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A few weeks ago, Dazed Digital published an article asking why men no longer read novels. The article itself had no satisfying answers, but the question triggered a big discussion online, particularly on X, where everyone had a hot take.

As I read the various perspectives, I thought, “Men like me do read novels, but we don’t read many novels published by the big five publishers.”

From my perspective, one of the main reasons we don’t is because editors at those publishers don’t know how to market to men, and the books are not written for men. In the business world, that’s called a product-market mismatch.

But men are buying books. I read a lot of novels, at least one per month, just for fun. And that doesn’t count the reading I do for work.

Over the years, I’ve noticed I’m reading more independently published books and fewer books by the big publishers because those books by the big publishers don’t appeal to me as a male reader.

Most of the novels I’m reading these days are by indie authors. This leads us to the questions:

• Why are men shifting what they’re buying?
• How do you write books for men?
• How do you market books to men?

Trigger Warning: In this article, we’re going to assume men and women are different. If you’re the kind of person who thinks men and women are the same, you’re going to find the following conversation very triggering.

I believe that men and women are different, not just physically but also psychologically and even spiritually. They look for different things in a book. If you’re the kind of person who looks for an exception to disregard a general principle, this conversation is not for you, and you can feel free to skip it.

As I was reading about how to write for men and why current books aren’t resonating, one of the best breakdowns I read was by the blogger, comic book author, publisher, and game designer Alexander Macris.

The first thing I saw that he posted was this meme:

What were you thinking when you created that meme?

Alexander Macris: It was triggered by that Dazed Digital article, which Publishers Weekly retweeted with their endorsement.

It was titled, “Why don’t straight men read novels?” I asked myself, “Is that true?” I read novels, and plenty of my friends read novels. So, I did a little dive, and it turns out that 80% of the book-buying market is now women. Something like 45% of women read fiction for pleasure, but only 30% of men do. So, there is a gap.

Thomas: Those numbers often come from BookScan, which has a huge hole in its data. The stats are true, but they’re not reporting the whole truth because BookScan does not capture Kindle sales unless they’re reported by the publisher. That means no indie Kindle sales are captured in BookScan’s data, so you get a distorted view of the market. In many categories, indie authors are outselling traditionally published authors.

Any time you hear statistics about publishing, you have to ask, “Where is this data coming from?” Is it k-lyrics data, which is Kindle data that is often wildly different from BookScan, or it is BookScan data?

BookScan gets its numbers from publishers and major retailers but not from Amazon’s Kindle division. They do get Amazon paper book sales but not the Kindle sales. Amazon keeps that as a trade secret.

Alexander: In this case, the first data point was from a National Endowment for the Arts study where they were they interviewed women, which is probably why you see that disparity. NEA finds 45% versus 30%, whereas BookScan finds 80% versus 20%.

So, the Indies are making up the difference between those two numbers.

Thomas: But it’s still not 50/50.

Alexander: Right. The Dazed Digital article suggested masculinity is in crisis, and men feel pressured to conform in order to be masculine. Their suggestion was for writers to “create a safe space where you can feel, with no strings attached,” the direct opposite of the manosphere. It was nonsense that completely missed the point of what will actually motivate a man to read.

I got very triggered reading this article, and I created the meme, and it went viral. I got all sorts of pushback from the usual suspects, so I did a much longer rant about it that went even more viral.

Many people in my feed today are discussing yesterday's meme about how Tradpub killed men's sci-fi and fantasy. Some are even questioning whether men's sci-fi and fantasy is really "a thing". As someone who does read novels, a lot of them, by writers of both sexes, I can assure…

— Alexander Macris (@archon) July 24, 2024

Thomas: In this post, you demonstrate what a story would look like written by a man for a man and what that same story would look like written by a woman for a woman.

Embrace the Info Dump

Alexander: There are so many differences. Men prefer action and information. They want to read about men. Men want adventure, horror, and science fiction.

Women prefer to read about relationships. Interestingly, women care a lot less about whether the protagonist is male or female, especially as they get older.

Women want things like realistic fiction, dealing with relationships, romance, and real-world problems. Men figure they have real-world problems, so they don’t want to read about them.

