Publishing and the Mediocre White Man
I recently reconnected with an old mentor. We’d exchanged emails perhaps once since the last time we talked in the mid 1990s, and so running into him in person was a delight. This mentor was a wonderful teacher, and an excellent writer. In the course of our conversation, however, he made a comment that momentarily collided with the person I remember. While sharing the happy news that a new novel will be coming out in 2026, he described the publisher as one of the few women run publishers still willing to publish an old white man. It’s not unusual to have people who were, seemingly, liberal minded in the past, reappear with shockingly retrograde views, although I don’t think he meant the comment in the way I first interpreted it. Other people have mentioned to me that certain contests and publishers that have never publicly declared a mission to focus on works from previously marginalized groups are simply turning away manuscripts by white men, no matter how good they are. There’s no anger or resentment about that, it’s just a fact they’re sharing, and it tends to be borne out by the contest’s and publisher’s recent selections. So, despite my initial shock, my old mentor’s comment ended up reading not as one of anger or resentment, but simple fact: this is how publishing works now, and there’s no need to be angry about it.
On the other hand, I’ve come across a lot of angry claims of discrimination by male writers who are convinced they are victims of discrimination, and that women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ writers who’ve gotten published are “DEI selections” whose supposedly mediocre books are taking up space that should have gone to them.
I doubt my old mentor is someone who believes those angry, ludicrous claims about publishers picking less worthy books by minorities over the exceptional books by white men. However, considering the general demographic shift going on in publishing (everything from the number of women agents and editors to the decreasing number of men reading fiction), I have to admit that it certainly feels like there’s some minor bit of truth to the notion that white men who would have gotten published in the past are now finding it harder to get published today.
Of course, there are still plenty anecdotal stories about women increasing the response rate on their manuscripts by changing their names to something more gender neutral or masculine. The submission process has never, and will never be, wholly objective. It can be more fair, certainly, but ultimately, picking what book to publish, just like picking what book to read, is a subjective matter of taste and judgement.
The thin line I’m trying to draw here is this: publishing in America has historically been dominated by white men, and when writers like Hemingway were alive, the majority of publishers where white men, the few agents that existed were white men, and so a lot of white men got published who, simply, weren’t that good.
In the last fifty years or so, things have started to change. Not only has awareness grown about how marginalized women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ writers have been, there have been efforts to correct that. There has also been an increase in the amount of market research and sales data available to publishers. Bookscan and Amazon have mounds of data now about who reads what, and how much those demographics read. The most avid readers and the most wide ranging and eclectic readers out there are women—and that includes women who also fall into the BIPOC and LGBTQ intersections. Gay men are next. Straight men are last. On average, straight men generally read less than anyone else, and they also read less fiction in general (they probably think it’s “gay” to read). When straight men do read, they tend to read mostly books written by men and mostly non-fiction. Add to that the “feminization” of the agent and editor ranks, as well as the subsequent shrinking of college humanities programs, especially the number of English degrees granted over the last forty to fifty years, and the truth is there are simply fewer men getting the education needed to have a career in publishing, whether that’s as an agent, editor, or executive.
There are not, however, fewer men trying to be writers. And those men who don’t read much, or who don’t read widely, but think they’re great writers are, basically, the literary equivalent of those dudes who think they can haul their asses off a couch, brush the Cheeto dust off their shirts, and win a fight against a woman MMA fighter.
There’s actually a complex web of factors leading to this perception among some white male writers that they are purposely being shut out, but, again, it’s not because of an anti-male bias in publishing. The Big Five publishers are simply doing what capitalist entities do: they’re pursuing money, ROI, and all that shit. If a publisher’s core audience, their most dependable source of income, is a group of readers whose tastes are eclectic and varied, then that publisher is going to select manuscripts they think such an audience would want to buy. A publisher would lose money if they ignored the most dependable book buying demographic and instead only published books written exclusively by white men who were writing only about what interests white men.
