I must admit that as of late I've gone back to reading more classics and even Indie fiction by fellow authors hereon Substack.
I used to visit bookstores about 3-4 times a week even as a young man, but ever since the 2010s I just suddenly stopped. I don't regret it. Bookstores have become since some time ago almost hostile towards Anglophones and Francophones herein Canada so that it just doesn't serve any purpose to go to them.
What was really enlightening on a trip to France and Japan was to discover that they still had small bookstores, and lacked ALL hostility and all the shitty covers and what not that you see everywhere these days. It gave me hope, I've taught in those countries also and have found that their students still read classic works (mostly masculine stuff like Norse Myths, Dumas and Tolkien). In turn though coming back to Canada was like stepping out of a dream and into a nightmare in some ways.
Bookstores are dead, or at least purely feminine spaces, the books on the shelves have crap covers and the stores are just... lifeless. The one from my hometown (the local Chapters) used to be bustling with people, now you might have 3 dozen people at most on a good day (and only a dozen on a bad day, and this is the biggest bookstore chain in Canada, and the largest store in the North of Ontario).
So definitely agree with this article good sir; the key is marketing, marketing, marketing followed by a healthy dose of networking for us Fiction authors. I've been finding this out not only as a reader but also as a writer of Fantasy Fiction, as most publishers won't give Tolkienian or Howardian stuff the time of day. It means the duties of marketing falls onto the shoulders of authors ever more (they've long since off-loaded those duties onto our shoulders to begin with). In this way we must carve our own path, so that in terms of fiction both as readers and writers we gotta be even more resolved, more forceful and more focused than ever before.
Good essay, and wish you the best with your endeavours, I'm glad I saw Joseph Wiess and Henry Brown had liked this one else I wouldn't have seen it.
New fiction sucks, and books are expensive. Better to just go browse Project Gutenberg until you find something readable and its all free. Just started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars" last night. Didn't cost me a dime.
In general novels are awful, and the novel is a horrible format. It was "novel" at one point, but now its stale. Would much rather read short stories than a novel; or long format stories that aren't so verbose and a waste of time. The contrived and enforced need to use tons of flowery descriptions is so stupid. The very format of novels is designed to be for women. Pulp novels escape this a bit. They're like short stories that are a tad longer than normal short stories rather than stupid overly long novels.
And I don't know if I'll finish it. Most novels I ever bought in the past, I stopped reading between chapter 3 to 5 because it was trash.
As a teen I used to LOVE going to book stores. I was exposed to authors I'd never heard of before, and have actually exciting stuff to read.
Now it's all books written by women, or cucked gammas. It's so boring and bad that I just keep going back in time to read stuff published 20+ years ago instead of researching "new" authors.
Alternatives are out here, writing and publishing. A small minority of us are writing for men. But as the author mentions, Amazon stacks the deck against you ever discovering our books.
This is also why, for male authors, building the audience has to _precede_ the writing and marketing of a book. Cernovich used to write about this fact ten years ago. The idea that a "writer" with no track record, no following, no marketing channels could produce his "magnum opus", post it on Amazon, and riches and fame would shortly follow as his genius was quickly recognized, is a complete fantasy and was so even a dozen years ago. Cernovich built his audience and following over multiple blogs and chatrooms over a decade, and when Gorilla Mindset came out, he had thousands of people who pressed "purchase" immediately. Similar for Victor Pride, Roosh, Milo, Vox and others. That's mainly non-fiction but the same principle holds. Taking a similar approach today is even harder than it was back then, now that blogs have largely disappeared, to be replaced by X, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
Exactement, it's what I'm currently doing though I've also gone the 'web serialization' route and so far it's going well enough.
The future for authors is to build large online platforms over the course of many years and to then market via these platforms what projects we do put together.
I have some men's fashion books and accessories that I purchased because of Twitter account posts. Very helpful to get a regular stream of posts on fashion principles and practical tips for execution, along with example pictures of good style.
After you've been following the account for a while because of the value of those free posts, the sales post are also high value and of interest. The free content attracts the customers and establishes reputation.