In writer circles, you’ll often hear authors advise, “Never do info dumps.” Meanwhile, if you interview men about what they like to read, they say, “I really like to learn information as I read.”

If you read the hard science fiction classics that men loved, like Heinlein, you’ll see entire physics discussions about why they’re all doomed to die because of the gravitational well that’s affecting the spaceship. Men eat that up, and women say, “This is the worst book I’ve ever read.”

Thomas: In high school, one of my favorite books was Jurassic Park (Affiliate Link). It was one of the first “grown-up” books I read, and it’s packed full of chaos theory. At one point, Malcolm is lying on a bed, looking up at the skylight where Velociraptors are slowly chewing through the bars. Then, for the next three pages, he explains chaos theory and how it relates to their situation.

A buddy of mine once spent 20 minutes talking to me about how nuclear bombs are made and how they work, based on what he read in The Sum of All Fears. In that book, he takes 30 pages to describe in detail how a nuclear bomb works. For readers in the ’90s, that was very mysterious information.

How does a nuclear bomb work? How is a hydrogen bomb different from an atomic bomb? What makes the explosion so massive? Why is it so much more powerful than TNT? This book, written by a man for men, went into extreme detail about how to make a nuclear bomb.

But don’t worry—no actual nuclear secrets were given away because the real secret lies in refining the uranium. The book just assumes access to weapons-grade uranium. However, if you did have weapons-grade uranium, you could theoretically use the instructions from that Tom Clancy book to make your own nuclear bomb with just a little engineering.

Alexander: Imagine you’re writing a scene where a male author writes for men, and a female author writes for women, and the scene involves deactivating a nuclear weapon they’ve just stumbled upon. In the male-written book, Jack Reacher might study the nuclear weapon. He’d be familiar with nuclear weapons from his time in the special forces when he learned their secrets. The author would showcase his expertise on the subject, discussing the origins of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the intricacies of their construction. There would be a detailed discussion on how to activate and deactivate them and the risks of fallout if things go wrong. Then, it would shift back to a technical description of the man performing the deactivation, building tension. Finally, Reacher would cut the red wire.

If the same scene were written by a woman for women, it might read something like this: “Jane Reacher realized that if she didn’t cut the right wire, everyone would die. In her mind, she saw vivid images flashing—children burning, cities being destroyed. She thought of her mother, whom she loved, and how her mother would never get to see her grandchildren because the bomb would go off.” Just then, she would be interrupted by a supportive male character saying, ‘You’ve got this. I believe in you.’ And then she’d cut the red wire.

Write About Things More Than About People

Thomas: One of the significant personality differences between men and women, which has been studied by social scientists for decades, is that men tend to be more oriented toward things, while women are more oriented toward people. Jordan Peterson writes extensively about this. There are some interesting observations, such as the fact that the more egalitarian a society becomes—like in the Nordic countries—the more these differences manifest in people’s career choices. For example, engineering is a very things-oriented job, while nursing is more people-oriented. Interestingly, in more egalitarian countries, you see a higher percentage of women choosing nursing, not less, which is fascinating.

This observation also affects writing.

You can see this shift in the Marvel films. The earlier Marvel movies focused heavily on things. For example, in the first Iron Man film, there’s a sequence where Tony Stark spends about ten minutes building his first Iron Man suit. In fact, the Iron Man movie is filled with multiple montages of him constructing suits. But in the more recent Marvel films, which are aimed more at a female audience, the suits just appear—it’s almost like magic. The focus is no longer on gadgets or things; instead, it’s much more about relational drama.

Alexander: I’m so glad you mentioned those studies because, just before I got online with you, I was refreshing my knowledge on them. Researchers keep trying to disprove the gender equality paradox, but every time they conduct a study, they find even stronger evidence supporting it. The more egalitarian a society is, and the more it has worked to liberate women, the more women choose to do traditionally feminine things, while men prefer to do traditionally masculine things.

To learn more, read the following studies:

• Adult Reading Habits and Preferences in Relation to Gender Differences 
• The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education
• Indulging our gendered selves? Sex segregation by field of study in 44 countries

The Stoet and Geary study in psychological science, as well as studies by Charles and Bradley in the American Journal of Sociology, find the same thing.