Now, one could argue that if there were more books by white men then more white men would read, but that sort of supply-side thinking doesn’t hold up. It ignores those other factors about the average straight white male, even some of the ones who read: male readers on average do not read women writers and generally read less fiction overall, regardless of the writer’s gender. The data basically suggests that if a straight white male can’t find a book by a straight white man, he simply prefers not to read—there is, after all, sports to be watched. On the other hand, women tend to read across gender, race, and sexual orientation. Women also read a varied mix of fiction and non-fiction. Given that divide, it’s the smart business decision to publish books women would want to read. By doing that, publishers will still end up publishing enough of the books that men who only read men will want to read (when they feel like reading). The men who do read widely across gender, race, and orientation will, essentially, continue to go unnoticed because they constitute, it seems, an insignificant demographic—besides, in our gender inflected world, they “read like women.”
Underneath all that is the “feminization” of the publishing industry, as well as the overall decline in the number of men going to college, and the steep, steep drop in the number of men getting the kind of degrees needed for a career in publishing. So, not only are the Big Five publishers choosing to put out books for their dependable, regular audience of eclectic readers, the people who have the education to be editors come from that same demographic, i.e., women and the small minority of men who aren’t scared away from something because women like it.
When I’ve gone out researching agents to submit to, it’s rare to find a straight male agent who represents literary fiction. The majority of straight male agents tend to focus on non-fiction about sports, technology, politics, science, history, current events, and, of course, business. If they do represent fiction, it’s usually in one of the market-based sub-literary genres like spy thrillers, or detective novels where a certain simplistic style and classic or retrograde male fantasies are still embraced as intrinsic to the genre’s definition, i.e., the hero cop, the patriotic spy, the womanizer who is somehow endlessly appealing to women, and so on. Since I write literary fiction, that means nearly all of my submissions are sent to women because they are the ones acquiring literary fiction.
If I were ignorant of how women are treated by men whom they’ve said no to, it would be easy for me to fall into that conspiracy theory that women agents and editors are discriminating against men. The truth is that dealing with men in general (not just white men), in any situation, carries an elevated amount of risk, especially for women. I have a friend from graduate school, a man, who runs a small press, and he has received at least one death threat from a man whose novel he turned down. So, it’s not a stretch in the slightest to imagine that most women in publishing have received multiple death threats, rape threats, and other threats of more general harm from angry men whose manuscripts they’ve turned down. Add to that, the well documented stories of published male writers, some nationally known with many awards and devoted fan bases, who have turned out to be sexual abusers and predators (Neil Gaiman, Junot Diaz, and Sherman Alexie are first that leap to mind). It’s understandable that women would be reluctant to sign male writers unless the book’s quality and appeal were high enough to override the potential risk, and assuage the regret and disappointment when, in the future, the writer turns out to be a cad.
In other words, if you’re a male writer, especially a white male writer, who is perhaps only moderately talented by publishing’s standards, and whose storylines and characters seem regressive or retrograde; if you have trouble writing well rounded, believable women characters; if your themes and subject matter are full of unexamined, or worse, actively elevate, racist and sexist tropes, your chances of appealing to a woman agent, editor, or reader are slim to none. It’s not specifically because you’re a man, it’s because you are a certain type of man who represents an existential threat to women.
This should bring to mind the bear vs. man debate that raged across social media in early 2024. It also is well described by my favorite analogy: for women, dealing with men is like being handed a box of random snakes. Sure, some are not venomous, but some are, and it would be stupid to just shove your hand in the box and grab one. The safest course of action is to treat all the snakes as if they’re venomous and only handle one once you’ve verified it won’t kill you. Unfortunately, even then it’s risky.
That says more about the sad state of men than it does about a potential bias in publishing. It’s why my first inclination when I hear a dude say men can’t get published anymore is to direct my ire and frustration at the male writers who are angrily ranting that men can’t get published anymore. Chances are good they’re the same men angrily complaining that women won’t date them even though they’re a “nice guy.” If a dude can’t get a date, and can’t get published, the common denominator is the dude, not the varied assortment of women with different tastes and preferences who’ve turned him down.
