that a lot of the people writing these articles claiming that men don’t get book deals come from privileged environments. Because when I read some of these articles, I can’t help but hear resentment and entitlement. In the article “The War on White Male Fiction Writers,” Lou Aguilar (Jump scare. He has the same last name as me.) writes: “ r agents who read it liked my writing but not my white face, even with a Latin shade.” (Ok so I looked it up, and Lou Aguilar was born in Cuba. That means that The New York Times book review would actually consider him an “author of color,” not a white author, so it sounds like he’s picking up this lance for white people in the publishing industry who wouldn’t even consider him to be one of them anyway, but I digress.) He continues: “Two [agents] told me so in more diplomatic terms. Even though my second book Paper Tigers is a Great American Novel.” Dude, you don’t get to call your own novel a Great American Novel. Somebody else has to call it that. According to the Atlantic, in the last 100 years, there have been 136 books considered Great American Novels, but before this guy could even consider the possibility that he didn’t write a Great American Novel, he first jumped to blaming women, and the fact that he self-identifies as “white with a Latin shade” when the publishing industry would not even consider him white. Could it be more likely that you just didn’t write a book the same caliber as The Great Gatsby? Isn’t that a more logical first conclusion?

The article that has most recently sparked this male writers debate, “The Vanishing White Male Writer,” was written by someone unknown named Jacob Savage, who I think was likely using a pen name because there is no other information about him online. 

In Savage’s article, he also has this debate with himself that essentially goes like this:

 

“There are no more great male writers!”

 

“Okay, what about Tony Tulathimutte and Tao Lin and Tommy Orange–”

 

“I meant there are no more white male writers.”

 

“Oh, okay, what about Nathan Hill and Joshua Cohen and Ben Lerner and Michael Connelly and Adam Ross–”

 

“I meant millennial white male writers.”

 

“Oh. What about Adam Ehrlich Sachs or Zach Williams or Phil Klay or Jordan Castro or Andrew Martin or Ben Shattuck or Lee Cole or Stephen Markley or Peter Vack or Matthew Davis?”

 

“I meant white, male, millennial authors who write fiction that takes place in the modern day and don’t have protagonists who are queer or non-white or women or woke and who don’t apologize for being white!”

 

How many identifiers do you have to add before you realize that the person you’re angry hasn’t been published, is you? You’re not identifying a hole in the market, you are inventing a perfectly you-shaped hole so that you can blame the industry for your failures instead of yourself. It would be like if my first book didn’t get published, and instead of starting a YouTube channel, which has been a great addition to my life, I wrote an article called, “Where are all the books taking place on the Galapagos Islands written by women born in 1995 and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania and why is nobody talking about this gaping hole in the market???

 

Part IX: Books are good

The artificial intelligence industry would have you believe that writing created by a robot that was trained on stolen words from writers can replace all types of professional artists. Glue-sniffing, mouth-breathing manosphere influencers would have you believe that reading is a waste of time because it doesn’t directly relate to your productivity levels. And wannabe right-wing Christo-fascists want to convince you that any empathetic and eye-opening education and literary prowess makes you less of a man. As far as I’m concerned, they can all get fucked. They’re wrong. 

 

A world with more people who read and write is a smarter one, a more empathetic one, and a kinder one. So instead of yelling at each other about the gender of the people writing, I want to make a call for unity among all artists. Fortunately, we chose to become artists because we believe in the power of the written word, the painted canvas, or the dancing body. So use that power and use your craft to speak words of unity and of a brotherhood and sisterhood among artists. Create and consume art as an act of play, like a child, unconcerned with the opinions of others. 

 

Needing to be productive, feeling rejected or resentful, being caught in the droll of issues like gendered roles and petty anxieties; it’s normal. That just makes you human. But being an artist, the act of creation, that makes you divine.