DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot. Part 1 of 7: The Gatekeepers

Once upon a time, an aspiring fiction writer had a fighting chance. If you wrote a good story, polished your manuscript, and braved the slush pile, you might just get picked up. The system wasn’t perfect, but it was meritocratic enough that talent sometimes slipped through the cracks and found its way into print.

That world is gone.

Today, agents and editors, the self-appointed gatekeepers of publishing, increasingly use submission guidelines not as a way to filter for quality, but as ideological purity tests. Want to query an agent? You’d better make sure your story features “marginalized voices,” that your characters are “diverse,” and that your personal identity matches the preferred checklist. Otherwise, don’t bother. Some agencies explicitly state they will not consider manuscripts by authors from “overrepresented groups.” Some agents state baldly that they will not be able to represent white males. Others signal subtly or overtly that unless your work advances the current ideological line — the one centered on race, gender, or sexuality — they are not interested.

This isn’t just rumor. It’s been noticed by people inside the industry. In 2022, Joyce Carol Oates, no right-wing firebrand but one of America’s most respected novelists, said that a literary agent friend of hers couldn’t even get editors to look at debut novels by white male authors. “They are just not interested,” she wrote, calling the situation “heartbreaking.” Best-selling thriller author James Patterson said much the same: white male writers face a harder time breaking in, a trend he called “another form of racism.”

Mainstream media rushed to shut them down. CNN ran a feature insisting the data “disagrees.” Their proof? A Penguin Random House audit showing that between 2019 and 2021, 76 percent of their authors were white (only 34 percent were men, but they downplayed that). A New York Times study that found 95 percent of novels in major houses were by white people. “Not a thing,” industry insiders declared.

But look closer. Those numbers are backward-looking, reflecting backlist contracts and long-established names. They say nothing about what Oates and Patterson were pointing out: the front door is closing. How many of those 2019–2021 books were new debuts by white men, as opposed to reprints or ongoing series from long-successful authors? CNN didn’t ask, because the answer might have proved Oates right.

And the truth is, this didn’t begin in 2019. I was hearing these stories nearly a decade earlier. Back in 2012, talented male writers were already telling me they couldn’t get their feet in the door, no matter how polished the work. If your manuscript smacked of conservatism in any way, you may as well self-publish. Stephen England is a prime example. His thrillers — more than twenty books, including the outstanding Shadow Warriors series — sell well and showcase an outstanding writer. Yet he is entirely self-published because his plots center around conservative themes. The gatekeepers would never give him a chance.

This was not an isolated story. Over and over, I heard the same thing: men with strong manuscripts, who in a more normal publishing climate would at least have received trial contracts, were locked out. But this is not a normal time for fiction. Instead of looking at quality, the industry is looking at equity. How do you boost minority authors? If that's your focus, you must exclude other groups, no matter how talented they may be. Inevitably, when you shrink the pool of potential talent, you wind up with weaker books — and you lose readers.

Unsurprisingly, the industry today is beginning to shrink. Readers are falling away, and new books are selling poorly. Publishing insiders seem baffled as to why this is happening. The answer is obvious: books are not widgets. Each one is different, and it must connect with an audience.

The numbers are stark. Over the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure in America has collapsed by more than 40 percent. Fewer than half of adults now read a book in a given year. And fiction in particular is bleeding readers: in 2012, 45 percent of adults read a novel or short story; by 2022, that number was down to 37.6 percent.

The losses are sharpest among men. A decade ago, 35 percent of men read fiction; today it’s under 28 percent. Women also read less than before — falling from 54.6 percent to 46.9 percent over the same span — but the male drop is steeper, and the gap between men and women has widened.

By refusing to bring in fresh male writers while leaning on the output of older, established ones whose production will inevitably slow down, publishers are ensuring they will also lose male readers. Then they shrug and say, “Well, men just don’t read anymore.”

But men did read twenty years ago. They still want to read. The problem is that they aren’t finding new books they want. So they turn to used bookstores and libraries, revisit their own shelves for overlooked titles, or simply buy classics. In other words, they keep reading — just not the new books the industry relies on for its profits.

Publishing is cannibalizing its own future. When gatekeepers silence the next generation of writers, they drive away the next generation of readers. That is how an industry dies.

Next up: Part 2: The Awards Racket