Ma𝕏 Vidya 🎮

i) boys interest in reading peaked at 52% in 2016 ii) now only 28% of boys are into it, drop of nearly half iii) girls also peaked in 2016! 65%! girls do like books more iv) girls now down to 42%, drop of a third v) thus: ALL kids were abandoned by publishers, boys just more affected vi) I say "different people like different things, that's okay, don't be mad about it" a lot... vii) ...but when people post "boys don't read", their mental model is simply wrong: girls' interest in books is now lower than boys' interest in books was every year from 2005-2022 viii) this is not because "girls don't read" -- it's because the books made & marketed for girls are displaced by books for adult women that happen to feature teenage characters ix) boys & girls have different interests, however their interests have more overlap than the interests of kids & adults x) while it's true that if you want books aimed at boys you need to go back in time, this is also true for girls! xi) The Last Unicorn is a femme-coded hero's journey that both genders can read and enjoy. "Trust Fall" is not. xii) Howl's Moving Castle is a femme-coded fantasy hero's journey that both genders can read and enjoy. "A Court of Thorns and Roses" is not. xiii) for a YA book to be publishable now, it needs to be able to sit alongside romance books targeted at adult women on bookshelves and have crossover appeal to an audience that would read those sort of things xiv) Brandon Sanderson has some books that can do this. The sample size is not zero. What IS zero is the subset of newly published books that have zero appeal to adult women looking to read teen romance. xiii) Darren Shan sold 30+ million copies of male-coded horror-fantasy mid-grade YA. xiv) Darren Shan's new series? Rejected. "I assumed the series would be picked up by one of the traditional publishers...the publishers that I took it to all passed." xv) This makes complete and total sense. His brand name carries zero crossover appeal for the audience who now browse YA shelves. xvi) The facts of the universe, tragic as they may be, are: - the population pyramid of reading kids is declining - boys and girls have different interests - girls have more interest in reading than boys - the overlap between boys' & girls' interests is higher than the overlap between girls' and adult women's interests - both boys & girls have seen large drops in reading interest since 2016, boys more so - more than half of boys COULD be interested in reading - the pool of romance readers is large - adult women do not want to be seen in public reading traditional romance section books, or to think of themselves as the kind of person who does that - if you want to make money, you need to sell books to this category - the best way to do that is "crossover" works that sit in more respectable shelf sections - putting "crossover" works on a shelf changes how that bookshelf is perceived - putting "crossover" works on every shelf in a store maximizes the chance of selling product to the cash cow customer segment - putting "crossover" works on every shelf also maximally dilutes the (real or perceived) social penalty of reading romance - maximally diluting the social penalty of reading romance ALSO maximally associates all books with romance - associating all of reading with romance is a theoretically economically smart move to address the very first bullet in this section on the changing demographic pyramid - the publishing industry is heavily centralized - sales channels are turbo centralized - group think and social conformism around our current culture war therefore go unchecked and exacerbate ALL the above dynamics Somewhere at the end of that long chain of facts we get people posting insane things online in one direction or another, foaming at the mouth to call boys who like male-coded books "future incels" or women who like romance books "porn brained" -- and no matter how much people scream at the other gender online, nobody is going to publish a new book my young son will actually go find and read anytime this decade.