There seems like a huge opportunity here for a publishing house that serves them.
5 thoughts on “Male Novel Readers”
I have completed 238 books (almost all novels) this year, according to my Kindle account.
TBH if I find a book I don’t like, I read at least 20% of it before I move on…That doesn’t happen often.
I typically read 500+ a year, now that I’m retired. When I was still in clinical medicine I’d always have some journal or medical book to read with me, anytime I had a free moment: This horrible habit has led to my current behavior.
Of course, if I’m with someone I will engage in conversation but alone? What to do.
There’s the rub. How many more male novelists who write about male protagonists do publishers or readers need when the stories of Doyle and Kipling, Hammett and Chandler, Fleming and Heinlein and numerous others are already available for those of us who like that sort of thing?
Magazine publishing is a dying industry but what’s left of it seems almost uniformly female-oriented. I’m old enough to remember Argosy and Stag, and the classic era National Lampoon when it hilariously parodied both as Real Balls Adventure Magazine.Playboy, Penthouse and even the “lad mags” are gone too. But we still have Cosmo, Vogue, Elle et weary cetera.
Paperback fiction is at least as grim. It’s hard to see how either Louis L’Amour or Elmore Leonard could get started in the present day. And there used to be paperback novel series aimed pretty much entirely at men – Mack Bolan, Blade, The Destroyer and others. The Destroyer series, by Murphy and Sapir, were wonderfully funny and full of entirely anti-PC social commentary as part of their plots. Where else, even in those days, would you find a radical environmentalist organization called “The Human Surplus League” as bad guys?
I have completed 238 books (almost all novels) this year, according to my Kindle account.
TBH if I find a book I don’t like, I read at least 20% of it before I move on…That doesn’t happen often.
I typically read 500+ a year, now that I’m retired. When I was still in clinical medicine I’d always have some journal or medical book to read with me, anytime I had a free moment: This horrible habit has led to my current behavior.
Of course, if I’m with someone I will engage in conversation but alone? What to do.
I read – and re-read – Robert Parker when I need something great that comes in bite sized morsels.
Same with Patrick O’Brian.
Other than that it’s non-fiction.
There’s the rub. How many more male novelists who write about male protagonists do publishers or readers need when the stories of Doyle and Kipling, Hammett and Chandler, Fleming and Heinlein and numerous others are already available for those of us who like that sort of thing?
Truth is beauty, beauty truth. Tis all ye know on this earth, and all ye need to know.
There. Now you can give up on this stupid reading idea and put your heads up your asses where they belong.
Magazine publishing is a dying industry but what’s left of it seems almost uniformly female-oriented. I’m old enough to remember Argosy and Stag, and the classic era National Lampoon when it hilariously parodied both as Real Balls Adventure Magazine. Playboy, Penthouse and even the “lad mags” are gone too. But we still have Cosmo, Vogue, Elle et weary cetera.
Paperback fiction is at least as grim. It’s hard to see how either Louis L’Amour or Elmore Leonard could get started in the present day. And there used to be paperback novel series aimed pretty much entirely at men – Mack Bolan, Blade, The Destroyer and others. The Destroyer series, by Murphy and Sapir, were wonderfully funny and full of entirely anti-PC social commentary as part of their plots. Where else, even in those days, would you find a radical environmentalist organization called “The Human Surplus League” as bad guys?