So, if the Romantasy bubble will burst (and evidently it's probably soon), what will take its place? Because what the recent years have taught me is that any industry will immediately create a new gravy train once the previous ones are derailed, and the book industry is no exception
So, if the Romantasy bubble will burst (and evidently it's probably soon), what will take its place? Because what the recent years have taught me is that any industry will immediately create a new gravy train once the previous ones are derailed, and the book industry is no exception
I worry that the fiction publishing industry overall is not going to see a shift back towards men's interests (or even just gender-neutral interests that appeal to both) for a very long time.
There will always be less-successful, lesser-known examples out there from niche publishers going, "hey, we're still here! Why don't you count us?" as they sell 200 copies of a book that everyone wants to praise on twitter as "one of ours," but it never gets read. And there will be exceptions from the authors who are big enough to write whatever they want, and they'll continue to write for the broadest "summer blockbuster" audience possible. But I think that they'll remain exceptions.
Publishers have been steering really hard into female-oriented subgenres for a while now, and women now make up a huge majority of fiction readers and purchasers. I worry that this feedback loop between the things that publishers put out and the women who show up to read it (and the men who leave because they're not being catered to) has significantly reshaped the fiction market.
We know that trends get popular and then fade over time, and we probably expect romantasy to rise and then eventually fall like noir pulps or westerns did, or like superhero movies seem to be doing now. But it seems like all of those past genre trends were fairly gender-neutral. They appealed (with varying success) and, maybe more importantly, were trying to appeal to both men and women, because both men and women read fiction at closer-to-equal rates and were potential customers.
But once the fiction-buying market is overwhelmingly women, why would publishers try to cater to anyone else?
There's always the hope that you could attract men to your audience and thereby basically double your customers. It seems tantalizing.
But if publishers were to change their output so much that their female customers (more and more, they're a specific type of woman) didn't like it anymore, then the publishers would be risking losing an audience which they do currently have in an attempt to add an audience which they might get to have... or, they might not, in which case the publishers would then be left with no audience.
It just seems like a way bigger risk for fiction publishers to go after men again than it is to just keep what they have with women. It seems way easier to maintain something that already appeals to both men and women, and way harder to try to force something which only appealed to either men or women to now appeal to both of them.
And all of this is only taking the customers' interests into account, as if "voting with your wallet" is the only thing that affects publishing output. I'm not even looking at the ideological drivers within publishing which initially steered the market in this direction, and which I expect will be quite resistant to change (even in the face of financial losses) for as long as they're around.
That's why, when romantasy and cozy fantasy and whatever else eventually becomes played-out and gets replaced by a new genre, I worry that it'll just be another female-oriented genre.
Women's tastes will have shifted and they'll demand something new, so the aesthetics will change, but fiction publishers will still be writing for the same women.
Maybe indie finally takes off and comes up with a parallel industry out of nowhere and saves us all. From what I've seen, though, I'm not optimistic.
I'm also young enough that I don't really have a good feel for the past genres that I mentioned rising and falling, and if they were really as close to gender-neutral as they seem. Nor do I have any sense of how much it might've felt like publishing was catering more to men and women at other points in the past.
So if any of this sounds way-off-base and retarded, contradict me.
Good luck with that. The industry is female dominated top to bottom. Publishers, editors, agents, influencers, writers, and consumers. The only way you're going to change that is to get more men reading and let the pressure work it's way up to the top. Until that happens there isn't enough certainty of profit for the risk-averse industry leaders to bother taking a gamble like that. You'd probably have to start with much smaller, niche publishers and build from there. Cultural change takes a long time, it isn't going to be a trend.
There was a thread recently in the RomanceBooks sub asking "how many romance books have you read in your lifetime?" and the answers were in the thousands. One woman estimated 20.000 romance books total. So until men start putting those kinds of numbers up...
But once the fiction-buying market is overwhelmingly women, why would publishers try to cater to anyone else?
There's always the hope that you could attract men to your audience and thereby basically double your customers. It seems tantalizing.
But if publishers were to change their output so much that their female customers (more and more, they're a specific type of woman) didn't like it anymore, then the publishers would be risking losing an audience which they do currently have in an attempt to add an audience which they might get to have... or, they might not, in which case the publishers would then be left with no audience.
There's always the hope that you could attract men to your audience and thereby basically double your customers. It seems tantalizing.