Reading this actually reminded me of a take I heard recently highlighting how much innovation and mass production is driven by pornography consumption. Blue ray, virtual reality, the concept of creating a humanoid robot. All got a major boost from the demand of porn they could provide as demanded mostly by men.
Buuuutt what form of porn has an overwhelmingly female audience?... literary porn. Of course a large part of female dominance in that industry has to do with the dirty books that are everywhere.
KU did get me to read a couple of the Galaxy's Edge novels. I think I ran across recommendation elsewhere, maybe YouTube, and when I looked they were available in Unlimited. Normally, out of ten algorithmic recs from Amazon, eleven are piffle.
Agree. My prayer is that these returning men read blogs like this one and learn just how desperately they need to root out feminism from the minds of their leadership.
I disagree that nothing is a major threat. The Church will overcome all problems, but they will cause havoc in the short term. Female domination of the local church is one such threat.
You're making a category error. "Christianity" does not equal "church". The former is a God-revealed conception of reality, whereas the latter is an artificial ecclesiastical entity. Only one of these can be in danger.
Since Jesus Himself built the Church, I wouldn't call it artificial. But there are some religious organizations calling themselves churches that are artificial at this point.
Fewer men read, but probably the ones that do are reading non-fiction and they're drilling down into a specific area of study that interests them. More women read, but it's mostly just best seller list slop. Not edifying in the least. Its a shame that reading is female coded, because there is plenty of classic and even ancient literature that's plenty masculine and that men could benefit from.
Does Castalia House have any authors that are like Bernard Cornwell? I admit I've only read the Missionaries, and Vox's books. In modern publishing, there seems to be a dearth of those types of well-written battle scenes and clever tactical thinking. I can't imagine any of these women would enjoy those types of books.
Have you read the series that inspired Cornwell to write his Sharpe books? He wanted Sharpe to be an Army version of Horatio Hornblower, which you will probably enjoy if you like Sharpe's adventures.
Just as Sharpe was invented to tag along with the Iron Duke, C.S. Forrestor took real events from Brittish Naval History and gave some of the best to his character.
"Many parallels exist between Hornblower and real naval officers of the period,[3][4] notably Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, Sir George Cockburn, Lord Cochrane, Sir Edward Pellew, Jeremiah Coghlan, Sir James Gordon, and Sir William Hoste.[citation needed] The actions of the Royal Navy at the time, documented in official reports and in the Naval Chronicle, provided much of the material for Hornblower's fictional adventures."
Some of Tom Clancy's books were great. His only historical fiction novel is my favorite.
Without Remorse. It's about a Navy SEAL who's returned home from the jungles of Nam and uses his skills to fight a private war in the urban jungles of America.
It's Tom Clancy's John Wick set in the late 60s early 70s.
If you like Historical fiction you must have read Gates of Fire, and if you want a lot more history in your fiction anything by James Clavell will be a great read. Everyone's read Shogun.
And then there's history told by a great storyteller, Band of Brothers by Stephen A Ambrose. Anything War or adventure related by Ambrose is great.
About 10 years ago, I went to a writers' conference and snagged a "Pitch the Agent" time slot. Zombie stories still had some steam left and mine was different enough. The agent expressed interest, especially as it was tied to my experiences in CENTCOM. Then he asked, "But no female characters?" Maybe I could have done the wink-wink and said, "There is now!" but I refuse to make that deal with the devil. I knew enough about ticket-taking even before our esteemed host here explicated it so well.
I'm a sucker for zombie fiction. Even the bad stuff is usually good enough and when the preppers realised that writing a zombie novel was not much different to a prepper one, a lot got released.
I'll be buying yours. Looking forward to reading it on my flight to the states Ina couple weeks.
Interesting bio. I'll add The Algerian to my list. I'm surprised we didn't ever cross paths, but you are a little younger than I am and it's a big Navy.
Big Navy indeed, but I had a funny episode when a captain and I had this "I know I know you" moment. We went through all our duty stations and came up with nothing. Then he said, "When I was on [Spruance DD], didn't think I'd be in so long." Me: "You were on [Spruance]? I did my 1st class cruise on her." He had been my midshipman coordinator!
