Book Marks: Do We Need A Male-Centric Publisher?

A new publisher caused a little stir with its business model of exclusively platforming male authors and claiming that they're rebalancing the publishing landscape that's leaning a little too female. Perhaps this publisher should look at what's being written instead of who's doing the writing, if it thinks that guys aren't reading what it thinks they should read, if at all.

Discussions over whether publishing is dominated by males was a thing about a decade ago, and if the pendulum is swinging the other way, I feel this trend has yet to reach its zenith – too early to hit the panic button. "Male authors going from 80% to 50% of the market is far from a crisis in need of another intervening corrective," James Folta writes in Literary Hub.

By all means, publish. There's room for new voices and if this publisher believes in its mission, its releases should strike a chord among the reading public. Just don't hype it up like the advent of some superhero team. I don't see the need for a male-only publisher right now because women still face hurdles in getting published. So I'm more welcoming of efforts like those of heritage publishing house Quite Literally Books, which is digging up books written by American women from a hundred years back.


Next up:

• Book lovers will inevitably have copies to give away, and here's another place for them: Buku Beyond Bars, a community book drive for prison libraries. "This initiative seeks to foster rehabilitation, personal growth, and mental well-being for the prison community through increased availability and accessibility of informative and meaningful reading materials," Mazni Ibrahim, CEO of the Malaysian Centre for Constitutionalism and Human Rights (MCCHR), tells The Star. MCCHR launched the project.
• "...it's not just theft. It's bullying. Exploitation. Looting on a grand scale. The stuff of Upton Sinclair. Only we don't have robber barons anymore. We have pirate captains. Bluebeards of the human heart. And what are we supposed to fight them with? Carefully worded emails? That's like bringing a spork to a nuclear war." Catherine Baab found that her book was among the many being used to train Meta's AI bot LLaMA 3. Still don't understand what the fuss is about? Hear her out and maybe you will.
• Speaking of theft: Nagi Maehashi (and maybe several others) versus Brooke Bellamy. The latter was accused of lifting recipes for her bestseller Bake with Brooki. Recipe ownership can be hard to prove, unless there are signs of stuff being copied verbatim. At the Australian book industry awards night however, Maehashi can walk away with a bit of satisfaction after her book beat Bellamy's, among others, for the title of illustrated book of the year.
• "If small and independent presses offered fresher, more challenging books, how could [readers] find and read them?" writers Melanie Jennings and Elizabeth Kaye Cook ask. They then lay out the reasons small-press titles don't get enough sun and what can be done about it. BookTok is one option, but readers should also step up and be a bit more adventurous. Small presses may need to find ways to get noticed as well, even if the task is herculean.
• "Authors have limited choice over what happens to their unpublished work after their deaths—but while they still live, the decision over how to treat their trunk works is as individual as the authors themselves. Given enough time every writer develops some trunk oeuvre." Randee Dawn dishes on "trunk" novels, the early stuff most authors don't feel is good enough for public consumption.
• In USA Today, Clare Mulroy speaks with Fredrik Backman, author of Anxious People and the latest release My Friends, which may be his last published work. Not because he wants to stop writing, but because the exertions required of published authors get to him. He seems to feel that younger writers have it worse. "It's fine when you put that pressure on someone like me, who is 44 years old and I have kids, and I have a life and I have a good support system around me and I've been doing this for 15 years. But when that pressure starts mounting up on someone in their 20s, I think that's a lot to ask of someone...."
• A recent snapshot of the Australian book industry looks bleak, with rising costs eating into margins and making writing, publishing, and bookselling less and less viable as careers. The article also offers some solutions, but is the will to execute them there, and how helpful will these be?