Yet they can’t bring themselves to state that men and women have innate differences. They’re always trying to explain it away. That’s what leads to this bad advice that the Publisher’s Weekly article gives, where the “problem” is that men are ambitious, stoic, and masculine, and to get them to read, we have to show them how that’s wrong.

Thomas: Trying to change someone into the kind of person who likes what you wrote is terrible marketing. When you see other people doing terrible marketing or a whole industry doing terrible marketing, view it as a market opportunity. When everyone is doing something ineffective, and you’re the only one doing something effective, you have an opportunity to make a lot of money. That’s what we’re seeing in certain male-oriented genres in indie writing.

LitRPG, for example, may give you a whole chapter that’s nothing but numbers. The audiobook is nothing but “strength is 14, charisma is 12”, and so on. It’s very popular with men and very much about things. Those authors are making hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.

If you were to rank authors in terms of money, these are some of the best-paid authors in the world. They’re doing very well in the market because they’ve seen this market mismatch, and they’re taking advantage of it.

Before the marketing can work, you must have the right kind of product.

Embrace Nerdiness

Thomas: I’ve noticed that men who like to read enjoy reading about history. In the nonfiction space, there are many nonfiction topics that sell well to men.

As a reader of fantasy and science fiction, I want what I read to be grounded in history. I often play a game where I try to guess which historical war is inspiring this science fiction battle.

Alexander: In my business, Autarch, we create tabletop role-playing games that compete with Dungeons and Dragons, and we publish graphic novels. These graphic novels are set in the same universe as our role-playing games. When I set out to create my most recent role-playing game, Ascendant, which is a superhero-themed game, I decided to build an entire comic book universe around it.

The game itself uses logarithmic math, allowing players to scale to any superhero power level. It’s very detailed and “crunchy,” with tables and quantized stats for everything. When I started working on this game, people thought I was crazy because most big publishers were shifting toward a female audience, making games more narrative-driven, story-focused, and softer. My game is more like the lit RPGs you mentioned, where everything is quantified. For example, you can say that American Eagle can lift exactly a certain amount, throw it a specific distance, and at a defined speed.

When I released Ascendant, it became an instant number-one bestseller on DriveThruRPG and my most successful Kickstarter to date. It’s even spawned two graphic novels. Similarly, my tabletop role-playing game, Adventure Conqueror King System, also goes against the grain. It’s set in a fantasy version of Rome called the Arn Empire and is highly detailed with robust economic systems and military tactics. You can play it as a war game on the table or as a traditional RPG. This is completely contrary to the direction companies like Wizards of the Coast are taking, which focuses on making games easier to access by reducing complexity and emphasizing the story. I chose the opposite approach, and it led to a $300,000 Kickstarter campaign.

The advice commonly given—that games should be simpler and more story-focused—is simply wrong. The advice you’re giving, which focuses on numbers, history, action, things, and stats, is the right advice. That’s what engages men.

A Book for Everyone is a Book for No One

Thomas: There are ways to target female readers, and those approaches work. What doesn’t work is trying to take something created for men and make it for women or vice versa.

Marvel has learned that the hard way. Their stats told them they had more men than women watching their superhero movies. Instead of leaning into that, they wanted to make their movies more geared toward women by featuring female characters, more female writers, and more female structuring of the story. By doing so, Marvel is doing far worse than they were, even among women.

Women don’t want a female superhero story; they want a story written more for them. They want Bridgerton, which is nothing like Marvel. You can’t mix the two. You can’t put a superhero in the Bridgerton universe.

Many authors make the mistake of listening to editors who say, “Your book is too masculine. You can expand your audience by making it more feminine.” But it doesn’t work. Women don’t want the male version of the thing, and men want the version that they had before. They don’t want the watered-down version.

I often talk about knowing your Timothy. It’s a metaphor based on the book of Timothy in the Bible. By writing to one person, the author of the letter has reached billions of people over the years.

Many of the great works of fiction in history were written for a specific reader. Christopher Tolkien was the target audience for The Hobbit. If J.R.R. Tolkien could thrill Christopher Tolkien, the book was a success. His focus on specifically thrilling Christopher, who at the time was a young man, has allowed him to also thrill my five-year-old daughter. She just finished listening to the audiobook of The Hobbit, and she loved it.

