Female Dominant

We can say it out loud now: Women rule fiction

The first time I read that women dominated contemporary fiction by as much as eighty percent was in a 2021 article in the Guardian called, “How Women Conquered the World of Fiction,” which is the first article I recall seeing in a legacy publication that addressed an elephant in the room. In publishing, there’s a few elephants in the room, a small herd. Self-publishing, for example, is the play-fighting juvenile elephant, getting too big for its breeches. AI is the baby elephant, cute but unbearably whiney and always getting in trouble. Yet when it comes to elephants in rooms—issues that should be confronted, talked about more, talked about openly—make no mistake, the dominance of women in all areas of publishing is the matriarch. With a gentle wave of her trunk—no need for a trumpet blast—the matriarch calmly and reassuringly says, “No, you’re not imagining things,” to the scores of young male writers who had set out to search for an agent only to encounter in agency staff lists row upon row upon row of women, as if the men had accidentally walked into the wrong washroom.

Men can’t whine and complain about fiction being ruled by women. (Lads, stop insulting us all by doing so.) For that matter, the Guardian article reminds us that men dominated the first five thousand years of publishing and, over those millennia, we were not super nice. The men would not even allow the women to unroll a scroll let alone scribble something. (If anything, then, we’re seeing a pretty good revenge fantasy play out.) So what has happened? Look at publishing today, a different world from just decades ago, as if an uprising had occurred and the men were not just defeated, they were knocked out of existence. Look at the debris-strewn battlefield, the blood-soaked pages that flutter in the wind to the raven’s caw. The time of the war novel is over. The time of the western novel is over. The time of the two-bit private dick novel is over. The time of the sexual insecurities but ultimately sexual conquests of the male of the species novel is over. Your nail gun factory trilogy? Forget it. That world is gone. Today is a new era. A female dominant era in the publishing of fiction has dawned. But again, how? When? What happened?

While a number of cultural shifts have occurred, mostly daughters of Women’s Lib, a shift that should receive more attention in terms of the publishing industry itself is a shift that didn’t involve men at all, it involved boys, that being the decades-long trend of boys abandoning books for video games. With little interest in video games, the girls kept reading and the novel remained a part of women’s lives. This phenomenon of the home video game and the Pied Piper effect it had on boys (but not girls) sparked the zeitgeist for women in publishing of which we are now in the midst. The arc of the home video game fits snuggly into the last fifty years, say 1975 to 2025, with 1975 being the debut of the home video version of Pong, the first video game that would cross the boundary from arcade to rec room and change everything. Home video games took hold in the 1980s with Atari and Nintendo and even moreso in the much slicker 1990s of Sega and PlayStation. By the turn of the Millennium, video games had moved past movies and music in terms of global revenue, so popular the industry hardly had to advertise. The boys, rapt, continued to follow the Piper. The girls? They kept reading. (“Space Invaders? Puh-lease.”) Today, a few generations on, look at publishing. Publishers, editors, agents, executives at all levels, proofreaders, designers, writers, readers, women are the vast majority.

Women have become so dominant in publishing that a big question now is, “How do we get the men back?” This is a question worth asking as without the men (and their wallets) half the money is being left on the table, a massive, untapped market and this at a time when publishing needs all the help it can get, especially here in the wake of a hundred year migration from page to screen, a wave that looms over even the mighty video game. In the 1920s, the movie screen was the first new age competitor for the novel, which had been ruling comfortably for more than 300 years; a few decades later, the 1950s, the TV screen impinged on the novel even more; a few more decades, in the 1980s, the computer screen changes the world; a few decades after that, into a new Millennium, the phone screen, which seems to be the screen into which we stare more than the others combined. It’s impressive that the novel survives given the competition for our time that seems to come along every few decades. (And then, lest we forget, AI arrives at the publishing party—uninvited—and does a cannonball in the talent pool, the pool where young readers and writers had been wading quietly, developing and growing.)

The women of publishing, the eighty percent, have been accused of catering to female readers. Well, let’s be honest, they do cater to female readers but can you blame them? Women—not men—are spending money on novels. And keep in mind, there’s another area of publishing where the rule of 80-20 applies, that being the Five Headed Monster. (NOTE: I can’t use a strong, positive-sounding name like “The Big 5” for a group of companies that represents the epitome of the corporate monopolization that is destroying—not just publishing—but civilization, a dark force I spend much of my life railing against.) At last count, the Five Headed Monster controls about eighty percent of fiction. As a result of this relentless monopolization by corporations, publishing is now owned by hedge fund managers, not book lovers, and we have five publishers where there used to be dozens. That’s publishing now and, employing the corporate business model, you are going to cater to your main customer base, you are going to keep them happy and spending, and so female readers hold the horn of plenty. The contents of the horn? Women novelists, genres and storylines. How else to explain the new golden goose, Romantasy? Over decades, as the women move in to fantasy and the men (well, the men still left post-Piper) are crowded out, romance mysteriously begins to appear in fantasy and soon a bouncing new portmanteau is born.

Do brilliant, book-loving people still work in publishing, even in this dark realm of the Five Headed Monster? Of course they do. Don’t insult me. It’s just that publishing, in this new corporate environment, has changed, just as the other arts have changed. Look around. Look at music and that horrid, thieving Spotify. Look at Hollywood and its ongoing collapse in slow-mo. The rulers of the arts are now Google and Apple and other denizens of the tragicomedy that is Silicon Valley and we are now seeing the results of that takeover. At present, we have a case of the ignorant few leading the many. That’s not only a threat to publishing, that’s a threat to humanity.

Sorry, this was supposed to be a men-women publishing thing, wasn’t it?