But if publishers were to change their output so much that their female customers (more and more, they're a specific type of woman) didn't like it anymore, then the publishers would be risking losing an audience which they do currently have in an attempt to add an audience which they might get to have... or, they might not, in which case the publishers would then be left with no audience.
Please consult this graph.
Women are, in general, massive consoomers. I used to think it was a 50/50 profit spread but it probably isn’t as clean when half of the men will either pirate or buy the cheapest paperback version.
Men prefer to do other things than read fiction when they have the freedom to do so apparently, (like gaming or watching) and the female "domination" of the industry seems to be more of a consequence of this than the inverse.
I don't think romantasy is going away pe say, maybe romance/another genre, romance will always be there; but I think it'll be more splintering into different genres - romantasy, romance/history, romance/military, romance/crime, readers are growing up with books expecting tropes and to bring up book boxes again, many of the book box companies are offering new Genres/types of books and the publishing companies or agents have subdivisions that sort of specialise in each genre (i can't remember the one that literally only publishes rewritten fanfic but its one of the Dramione book people). I do think there's a cultural shift on social media all over to be 'more unique', people are sick of everything being the same everywhere but still aren't brave enough/intellgient enough/don't know their own personal likes to stop following trends as a whole.
I was thinking about the shitty YA dystopians I read as a teen, did anyone read Maximum Ride? what a fucking trip that series was. IK it was definitely ghostwritten but jesus
The graphic novels really capture that 2010s early Western manga vibe.
Men prefer to do other things than read fiction when they have the freedom to do so apparently, (like gaming or watching) and the female "domination" of the industry seems to be more of a consequence of this than the inverse.
Oh I agree completely. I think men enjoy good fiction and writing just as much as women do, they just consume them in different ways. I always go back to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as my gold standard for video game writing and storytelling, and it's massively popular with men for that exact reason. I don't think men were forced out of the industry, but left it for mediums that appealed to them more. There still lots of men who read for fun and there's plenty of content out there for them, but the demand for new books isn't nearly as great as what we see in more female-focused genres.
Please consult this graph. View attachment 8087952
Women are, in general, massive consoomers. I used to think it was a 50/50 profit spread but it probably isn’t as clean when half of the men will either pirate or buy the cheapest paperback version.
Oh yeah, many surveys and data of different entertainment industries showed that women is always the bigger spender. That is almost an universal truth. However, no one have ever specified nor researched the reason why
My brother hypothesised that the reason is that women buys stuff in small amount/price, but very very FREQUENTLY and that adds up A LOT. Men, however, are reluctant spender and though often splurge only done so rarely
It's a volume vs quality thing, and the volume won
Oh yeah, many surveys and data of different entertainment industries showed that women is always the bigger spender. That is almost an universal truth. However, no one have ever specified nor researched the reason why
My brother hypothesised that the reason is that women buys stuff in small amount/price, but very very FREQUENTLY and that adds up A LOT. Men, however, are reluctant spender and though often splurge only done so rarely
It's a volume vs quality thing, and the volume won
Dudes go for something very specific. If a guy with a reading hobby uses e-readers, he's either pirating everything or hunting for kindle/kobo sales (or using library services). If a guy is the type to exclusively read physical media, he's probably exclusively a used book buyer and thrifts or uses any of the online shops (but waits for prices to dip).
Hell, I prefer physical books. I'll take hardcovers and trade paperbacks if possible. Mass Markets if the price+condition if viable. But that's the thing. The majority of tradpub women's fiction is bought up in the shitloads by women. There's special editions and all sorts of odd collectible things. For my interests (classic sci-fi, fantasy, pulps, crime, horror, weird fiction, etc), there's still shit in publication but it gets scarcer every year and trends towards small limited presses (Haffner, Centipede, Subterranean, etc), print on demand (Steeger Press, Armchair Fiction, DMR Books), or increasingly specific imprints owned under bigger publishers (SF Masterworks, Hard Case Crime, Night Shade, Baen, Tor, etc).
While Doubleday is certainly happy to keep making money from Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, there's not too much money in the variants they can sell. They've got a neat hardcover trilogy omnibus with Whelan art, along with a separate set of paperbacks. I'm willing to bet that if Del Rey or whoever owns the rights to Conan The Barbarian literature were to issue runs of paperbacks with different variant covers from Conan's history (lots of famous artists, like Frazetta), we could see a collectable bump.