There's so much absolute crap out there for books. It's no wonder people have become so vacuous and simpleminded. We become what we consume. If all you read is the popular dreck you're going to eventually live like those horrible characters.
This is why indie publishing will eventually take down the big publishers, it allows people to support the work they want to read.
Most of the books today, especially the romance ones, should be burned, not read. "Romance" has been turned into a euphemism for all kinds of wickedness, and as its portrayed in "popular" books, it is the farthest thing from what real love should look like as one can get.
Theoretically it allows readers to support what they love; but bookseller algorithms are seemingly designed to prevent readers from finding what they would prefer to support.
For almost all media these days I wait for it to ripen before consuming it. Helps to avoid the waists of time. The problem then becomes finding reviews that are reliable.
Vacuous crap has always been in the majority. The difference is that as a civilisation we didn't historically promote it as the best thing ever. We treated it like an embarrassing weakness, a guilty secret.
If a “victory” for feminism is achieving penetration in a field beyond their percentage of the population, we can state conclusively that it was never about equality.
I think we all know that, but clearly they’re not willing to give up that lie yet.
I must admit that as of late I've gone back to reading more classics and even Indie fiction by fellow authors hereon Substack.
I used to visit bookstores about 3-4 times a week even as a young man, but ever since the 2010s I just suddenly stopped. I don't regret it. Bookstores have become since some time ago almost hostile towards Anglophones and Francophones herein Canada so that it just doesn't serve any purpose to go to them.
What was really enlightening on a trip to France and Japan was to discover that they still had small bookstores, and lacked ALL hostility and all the shitty covers and what not that you see everywhere these days. It gave me hope, I've taught in those countries also and have found that their students still read classic works (mostly masculine stuff like Norse Myths, Dumas and Tolkien). In turn though coming back to Canada was like stepping out of a dream and into a nightmare in some ways.
Bookstores are dead, or at least purely feminine spaces, the books on the shelves have crap covers and the stores are just... lifeless. The one from my hometown (the local Chapters) used to be bustling with people, now you might have 3 dozen people at most on a good day (and only a dozen on a bad day, and this is the biggest bookstore chain in Canada, and the largest store in the North of Ontario).
So definitely agree with this article good sir; the key is marketing, marketing, marketing followed by a healthy dose of networking for us Fiction authors. I've been finding this out not only as a reader but also as a writer of Fantasy Fiction, as most publishers won't give Tolkienian or Howardian stuff the time of day. It means the duties of marketing falls onto the shoulders of authors ever more (they've long since off-loaded those duties onto our shoulders to begin with). In this way we must carve our own path, so that in terms of fiction both as readers and writers we gotta be even more resolved, more forceful and more focused than ever before.
Good essay, and wish you the best with your endeavours, I'm glad I saw Joseph Wiess and Henry Brown had liked this one else I wouldn't have seen it.
Most male author like your truly went of to the Web serialization
Exactly
New fiction sucks, and books are expensive. Better to just go browse Project Gutenberg until you find something readable and its all free. Just started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars" last night. Didn't cost me a dime.
In general novels are awful, and the novel is a horrible format. It was "novel" at one point, but now its stale. Would much rather read short stories than a novel; or long format stories that aren't so verbose and a waste of time. The contrived and enforced need to use tons of flowery descriptions is so stupid. The very format of novels is designed to be for women. Pulp novels escape this a bit. They're like short stories that are a tad longer than normal short stories rather than stupid overly long novels.
And I don't know if I'll finish it. Most novels I ever bought in the past, I stopped reading between chapter 3 to 5 because it was trash.
Does anyone have an opinion on Lulu? Is it a decent platform, or is it run by wokies?
As a teen I used to LOVE going to book stores. I was exposed to authors I'd never heard of before, and have actually exciting stuff to read.
Now it's all books written by women, or cucked gammas. It's so boring and bad that I just keep going back in time to read stuff published 20+ years ago instead of researching "new" authors.
Pretty much the same deal with movies.
