Girly-girl books

Jamie K. Wilson is publishing a seven-part series on DEI’s effect on publishing. I’ve certainly noticed what she’s talking about; Amazon sends me monthly “First Read” suggestions, and almost all are by female authors — the few written by males tend to be Clive Cussler-type action/adventure crapola novels holding no interest for me.

I’ve nothing against female authors, and read plenty of them, but almost none written in the past twenty years because the plots as described involve “deep, psychological turmoil”,l and “victory over oppression”, and “personal angst” and … blah blah blah.

In any event, here are excerpts from Wilson’s series:

DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot. Part 1 of 7: The Gatekeepers

Once upon a time, an aspiring fiction writer had a fighting chance. If you wrote a good story, polished your manuscript, and braved the slush pile, you might just get picked up. The system wasn’t perfect, but it was meritocratic enough that talent sometimes slipped through the cracks and found its way into print.

That world is gone.

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.

This isn’t just rumor. It’s been noticed by people inside the industry. In 2022, Joyce Carol Oates, no right-wing firebrand but one of America’s most respected novelists, said that a literary agent friend of hers couldn’t even get editors to look at debut novels by white male authors. “They are just not interested,” she wrote, calling the situation “heartbreaking.” Best-selling thriller author James Patterson said much the same: white male writers face a harder time breaking in, a trend he called “another form of racism.”

Mainstream media rushed to shut them down. CNN ran a feature insisting the data “disagrees.” Their proof? A Penguin Random House audit showing that between 2019 and 2021, 76 percent of their authors were white (only 34 percent were men, but they downplayed that). A New York Times study that found 95 percent of novels in major houses were by white people. “Not a thing,” industry insiders declared.

But look closer. Those numbers are backward-looking, reflecting backlist contracts and long-established names. They say nothing about what Oates and Patterson were pointing out: the front door is closing. How many of those 2019–2021 books were new debuts by white men, as opposed to reprints or ongoing series from long-successful authors? CNN didn’t ask, because the answer might have proved Oates right.

And the truth is, this didn’t begin in 2019. I was hearing these stories nearly a decade earlier. Back in 2012, talented male writers were already telling me they couldn’t get their feet in the door, no matter how polished the work. If your manuscript smacked of conservatism in any way, you may as well self-publish. Stephen England is a prime example. His thrillers — more than twenty books, including the outstanding Shadow Warriors series — sell well and showcase an outstanding writer. Yet he is entirely self-published because his plots center around conservative themes. The gatekeepers would never give him a chance.

This was not an isolated story. Over and over, I heard the same thing: men with strong manuscripts, who in a more normal publishing climate would at least have received trial contracts, were locked out. But this is not a normal time for fiction. Instead of looking at quality, the industry is looking at equity. How do you boost minority authors? If that's your focus, you must exclude other groups, no matter how talented they may be. Inevitably, when you shrink the pool of potential talent, you wind up with weaker books — and you lose readers.

Unsurprisingly, the industry today is beginning to shrink. Readers are falling away, and new books are selling poorly. Publishing insiders seem baffled as to why this is happening. The answer is obvious: books are not widgets. Each one is different, and it must connect with an audience.

….

By refusing to bring in fresh male writers while leaning on the output of older, established ones whose production will inevitably slow down, publishers are ensuring they will also lose male readers. Then they shrug and say, “Well, men just don’t read anymore.”

But men did read twenty years ago. They still want to read. The problem is that they aren’t finding new books they want. So they turn to used bookstores and libraries, revisit their own shelves for overlooked titles, or simply buy classics. In other words, they keep reading — just not the new books the industry relies on for its profits.

DEI vs. Story, Part 4: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Silencing of the Straight White Male

There's a story I keep hearing from male writer friends and acquaintances. They tell me, with variations on the theme: “I found a dozen literary agents right for my book, but when I sent them the manuscript, only six had the courtesy to respond, all with rejections. When I asked what I had done wrong, they said nothing was wrong with the book, but that editors are not considering titles written by straight white males. Then came the question: Do you maybe have Native American ancestry or something?” Considering that in 1970 about 70% of books were written by men, most of them white and probably straight, this is quite a swing.

…. The Numbers Tell the Story

In Compact, Jacob Savage lays out the evidence: by 2021, not one white male millennial appeared on the New York Times “Notable Fiction” list; the same in 2022; and only one apiece in 2023 and 2024. He concludes bluntly:

The literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down.