There’s something else going on as well, and this is where we need to circle back to the purpose of capitalism and all that new data and market research that has been flooding into the publishing world from things like Bookscan and Amazon. We have a tendency in America to equate popularity with quality. The idea that because Dan Brown has sold a lot of books, he must, therefore, be a good writer is ludicrous on an artistic level . . . but, on a purely capitalistic level it’s fair. He is (or at least was at one time) a good commodity. Capitalism is fundamentally conservative when it comes to taking risks. To keep that sweet, sweet money rolling in so the CEO can buy a new house or yacht, the product the company sells must be inexpensive to produce, of a dependable and consistent average quality when produced en masse, appealing to as many people as possible, and frequently consumable. Profit is why what we call “durable goods” are now less durable than they used to be, why automobiles do annual model upgrades, and why computers use planned obsolescence. It’s all designed to get you to buy “big ticket” items more frequently.
Works of literature are, by their very nature, consumable, but they’re not, at least historically, inexpensive to produce, of dependable and consistent average quality, nor appealing to everyone. However, in the last twenty-five years, the publishing industry has been trying to change that. AI is just the latest tool of product homogenization and human marginalization.
Computer based data analytics has allowed publishers to not only determine who does the most buying and reading but what writing styles have been the most popular over time. There have been arguments and debates going on for as long as I’ve been following the publishing world[1] about whether there is, in fact, an “MFA” writing style. I’ve written about this before (see The Writing Industrial Complex). Although there is no conscious effort in MFA programs to standardize the way we write, there is a decidedly heavy subconscious, sales data driven push to acquire books where the writing style conforms to some version of style that is familiar, dependable, and historically popular or accepted to the majority of readers.
For the fundamentally conservative nature of capitalism, anything that is risky or daring is therefore unappealing. Also, anything that is old, outdated, or unpopular is not profitable and should be discontinued. The only reason publishers keep a backlist of titles that we might consider old and outdated is because those titles are cheap to produce and sell dependably—usually to schools and those avid readers who like classics. Once a backlist title stops selling, however, publishers stop printing it and it vanishes. The sweet spot for current writers is to be a combination of new but somehow familiar at the same time. This is the capitalistic reason why author identity feels like it’s so central to publishing right now, and it just happens to intersect with the push to redress inequalities in who got published, historically. Author identity has become the one area where a writer can be “new” and it’s also an area where, historically, white men have been overrepresented.
The problem is that the product, regardless of the author’s identity, has to be familiar, dependable, and popular. So, yes, we’re getting more work by women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ writers—and that’s a good thing of which I’m excited about—but the writing styles of all these diverse writers, the patterns of their lines as the lines build paragraphs and narratives, are not discernibly different or new when compared to the white male dominated past. I recently hit on a comparison that seems to fit: what’s happening to writing styles is similar to the way regional accents have been vanishing in America since the widespread adoption of the television. Our accents are derived from what we hear spoken around us most often. As TV presenters and news anchors began to flatten and unlearn their natural accents so, too, have viewers. There’s still some variation, but it’s not as strong as it once was. As publishers have consolidated and merged, as market research has increased, a certain writing style has emerged as an unspoken, unacknowledged standard and, sadly, it’s kind of flat.
So, what we’re dealing with here is a two-fold problem. Selecting what to publish has always been and will always be subjective. For a long time, two components of that subjectivity were racism and sexism, which made publishing biased in favor of white men. Because of that, there were a lot of sub-par white men who got published over equally talented or more talented women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ writers. The writers from marginalized groups had to be exceptional in some regards, or inoffensive to white male sensibilities in other regards, to break through the bias, or they had to be willing to mask their true identity—using initials to hide a feminine name for example. Then as the publishing world began making efforts to remedy past biases, writers whose work was sub-par, not just men, began to find it harder to get published. Then, to complicate matters, as publishing houses began to consolidate, and as the sales and marketing departments began to dictate more and more what would get published based on all that data from Bookscan and Amazon, the quality of what has been getting published has arrived at a common mean: not too risky or daring, and only slightly better than mediocre.
This puts writers at all skill levels in a bind, as well as any writer who is unwilling or unable to be content cranking out the kind of blandly marketable content required by publishers who are only interested in maintaining market share and dominance. The other problem is that patriarchy creates a lot of un-self-aware men (especially white ones) who overestimate their ability and who are ill-informed about the amount of effort and sheer luck it has always taken to get published, and so they’re running around angrily blaming everyone else for their personal, artistic shortcomings.