Alternatives are out here, writing and publishing. A small minority of us are writing for men. But as the author mentions, Amazon stacks the deck against you ever discovering our books.
This is also why, for male authors, building the audience has to _precede_ the writing and marketing of a book. Cernovich used to write about this fact ten years ago. The idea that a "writer" with no track record, no following, no marketing channels could produce his "magnum opus", post it on Amazon, and riches and fame would shortly follow as his genius was quickly recognized, is a complete fantasy and was so even a dozen years ago. Cernovich built his audience and following over multiple blogs and chatrooms over a decade, and when Gorilla Mindset came out, he had thousands of people who pressed "purchase" immediately. Similar for Victor Pride, Roosh, Milo, Vox and others. That's mainly non-fiction but the same principle holds. Taking a similar approach today is even harder than it was back then, now that blogs have largely disappeared, to be replaced by X, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
Exactement, it's what I'm currently doing though I've also gone the 'web serialization' route and so far it's going well enough.
The future for authors is to build large online platforms over the course of many years and to then market via these platforms what projects we do put together.
Still works on social media.
I have some men's fashion books and accessories that I purchased because of Twitter account posts. Very helpful to get a regular stream of posts on fashion principles and practical tips for execution, along with example pictures of good style.
After you've been following the account for a while because of the value of those free posts, the sales post are also high value and of interest. The free content attracts the customers and establishes reputation.
I knew exactly where that was going.
Reading this actually reminded me of a take I heard recently highlighting how much innovation and mass production is driven by pornography consumption. Blue ray, virtual reality, the concept of creating a humanoid robot. All got a major boost from the demand of porn they could provide as demanded mostly by men.
Buuuutt what form of porn has an overwhelmingly female audience?... literary porn. Of course a large part of female dominance in that industry has to do with the dirty books that are everywhere.
Has the campaign for sigma game book gone up yet? I cannot find it but if its due May, I was just making sure I've not missed it.
It ended months ago.
KU did get me to read a couple of the Galaxy's Edge novels. I think I ran across recommendation elsewhere, maybe YouTube, and when I looked they were available in Unlimited. Normally, out of ten algorithmic recs from Amazon, eleven are piffle.
Same reason there are more women in western churches.
That does seem to be changing. More young men seem to be coming back, while women are leaving.
Agree. My prayer is that these returning men read blogs like this one and learn just how desperately they need to root out feminism from the minds of their leadership.
What denominations are you observing this in?
The more based and hardcore ones, not the gay ones
This is a major threat to Christianity.
Nothing is a major threat to Christianity, but I agree that the traditional ecclesiastical models in the west are under extreme pressure.
I disagree that nothing is a major threat. The Church will overcome all problems, but they will cause havoc in the short term. Female domination of the local church is one such threat.
You're making a category error. "Christianity" does not equal "church". The former is a God-revealed conception of reality, whereas the latter is an artificial ecclesiastical entity. Only one of these can be in danger.
Since Jesus Himself built the Church, I wouldn't call it artificial. But there are some religious organizations calling themselves churches that are artificial at this point.
You're not following the distinction i’m making. Less sectarian jingoism and more discernment should do the trick.
If the number of women result in female domination of the church, that's on the men, not the women.
Numbers matter but are not the determining factor.
Fewer men read, but probably the ones that do are reading non-fiction and they're drilling down into a specific area of study that interests them. More women read, but it's mostly just best seller list slop. Not edifying in the least. Its a shame that reading is female coded, because there is plenty of classic and even ancient literature that's plenty masculine and that men could benefit from.
There is Passage Publishing, the publish fiction and nonfiction, and are very masculine centric.
Does Castalia House have any authors that are like Bernard Cornwell? I admit I've only read the Missionaries, and Vox's books. In modern publishing, there seems to be a dearth of those types of well-written battle scenes and clever tactical thinking. I can't imagine any of these women would enjoy those types of books.
My 32 year old daughter is devouring Cornwell's Saxon Tales series about Uhtred of Bebbanburg right now, although she may be an outlier.
No, we haven't published any historical fiction.