People rarely realize that if you can thrill one person, you can thrill a million other people who are like that one. But if there’s no single person at the center of the target, there’s no pond for the ripples to reach.

Alexander: The best example I know of an author going the wrong direction was the independent writer Anthony Ryan, who I really like. He writes fantasy. His novel Blood Song (Affiliate Link) was about a very masculine hero who discovers his importance, overcomes adversity, and makes a difference.

I was delighted to hear that he had been picked up by a publisher and that there were going to be sequels. But the publisher immediately said, “We’ve got to reach more women.” So, the second and third novels take away the hero’s powers he earned in the first novel. The second book introduces the strong female protagonist, who continues into the third.

The books flopped. So, Anthony Ryan started a new trilogy with his original hero. He gave him his powers back, and everyone thought it was fantastic.

Don’t make that mistake.

Write about Adversity Not About Trauma

Thomas: Books that resonate with men often involve a strong character who is facing internal and external adversity he must overcome.

The strong female trope often features a woman who’s basically perfect but has been harmed by people outside of her. She has experienced some trauma and must learn to let go of her trauma in order to live her truth and be stronger. I realize I’m not doing a fair job describing it, but my point is that if you want to appeal to men, you can’t write in a way that appeals to women.

When writing for male readers, it’s important for the characters to suffer but to overcome by their own strength without being defined by the suffering.

For example, Tony Stark doesn’t whine about being in a cave with shards about to kill him. That doesn’t haunt him for the rest of his narrative because he overcomes the adversity. What haunts him are his own moral failings he occasionally wants to overcome. That’s what makes him an appealing character. Trauma doesn’t haunt him, and he’s a winner. Men want to read about winners.

Alexander: The 1984 movie Conan the Barbarian, directed by John Milius, was one of the most masculine movies ever made. The opening is the Nietzsche quote, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” In the opening scenes of the movie, Conan’s family gets killed by the big bad Thulsa Doom.

Then he gets enslaved and put on the wheel of pain, where he has to push a heavy wheel his whole childhood. When they see he’s strong and has survived that, he becomes a gladiator. He must then overcome the adversity of gladiatorial battles and suffering. Finally, he becomes a master of swordplay, makes his escape, and decides to get his revenge on Thulsa Doom.

At the end of the movie, he confronts Thulsa Doom. In that confrontation, Tulsa Doom says, “I made you. I created you with the adversity that I inflicted upon you. Your strength is the strength I gave you.”

If this movie had been made in the modern day, Conan would probably say, “And now I’m bigger than you,” and he would turn around and walk away.  However, in the 1984 movie, Conan looks at him and cuts off his head.

Then he sits down with his arms crossed and watches as all the guy’s minions panic and realize their hero has been defeated. They leave, and he just sits there in satisfaction at the victory.

That’s the male fantasy.

Thomas: That desire for strength, winning, and overcoming is what makes Conan such an appealing character. At the end of every story, he’s victorious.

It’s interesting to read these Conan stories because the original ones are almost a generation older than The Lord of the Rings. A generation before Frodo was fighting Shelob, a giant spider in ancient ruins, Conan was doing the same. One of the major differences is that Tolkien sometimes portrays magic as good—Gandalf is a wizard who uses magic for good, and Tolkien introduces good non-human characters.

In contrast, Conan lives in a world where magic is always evil, civilization is almost always corrupt, and he must rely on his own strength and vigor to overcome evil. The inhuman creatures are evil as are many of the humans. In these stories, Conan often escapes with a woman who invariably needs to be rescued. There’s something very ancient about this form of storytelling.

If you want to write for men, your protagonist needs to become a winner in a meaningful way. Telling the reader he is a winner is not enough. That’s not a meaningful win. Only great difficulty makes the triumph satisfying.

Alexander: The adversity must also be meaningful. It shows up a lot in post-apocalyptic fiction, where it always starts with the normal world on a Monday, and then everything goes to hell. The man grows and rises to the occasion of dealing with that apocalypse.

In some way, part of the male fantasy is being made to suffer so you have the opportunity to achieve greatness, which is foreign to the sort of advice you get about writing for women.