The numbers bear him out. Between 2021 and 2024, the New York Times “Notable Fiction” lists, which tends to highlight debut novels, included an average of about fifty novels per year: 48 in 2021, 51 in 2022, 46 in 2023, and 47 in 2024. That is nearly 200 fiction slots across four years. Yet not one of those slots in 2021 or 2022 went to a white male millennial writer, and only one did in 2023 and again in 2024, for a grand total of 1% of the coveted Notable Fiction slots going to these writers. 

Older established figures, men like Cormac McCarthy, still made the cut. But the next generation of white male writers, those without an existing track record or industry allies, has been systematically locked out. The message could not be clearer: if you are a young, unproven straight white male, publishing has no place for you.

The Vanishing Pipeline

American literature has been built on the energy of young writers, especially young men. Roughly 85 percent of the authors who now form the pre-1950 American canon, nearly all of them male, published their first books before the age of 35. Washington Irving was 26 when he debuted, Herman Melville 27, Stephen Crane 22, F. Scott Fitzgerald 23, Ernest Hemingway 24, William Faulkner 29, John Steinbeck 27, Richard Wright 30. Their youthful debuts did not just launch their careers. They supplied the lifeblood of American literature, the raw brilliance that matured into the classics still taught today.

Today that entire pipeline has been severed. Straight white millennial men — the group that should now be filling the same role as those earlier generations — have been almost completely erased from the literary establishment. What once gave American literature its vitality has been deliberately cut off at the root. It is not merely silencing voices in the present. It is strangling the renewal of literature itself. That is not just exclusion or bias. It is, in the truest sense, literary genocide.

The Industry’s Justifications

Gatekeepers insist this exclusion is not discrimination but policy. They argue that white men have already had their turn, that publishing now carries a duty to promote “diverse voices,” that the market supposedly demands it, and that moral justice requires it. These claims form the industry’s defense of shutting out an entire demographic, but when examined closely, they collapse under their own contradictions.

The first justification is overrepresentation. Straight white men, they argue, have already dominated the shelves for centuries. Since the canon is “too full” of these voices, the industry must now impose limits on them to make space for others.

Next comes the diversity mission. Agents and editors increasingly describe themselves as cultural gatekeepers. Their job, they say, is not just to publish books but to reshape the future of literature — and that means elevating “marginalized voices,” even if it requires locking out whole demographics. It is why you can find submission guidelines that openly state they are “not accepting queries from straight white men.”

Then comes the market excuse. We are told that readers no longer want books from white male authors, that the public demands diversity. Yet the sales data keep proving otherwise: bestsellers are still often written by the very people the industry insists nobody wants.

Finally, there is the moral cover. Excluding white men is painted not as bias but as justice. It is “equity,” they say — a correction for past wrongs. The rejection letter is not prejudice; it is progress.

What Readers Lose

But here’s the reality: this collective punishment is not only destructive, it is profoundly unfair. Today’s white male writers had nothing to do with the preponderance of their forebears in the canon. They are simply trying to tell their stories, yet the industry tells them, in effect, you are guilty by birth.

It is unfair to readers as well. I have never once picked up a book because of the author’s skin color or chromosomes. I picked it up because I wanted to read the story. And some of the greatest voices in literature would be silenced if today’s submission standards had existed in their time. Tolkien, Lewis, Twain, Bradbury — men whose work shaped generations — would have been stopped at the door, not because they lacked talent but because they were the wrong classification of people: too white, too male, too straight.

And then there is H.P. Lovecraft. Not only would his race, sex, and orientation have disqualified him, but his conservative and sometimes racist views would have marked him untouchable. Yet his cosmic horror rewired an entire genre and continues to influence writers across the spectrum today.

This is what makes the industry’s new regime so destructive. By refusing to even consider a whole category of writers, they are strangling stories before they can take a breath. It is like killing the child in the cradle, or the womb. We will never know what voices might have risen, what novels might have reshaped our world. That is not mere bias. It is something closer to a cultural crime. 

….

The industry calls this progress, but for many, perhaps most, writers it feels like suffocation. It is not only men being pushed aside. Women who refuse to echo the leftist line are dismissed as well — we uppity women who won’t play the part assigned to us. The message is the same: you don’t have a voice unless you can claim the right identity and endorse the approved agenda. Some writers refuse and take the hard road. Others try to disguise themselves with pen names or invented ancestries. Either way, it breeds a quiet desperation. This is the writer’s dilemma.