Essentially, writers at the bottom of the skill and talent curve and writers at the top of the skill and talent curve are both in a situation where their work is the primary reason they can’t get published. It’s just one side is angry because they can’t admit their work is below mediocre, and so they’re consumed with envy and rage at those they perceive as keeping them unpublished, which creates that second layer of personal risk around them. Those on the other side, the talented visionaries, are constantly on the verge of giving up because they can’t bring themselves to write down to the average level demanded by the safely commodified literature that the big publishers want. Normally, those writers would shift to a small press, but there’s simply not enough small presses to accommodate everyone trying something new.
For a storytelling species, this is a problem, especially in an era of extreme existential crisis. Literature is humanity’s rehearsal space, but that space’s power feels weakened by the conformity demanded by literature’s commodification[2]. The formalization of the novel’s structure and the drive to establish a universal, semi-journalistic “Goldilocks” writing style[3] based on the work’s genre, reduces and restricts the importance of subtextual meaning. To make writing easily digestible by the most number of people, subtext can either be made simplistic to the point of meaningless escapism, or subtext can be made obvious and confirmable to the point of heavy-handedness, or dogma. In a commodified environment like that, subtext can’t be what it needs to be, which is oblique, or ambiguous.
Subtext, inevitably, has a moral component. Weaken subtext, or make it irrelevant to the story, and the story is little more than a puzzle, a distraction that enters and leaves the mind without disturbing a single molecule. Make subtext heavy-handed and there’s no nuance, no room for personal agency, which means a reader’s only choice is to accept or reject the book’s moral vision rather than wrestle with their relationship to the moral choices posed by the story.
What complicates all of this further is the decimation of the education system, especially when it comes to the humanities. We may be a storytelling species that transfers culture and meaning through narrative, but we are also a species prone to cognitive biases, self-delusion, and manipulation through misinformation and malicious fabrication. We need an education in the humanities as much as we need an education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The reason publishing prefers subtext-less fiction or heavy handed morality plays is because stories that ask something of the reader don’t sell when 54% of the population can’t read above a sixth grade level, and the 46% who can, even if only barely, are consumed by day-to-day survival, distracted by always-on media, and in need of mindless, palliative downtime activities in between the stress of work and the bliss of sleep.
Art that takes risks, art that is daring and subsequently challenging to readers, is essential to breaking us out of this dystopian death spiral we seem to be in. Unfortunately, readers who have been conditioned by a factory-first education system to abdicate their native intelligence to authority figures and technology, and who believe art is unworthy of serious study and attention because art’s only purpose is to entertain us in between work shifts, will encounter a challenging, worthwhile, life changing narrative and give up on it. One of the reasons they’ll give up on it is because it’s nearly impossible to generate risky, daring, and engaging art using rigid models and old tools.
You can’t build a modern car using the methods and tools that existed in 1900, and you can’t write a novel for the 21stcentury following the formal rules of the 19th century and early 20th century before the rise of cinema, TV, and the internet. While a car of the 1920s and a car of the 2020s are fundamentally the same, they’re not built to function in the same environment. The same is true for the stories we tell ourselves. Novels and stories need a redesign if we expect literary art to contribute to the fight against our modern, technologically induced existential crisis.
That means we’re going to still hear a lot, for a long time, from those sub-par, lesser than mediocre would-be writers who are artistically and morally retrograde, about how they’re being discriminated against. And as long as publishing continues to praise works that are, fundamentally only slightly above the average, no matter how diverse the authors are, those angry men may just have enough of a point to not be wholly dismissed as the fools they are.
I make this argument knowing full well that the literary world I imagine may not include me. Hell, it probably won’t: I simply may not be good enough. I don’t care. I’d rather be a nobody in a better world, with interesting books to read, than an undeserving somebody in a devastated, unfair world where every writer’s book reads just like every other writer’s book.
[1] I’ve been paying attention to what agents and editors want since at least 1988-89 when I was given my first subscription to Writer’s Digest as seventeen year old high school junior.
[2] See The “I have an idea, can you write it for me?” People are Making a Comeback, and I Despise Them Even More Now.”
[3] Not too easy to read, not too hard to read, but just (blandly) right. See The Writing Industrial Complex
Excellent - well written and spot on.