A male-only publisher to fight toxic masculinity? I have a better idea
Conduit Books, a new small press, will only publish books by men to ‘address imbalance’ in the industry – but the death of the male novelist has been wildly overstated
It is a difficult time to be a young man. Masculinity is in crisis. Loneliness is on the rise. Just as centuries of emotional repression finally start to make their way out of the collective male system, misogynistic, hyper-macho influencers and incels push viral ideas that are totally the opposite.
Perhaps all of this is why it feels so personal and significant when the things men thought they could count on start to dissolve, such as the hope that they could – if they wanted to – publish a bestselling work of literary fiction. For the past five to 10 years, the fiction world has seemingly been dominated by women – Sally Rooney, Dolly Alderton, etc – in sharp contrast to the Martin Amis-Ian McEwan-William Boyd era of the late 20th century. Many column inches have been taken up analysing why this is, and why it is a problem.
Enter Conduit Books – the new publisher from Jude Cook, a critic, author and lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster – which will initially publish books only by men (he is open to women writers in the future, he said) and provide a platform for “unheard narratives”.
“There is this assumption that all men are doing fine and have connections and money,” Cook said. “But if you are a 21-year-old working class male writer from Newcastle, you will feel that the system is against you.” And while Cook is right that class is a huge problem in publishing and across the creative industries, it is gender that is ultimately the guiding factor for Conduit.
The concurrence of male crisis and success for female authors is not a coincidence: they are indirect and direct results of increased equality for women. You can see why not being able to write novels is easily tacked on to the long list of things going wrong for men in 2025. But it is counterproductive to conflate the two issues to this extent.
The effect of this conflation is that people start to hold a subconscious belief that men’s alienation is a direct result of women’s success. The reality is more complex, or perhaps more simple: the work of platforming and creating equal opportunities for women, and ensuring men are fulfilled and confident enough not to become incels, is the same. I believe Cook when he says it “cannot be over-stressed” that Conduit Books “does not seek an adversarial stance” – but I struggle to see how boiling it down to the gender issue helps.
The fact is that the publishing industry is not suffering from intrinsic bias against men. The market is currently dominated by fiction written by women, yes, but this is because of a simple matter of supply and demand, which is not the same as inherent, systemic disadvantage. The Sally Rooney effect, for the want of a better phrase, is self-fulfilling: publishers know these kinds of books will sell, so they are more likely to buy them (new male authors that are out there, for what it is worth, are also marketed in the vein of Rooney; you could just as much attribute to her a new “golden era” for Irish fiction).
This might mean it’s more difficult for new male writers at the moment – that there is less space for them in the market – but not necessarily that the system is against them. The system is only as much against them as it is anyone not writing dragon porn.
What is more, 80 per cent of novels are bought by women; reading fiction is always something women have done more than men (a pastime that has, as a result, historically been written off as sentimental and pointless). Yet it is only now that the number of respected female authors is proportionately increasing: it was after the 1991 Booker shortlist contained no female writers that the Women’s Prize for Fiction was founded, giving a platform for the authors who were going unrecognised by an industry whose executives were primarily male.
Now, it is true that there is a lack of new male talent (James Marriott, writing in The Times in 2020 in an article that set off a protracted online debate on the topic, pointed out that there had not been a white British man under 40 on the Booker shortlist since 2011 – quite a strict set of criteria, but the point stands). But it’s not true that it is because the industry strategically favours women.
Despite the widely quoted fact that a large majority of editorial publishing roles in the UK are filled by women, it is still the case that three chief executives of the UK’s “Big Four” publishers are male. Seven of nine Booker Prize winners since 2015 are male. In 2023, there were more men named Paul on the shortlist than there were women. It is not like there is a lack of male role models in the literary world.
“It is just to address a very small imbalance in the negligible world of literary fiction,” Cook said of his new venture. “If there is anything political in this, it is about all the recent noise about toxic masculinity post-Trump’s second election victory, Andrew Tate and the Netflix series Adolescence. The subject of what young men read and write has become very important.”
Well, with the last sentence I could not agree more. But to drown out all that noise, I have another idea: young men could always take a punt and read one of the many books available that has been written by a woman.
