Men Didn't Stop Reading, They Stopped Reading Oldpub

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Spend enough time on social media, and you’ll see the same stale memes spammed by the same tired institutions. The latest to claw its way out of the grave is the claim—dutifully repeated by The New York Times—that men have “disappeared” from fiction reading altogether.

Like every cultural lament from the Pop Cult press, this narrative isn’t just misleading; it’s projection. The hand-wringing about “where all the male readers went” isn’t a mystery. I’ll save the Times’ editorial board a few years of focus groups and a few million in consulting fees: Men didn’t stop reading. They stopped reading you.

Let’s start by unpacking the core of this pseudo-crisis.

The 20 Percent Myth

The Times and their fellow oldpub dinosaurs love to fling around the same statistic: “Only about 20% of fiction readers are men.” A convenient number—low enough to justify ignoring men as a market, high enough to scold them for supposedly abandoning literacy.

But this figure crumbles under even cursory scrutiny. Where does it come from? Nielsen BookScan. That methodology might have captured a snapshot of American reading habits in 2005. But in 2024, it’s laughable.

Because Nielsen primarily measures print sales from Barnes & Noble and a shrinking roster of physical outlets. They all but ignore digital sales—the actual majority of book transactions today.

They capture almost nothing of independent and self-published sales, which make up a massive share of male readership.

Related: No, Men Do Not Hate Reading

When you systematically ignore the places where men are actually buying books, of course you’ll conclude they don’t read. It’s like a fisherman throwing a net into a pond that’s been drained dry, then declaring that fish have gone extinct.

Amazon Ate Their Market, and They Pretend It Didn’t Happen

Here’s a fact the Times won’t say out loud: Amazon controls over half of all book sales in the United States. The ratio is even higher for eBooks, and higher still in genres where men make up the core audience: thrillers, sci-fi, military adventure, pulp fantasy.

If you’re a male reader who likes hard-hitting genre fiction, you’re not trudging into a chain bookstore hoping to find it on the shelf. You’re downloading it to your Kindle, buying direct from an indie author, or grabbing it in audio form for your commute.

The New York Times can’t see any of this activity because it happens outside the dying brick-and-mortar channels they still treat as the center of the universe.

Meanwhile, Nielsen BookScan keeps counting only the oldpub crumbs, and everyone wonders why the numbers look bleak.

Survey Reality: Men Read—Just Not What Oldpub Prints

When you step outside the BookScan echo chamber, you see a very different picture. The National Endowment for the Arts—hardly a bastion of newpub—ran a comprehensive survey across reading formats.

Their results?

33% of American men reported reading at least one novel in the prior year. That’s significantly more than a margin-of-error increase over the 20% figure the Times wants to scare you with.

Even that number likely underestimates the reality. Government surveys over-sample certain demographics and under-sample digital-first readers. So the true share of men who read fiction is almost certainly higher. Going on my own experience, as well as a considerable number of the comments on the NYT’s story, I’d put the male share of actual US reaership at 50%.

Oldpub’s Self-Inflicted Wound

So why are the Big Five—and the Times by extension—so desperate to spin this story?

Because they know, on some level, that they’re lying in the soiled bed they made.

There wasn’t some grand cultural shift that collectively convinced men to stop reading. The Big Five’s deliberate editorial and marketing strategy shoved them out.

• Oldpub stopped publishing the genres men love—or sanitized them beyond recognition

• The big NY houses staffed editorial floors with a monoculture of Millennial witches

• Legacy publishers acquired books that pandered to the tastes of an ever-narrowing clique

• Deadpuib turned their marketing departments into HR compliance offices, obsessed with “representation” and pre-approved ideological messaging.

The result: an entire generation of male readers walked away.

When those readers went looking for something that respected them, they found it. But not in oldpub’s halls. They found it in the indie boom.

Newpub: The Part of the Iceberg They Can’t See

The Times pretends that if a book doesn’t show up in Nielsen BookScan, it doesn’t exist. But the indie market is too big to ignore:

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing publishes millions of titles yearly.

Self-published sci-fi, fantasy, and military thrillers consistently top Amazon’s genre charts.

Newpub authors can move thousands of copies a month; more than many “award-winning” literary fiction titles ever sell.

Yet because none of this flows through the legacy distribution channels—because men are buying direct from indie authors or digital-first imprints—The New York Times can’t or won’t see it.

If you don’t know your enemy, you’ll lose half the time. When you pretend your opponents don’t exist, you get blindsided again and again.

Men Don’t Hate Reading—They Hate Deadpub

Here’s the part the publishing elite will never admit: Men don’t resent books. They resent the contempt oldpub has shown them for twenty years:

• Being told the stories they loved were “problematic.”

• Watching every franchise they grew up with gutted to deliver half-baked lectures

• Seeing every male character neutered, humiliated, or erased

• Listening to publishing execs declare their tastes backward, toxic, or irrelevant.

You can only spit on a customer for so long before he stops paying you.

And that’s exactly what happened.

What the Times Won’t Acknowledge

The NYT article wrings its hands about “bringing men back.” Here’s the harsh truth:

Oldpuib can’t bring them back. Because it never really valued them.

Men aren’t clamoring for the Big 5’s return. They’ve simply moved on to books made by authors who don’t hate them and actually want to entertain them.

If that means buying eBooks off an indie storefront instead of browsing a Manhattan publishing house’s seasonal catalog, so be it.

A Way Forward (If Deadpub Has the Spine for It)

If legacy publishers actually want to reconnect with male readers, here’s my free advice:

1. Stop lying about who buys books, and admit that the 20% statistic is nonsense

2. Publish what men want; not what your sensitivity readers tell you they should want

3. Embrace new channels.

If Amazon is where men read, meet them there instead of pretending it’s 2003. Time to end dependence on the old vertically integrated paper distribution cartel.

But let’s be honest: Oldpub won’t do any of this. They’ll keep blaming their audience for drifting away while congratulating themselves on their moral purity. All they while, they’ll keep citing debunked data and congratulating each other on growing the diversity of their readership, even as it shrinks. And they’ll keep hemorrhaging market share to newpub authors who are too busy selling books to read the Times’ lamentations.

So no, the novel-reading man didn’t disappear. Deadpub just lost him because it refused to serve him. He hasn’t stopped reading; he just stopped caring about New York editors’ approval. And the sooner oldpub accepts that fact, the sooner they’ll understand what really killed their cartel.

So, probably some time after they’re evicted from their Manhattan offices for not paying rent.

Ten years ago, we launched more than just a book—we sparked a movement.

Now let’s take it to the next level. Back the Nethereal 10th Anniversary Edition on Kickstarter now!