Dadgum. Well, maybe there isn't much of a market for it besides me and my dad, I don't know. Thanks for letting me know.
Have you read the series that inspired Cornwell to write his Sharpe books? He wanted Sharpe to be an Army version of Horatio Hornblower, which you will probably enjoy if you like Sharpe's adventures.
Just as Sharpe was invented to tag along with the Iron Duke, C.S. Forrestor took real events from Brittish Naval History and gave some of the best to his character.
"Many parallels exist between Hornblower and real naval officers of the period,[3][4] notably Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, Sir George Cockburn, Lord Cochrane, Sir Edward Pellew, Jeremiah Coghlan, Sir James Gordon, and Sir William Hoste.[citation needed] The actions of the Royal Navy at the time, documented in official reports and in the Naval Chronicle, provided much of the material for Hornblower's fictional adventures."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Hornblower
Yes, and all Patrick O'Brien and all Conn Igguldsen as well. But always looking for recommendations
Some of Tom Clancy's books were great. His only historical fiction novel is my favorite.
Without Remorse. It's about a Navy SEAL who's returned home from the jungles of Nam and uses his skills to fight a private war in the urban jungles of America.
It's Tom Clancy's John Wick set in the late 60s early 70s.
If you like Historical fiction you must have read Gates of Fire, and if you want a lot more history in your fiction anything by James Clavell will be a great read. Everyone's read Shogun.
And then there's history told by a great storyteller, Band of Brothers by Stephen A Ambrose. Anything War or adventure related by Ambrose is great.
About 10 years ago, I went to a writers' conference and snagged a "Pitch the Agent" time slot. Zombie stories still had some steam left and mine was different enough. The agent expressed interest, especially as it was tied to my experiences in CENTCOM. Then he asked, "But no female characters?" Maybe I could have done the wink-wink and said, "There is now!" but I refuse to make that deal with the devil. I knew enough about ticket-taking even before our esteemed host here explicated it so well.
I salute you, sir.
I'm a sucker for zombie fiction. Even the bad stuff is usually good enough and when the preppers realised that writing a zombie novel was not much different to a prepper one, a lot got released.
I'll be buying yours. Looking forward to reading it on my flight to the states Ina couple weeks.
I thank you...and apologize in advance if it should prove to be in the "bad stuff" category. Ha ha.
Interesting bio. I'll add The Algerian to my list. I'm surprised we didn't ever cross paths, but you are a little younger than I am and it's a big Navy.
Big Navy indeed, but I had a funny episode when a captain and I had this "I know I know you" moment. We went through all our duty stations and came up with nothing. Then he said, "When I was on [Spruance DD], didn't think I'd be in so long." Me: "You were on [Spruance]? I did my 1st class cruise on her." He had been my midshipman coordinator!
Did you get it published eventually?
Went the self-publish route with that one.
There's so much absolute crap out there for books. It's no wonder people have become so vacuous and simpleminded. We become what we consume. If all you read is the popular dreck you're going to eventually live like those horrible characters.
This is why indie publishing will eventually take down the big publishers, it allows people to support the work they want to read.
Most of the books today, especially the romance ones, should be burned, not read. "Romance" has been turned into a euphemism for all kinds of wickedness, and as its portrayed in "popular" books, it is the farthest thing from what real love should look like as one can get.
Theoretically it allows readers to support what they love; but bookseller algorithms are seemingly designed to prevent readers from finding what they would prefer to support.
The algorithms are designed to push whatever the publishers have the biggest surplus stock in.
For almost all media these days I wait for it to ripen before consuming it. Helps to avoid the waists of time. The problem then becomes finding reviews that are reliable.
Vacuous crap has always been in the majority. The difference is that as a civilisation we didn't historically promote it as the best thing ever. We treated it like an embarrassing weakness, a guilty secret.
Now it unironically wins awards.
If a “victory” for feminism is achieving penetration in a field beyond their percentage of the population, we can state conclusively that it was never about equality.
I think we all know that, but clearly they’re not willing to give up that lie yet.
This is a male weakness problem, not a female truthfulness problem.