Issue is, they haven't thought of this yet and it's likely because it hasn't really worked out.
Also, let's consider that reading as a hobby has dropped. The guys that want to read often start with manga or comics or webnovels. Maybe they go into classics or somesuch. The issue is, the kinda dudes who'd enjoy picking up Elmore Leonard, Robert E. Howard, or Arthur C. Clarke are also the type to just buy Elden Ring or Witcher 3 or any game with solid rpg elements and storytelling. The supply of dudes interested in literature is pretty limited. If a guy wants to read, he's going to look at whatever interests him. I know a lot of men go into the idea of picking stuff that won't waste their time when it comes to fiction. Perhaps that's where some of the issue is. The selection of currently popular-ish and decent men's fiction isn't that wide. Over half of it is by dead writers (Tolkein, Asimov, Dumas, Spillane etc). The others are taken up by names that've been around forever, like Clive Cussler or Stephen King or GRRM. Who does that leave? Fuckin' Joe Abercrombie? Cixin Liu? Let's also not forget that there are long-running authors that, while massively influential to their niche (Michael Moorcock, Glen Cook, etc), the normies don't really know who they are compared to GRRM or The Witcher.
Make reading cool again. Just fucking re-release the old school of covers so dudes can get drawn into thinking something's cool and worth a shot. Not even Baen does those cool old fashioned covers anymore. Last I hear, it was maybe Christopher Ruochhio who did sort of interesting covers on his SF books.
Women who read smut also need to be called out for it too. Jeez.
This isn't an intractable problem - even just 20 years ago there was a pretty stable population of young male readers who regularly consumed written fiction. And nowadays with shit like web novels and indie publishing, there's more avenues than ever to get young men into reading.
Honestly, I'm more sanguine than I have been in a long time about the state of things. The romantasy fad seems to be losing a bit of steam and publishers are looking for the next "ez 10k sales" mealticket genre. The odds are pretty good that a few of them try to scoop up something for the dudes in the hopes of cracking the code.
At the same time, the alternatives for entertainment like vidya, TV shows, movies, and even anime have all gotten extremely lame and gay.
(And that's not even accounting for things like Peter Thiel deciding to throw his billions into making genre fiction great again)
Don't doom, just read what you like and tell people about it. Maybe give some small/indie authors a shot. Things will probably be fine.
This isn't an intractable problem - even just 20 years ago there was a pretty stable population of young male readers who regularly consumed written fiction. And nowadays with shit like web novels and indie publishing, there's more avenues than ever to get young men into reading.
Honestly, I'm more sanguine than I have been in a long time about the state of things. The romantasy fad seems to be losing a bit of steam and publishers are looking for the next "ez 10k sales" mealticket genre. The odds are pretty good that a few of them try to scoop up something for the dudes in the hopes of cracking the code.
At the same time, the alternatives for entertainment like vidya, TV shows, movies, and even anime have all gotten extremely lame and gay.
(And that's not even accounting for things like Peter Thiel deciding to throw his billions into making genre fiction great again)
Don't doom, just read what you like and tell people about it. Maybe give some small/indie authors a shot. Things will probably be fine.
I just talk about Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, Poul Anderson, and the like. For some reason, the only people who make a fuss about it all are faggots who got caught up too much in the culture war.
Oh yeah, many surveys and data of different entertainment industries showed that women is always the bigger spender. That is almost an universal truth. However, no one have ever specified nor researched the reason why
My brother hypothesised that the reason is that women buys stuff in small amount/price, but very very FREQUENTLY and that adds up A LOT. Men, however, are reluctant spender and though often splurge only done so rarely
It's a volume vs quality thing, and the volume won
Little bit of Alchemised seething on bookstagram.... https://www.instagram.com/p/DPWiRpQE-eI Black Woman complaining this book isn't 'diverse enough' and if you read Alchemised because you want to support POC/Tranny authors you must be reading OTHER approved(TM) poc/tranny authors. Truly Asians are seen as eastern whites and not POC enough lmfao. Also just becoz SenLinYu is nonbinary it doesnt make it 'diverse enough' either! View attachment 8058225 View attachment 8058218
She ends the video seething that because YOU read a book by a POC nonbinary you must ALSO follow her because she is black and nonbinary.
"Everyone" is equal, therefore "everyone" must equally share in resources, including the consumers. That means they rationalize the idea that they get an equal slice of the pie to [insert mainstream author]
