The non-story so far … A man announces he’s setting up a press that will ‘focus on literary fiction by men’. He says he plans to publish three books next year. To date, he has taken on nothing. His website (which looks as if it’s been thrown together in 5 minutes) announces a submissions window of just one month (the current one) and offers no explanation at all of why the focus on men. Or any info about, you know, the tedious details of actual publishing: distribution, design, funding, etc. This is a hoax, isn’t it?
The non-story starts becoming a story when The Bookseller picks it up, and then the Guardian and The Times (‘Men-only publisher hopes to fix “imbalance” in world of books’), and then a BBC4 radio programme, and then a list of ‘Ten Independent Publishers to Watch in 2025’ (even though there simply ain’t anything to watch: no books till next year), and then the Guardian again with an op-ed story. The man who is starting the press mutters something about male writers of literary fiction getting a bad deal: they are under-represented, or overlooked. One’s heart bleeds. And suddenly everyone starts quoting statistics at each other – numbers of women/men on prize shortlists and bestseller lists, numbers of men/women working in publishing – and journalists ask agents for soundbites.
It’s quite possible that there are more good women writers around than men. It’s also quite possible that that editors at big commercial publishers are under pressure from their owners to deliver the New Sally Somebody (smart, young, female, photogenic, ticks the boxes). That’s how business – ‘the publishing industry’, ha – works. It is not how small independent publishers work. Some of these publishers do offer ‘correctives’ to mainstream bias – by championing POC or working-class writers or work in translation – and over time they can make a difference; but what I’m looking at here (and I’m putting this as kindly as I can) is a solution in search of a problem. Move along now. The only story here is about the crass, knee-jerk, clickbait way in which anything about books is treated by the media, and even that story isn’t news.
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