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Do real men buy novels? And could e-books boost male readership?
September 11, 2007 | 11:50 am
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By David Rothman
Do real men buy and read novels, in line with the goals of groups such Guys Read?
“Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain,” reports a National Public Radio story discussed on the eBook Community list.
While the gap is widest in fiction, women outread men in other areas, too; and you can’t explain the entire gap by saying wives are buying for their spouses.
Could e-books narrow the gender gap somewhat and help the industry find new customers? Yes, and here are a five ways:
Way One: Appeal to men’s gadget-loving ways
Men go more for gadgets (even though, yes, some very e-book-hip women are out there) and the e-book industry could use this fact to convince publishers to speed up digitization efforts.
In the above respect and others, think of the gender gap as an opportunity; imagine all the potential customers, the upside! I doubt that men will ever read book-style fiction in the same numbers that women do, but surely some inroads can be made against movies and video games.
The IDPF could help with a logo that cellphone and PDA makers could display on hardware to assure .epub compatibility. That in turn would encourage more hardware manufacturers to bundle in e-reading software. Yes, DRM incompatibilities are an obstacle, one reason I’m so keen on the group doing a logo now for publishers who share my loathing of the usual DRM.
Way Two: Use the economies of E to take more risks
E-books and print on demand can reduce the risks for publishers, making it easier to experiment with new titles of male interest. Harry Potter, apparently more popular among boys than girls, was a long shot at the start.
And yet the industry hasn’t taken the clue. See Way Three for some concrete ideas in genres that could be popular among men.
Way Three: Start male-oriented imprints in E in new genres
In line with the above, how about e- and p-book lines with themes such as sports and political fiction? Does anyone at Simon & Schuster, Random House, HarperCollins, or even Harlequin, that female stronghold, care to experiment with digital originals in those areas and others? Come on, is every guy a fan of sci-fi and military-hardware novels?
An election period like 2007-2008 would be a great time to experiment with political novels (disclosure: I’ve been working on some Washington-related fiction). Newspapers are so wimpish these days, and that could be good for novels. As in so many Eastern European and Latin countries, novels might be the best way to get out the truths missing in nonfiction. Yes, blogs and the rest of the Net have a role. But they’re still no substitute for the permanence and depth of books. Same in fact for newspapers. All the King’s Men is still news. If the big houses lack the guts to do political fiction in E form, this could mean all the more opps for smaller publishers. Hello, Deena and Rob? Sports and political novels—those are just two genres that publishers could develop in E and P alike. Same for regional fiction on male-related topics.
Shudder, shudder, maybe e-books could even be a new home for serious mainstream nonfiction. Must everything fall within a genre?
Way Four: Advertise to let men know the new books are out there
The e-book industry should spend more money on online advertising on sites where men are likely to hang out. Match the ads to the interests of the readers. In the TeleBlog’s case, yes, people here seem big on sci-fi, though I could be wrong. Any interest among our readers in well-done sports fiction and politically related novels? Maybe not. I’m just curious.
As for where the advertising money could come from for e-genre dev and advertising, I suggest that publishers cut back on outrageous advances for VIP books. Instead channel the money toward long-term business development, a category into which focused Net advertising with long-term partners would fall.
Way Five: Take interactive books seriously
Interactive books are a good way to engage men and women alike. Books with built-in forums will make reading less of a passive experience and hence more attractive to men, who enjoy enjoy vidgames action. What’s more, guess which sex calls in the most often to talk shows, so many of which, by the way, are devoted to sports and politics and thus might provide promo opps?
The IDPF could help the cause of interactivity by giving top priority to standardized annotations and launching an educational initiative among publishers.
Anyone care to go beyond the above list or comment on the above? Just what will it take to use e-books to get men to read more novels—beyond the obvious measures such as improved hardware, a standard format and, as I see it, more willingness to experiment with no DRM or the social variety?
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Comments:
While it doesn’t pertain directly to gender, the reading professor James Paul Gee argues that learning comes from a context; for boys (and by implication, for men), mastery of a specialized body of knowledge is the key for bringing boys to books. This domain could be videogames, sports, dinosaurs; it doesn’t matter. They read in order to gain this knowledge (even if the reading that takes place relates not to books but to other interactions). For example, yu-gi-oh card games involves a strong verbal component and involves mastery of complicated rules and explanations about cards. In my own life Dungeons and Dragons playbooks were a critical part of my learning to read widely (and write too).
If you polled the buyers of Oreilly books and entrepreneurship books and baseball card collectors books, I doubt you would find gender disparity (or a reverse gender disparity).
David, I think you have hit upon something about topicality. Sci fi is a way to absorb background information about technology in a fun and theoretical way. On the other hand, women’s predilection for Jane Austen and romance novels may represent a desire to absorb not domain-specific knowledge but simply an understanding of how inner emotions work and how relationships work.
Erotica is a special case. Males used to be the main consumers, but now it seems that men gravitate to the video, while women gravitate to the books.
I think the reason for the disparity relates to the stay-at home mom phenomena. At some point, lots of woman take time off from work (maybe even permanently) to manage raising a family. That is an ideal time to pick up reading again. (that wouldn’t explain gender disparities in high school though).
The great thing about ebooks is that you combine gadget freakdom plus imagination. I suspect more men own Sony Readers than women at the moment…
If I were in publishing, I think I’d take a different tack here. Instead of putting out ‘chick-lit 4 boyz’ (as I believe was tried last year with no success at all) I would take the genres that men/boys do now read, and try to leverage out from there. So s/f and techno-thrillers done right, and then add in some ‘chick’ elements to them, maybe.
An entirely different way of approaching this would be to address the marketing not by content but by avenue (for want of a better word). In other words, find out where men/boys are and what they are looking at, and try to get that to help them to read more fiction.
I agree that guys love toys and therefore E should be a natural for us guys. Maybe the key is to make ebook devices that are MORE DIFFICULT to use so we would have to hack them to get them to work right?
Though to tell you the truth, fiction in America is so lame and out of touch and useless these days, I’m a little curious as to why anybody thinks it is important to get men reading more of it. I mean the Republic is captured, tyranny is around the corner, the economy is crashing, the environment is suffering, and we have already begun the Last World War that will write the end to European civilization and the American Empire…so does anybody care about reading ‘richly parsed dense and aromatic sentences’ of literary fiction?
Maybe if fiction got relevant again, more men women and children would be interested in reading it?
Robert and Pond, re men and fiction: Perhaps the United States wouldn’t end up in wars so often if its policymakers showed a little more empathy with others and used diplomacy instead. Guess what can help build empathy. Yep: the F word. Perhaps the Shrub needed to take fewer biz courses and read more English lit.
R: I agree, fervently, that context is important. That’s one reason I think lit and history courses should overlap a bit more than they do.
P: Hey, you mean to tell me men don’t care about sports and politics, where competition reigns supreme? Chicklit not! I do agree with you about the lame condition of literature, though. Give it a chance with less money for celebrity extravaganzas but a lot more for other writers and promo of their works on the Net.
Thanks, both of you, for some great comments!
David
Pond: I don’t really disagree with your points about the irrelevance/elitism of the novel/mainstream fiction.
I just wanted to point out that the only artworks I can think of as being relevant to US society without being oppressively topical is tom tomorrow’s This Modern World comic strip and a lot of science fiction. And, oh, yes, alternative rock.
Movies, I’m not so sure. Daring, sometimes but often any edge is tempered by commercial concerns.
Only place I read novels is on the pot when there is nothing else to read. Ebooks are much better since you can easily carry many in your pocket on a ebook reader.
More boys-genres came to mind: basically, just look over the covers of pulp magazines of the 1930s:
- Explorers’ tales
- Cowboys and rodeos
- Hunters’ tales
- Sword-and-Sorcery
- Horror
- Fliers’ tales
- War tales
- Sports stories, yes:
– Boxing
– Fishing
– Baseball
– Football
- Crime stories
- Private-eye
- Tramp steamers
- South Seas
- Pirates (modern and historical)
- Historical war tales
Being a guy and a publisher, I’ve wrestled with the issue of male readers/female readers for a while now.
Part of the problem is that people are working longer hours than ever and grabbing a book at the office is considered questionable behavior. Part is the entertainment options. Guys do tend to be a bit more visually oriented which means TV, movies and video games.
Clearly one advantage of ePublishing/small publishing is that we can address niches the New York publishers won’t touch. At BooksForABuck.com, for example, we’ve published several hardboiled detective mysteries–which is something New York has pretty much killed. This is a traditionally male read.
I don’t read political novels myself (although I did read Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men years ago), but several of our books have a political slant or theme (Sword of the Dajjal, a SF novel, explores a universe with parallels to our Iraq experience, In the Werewolf’s Den, an urban fantasy by me, deals with prejudice, hatred, and government-sponsored terror). I don’t know if this makes books more appealing to men or not.
I certainly appreciate all of the ideas from you guys.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
I don’t particularly agree with the “stay at home housewife” reader idea of Robert’s, having worked all of my adult life, and having read a load of books in my life! It is something that seems to emerge quite early, girls often develop speech and reading before boys and maybe just get into the reading habit. I am certainly the chief book collector/library user in our household, with husband reading stuff I have bought or borrowed. But why? Perhaps there are too many dreary “soapie” type novels around, too much emotional wallowing (as you can tell, I don’t like them either!).
Maybe we need another Haggard or Doyle or even a Homer (think of the battle scenes!)