Men Are More Conservative in Reading Preferences

Thomas: It’s definitely foreign to the kind of book you see at Barnes and Noble. My wife was just at Barnes and Noble last week, and she was rolling her eyes because there weren’t even any books for her. The modern books available at Barnes and Novel aren’t even written for conservatives.

There’s been this interesting phenomenon where men and women are separating politically. Men and women are now significantly different in where they land politically.

There is an element of politics that’s now getting infused into the politics in modern fiction, whether it’s identity politics or the idea of oppressor-oppressed neo-Marxism, where your virtue is equal to how oppressed you’ve been in the past.

That doesn’t appeal to many modern male readers because they’re looking for characters who overcome adversity not oppressed whiners.

Alexander: The split in male-female politics has been interesting because it gets to that fundamental difference between men and women that we alluded to earlier. If you don’t believe there’s something fundamentally different about men and women psychologically and spiritually, then it becomes inexplicable.

You can only assume, “Oh, boys are being peer pressured by other boys and toxic masculinity to vote for Trump.” There are actually very good biological reasons why men are motivated to succeed and excel in a way that women are not.

If you look at history, something like 85% of the women who’ve ever been born were able to reproduce if they wanted to, but only something like 20% of the men who’ve ever been born were able to reproduce. From a biological perspective, men are the expendable sex.

One guy can reproduce with as many women as needed. But if your society doesn’t have enough women, it will not reproduce itself. This basic biological fact carries through into all elements of civilization and culture. Deep in every guy is the belief that sounds like, “If I don’t excel, if I’m not in some way special, if I don’t in some way overcome, then my paternity ends with me, and my ancestry ends with me.”

I think these are deep, raw, vital instincts that have been massively suppressed. They’ve been problematized and called toxic when they’re expressed by men.

I think that’s why we’re seeing such poor performance by men in society in so many areas now. I think it’s one reason we’re seeing so much anger and the rise of the incel and the black pill (nihilism) and incel movements. It’s all related, and it directly ties into what you need to do to reach men as an audience when you write for them.

Thomas: It’s based on a core biological fact: A baby can be born to a dead father, but a baby cannot be born to a dead mother. A man can get his wife pregnant and go off to war. And if he dies in war, his wife still gives birth to his child. That can’t happen in reverse. If a pregnant woman dies in war, the baby dies as well.

In fact, Titus Livy writes about this in Roman history. The Romans in the Republican era, which is what Livy was writing about, had these barbarian invasions.

Every once in a while, the population of Gauls would swell, and they would pour over the Alps in large invasions. The battles were costly, but the Romans often emerged victorious. However, one time, the Gauls brought their women with them. This was a different tribe, one the Romans were not used to encountering, and they arrived in massive numbers. The Romans only had to fight this tribe once. After defeating the men, they enslaved all the women, and the tribe disappeared from history. They vanished from the historical record, and we only know about them from one passage in Titus Livy. Now, we can only speculate about who these people were, as they are lost in the genetic stream. There is no way of knowing who they were.

By contrast, the Germans and Celts would send their young trouble-making men off to fight the Romans so they could prove themselves. The ones who were successful and survived to return had descendants.

There’s a powerful reward mechanism built into biology. If you want your genes to contribute to future generations, you have to have your genes contribute to future generations. You can’t do that if you don’t reproduce.

Alexander: We see that now when they do genetic studies. Scientists study a population group, and they’ll find that the X chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA are all descending from early Anatolian farmers, but the Y chromosome of the men comes from Indo-European Steppe nomads.

Those deep instincts, suppressed as they are, remain available to the writer to tap should he wish to.

War Fascinates Men

Thomas: I suspect it’s part of the reason men find battle so interesting.

One of the responses to your viral tweet said, You can tell if a woman or a man wrote the book by doing a search for the word “flank.” If a man wrote the book, you’d be reading that word quite a bit if it’s the kind of book with battles because men study those things.

If you don’t believe me, just ask your dad about World War II.

Ask your dad a specific question about the Sherman tank, and mention that you think it was either a really good tank or a really bad one. If your dad is still alive, he’ll likely give you a detailed breakdown of the Sherman tank and its effectiveness, both tactically and strategically, because he’s probably studied it.

Alexander: I was a military history major at West Point—that’s my thing, and I loved it.

Edward Luttwak, the strategist who wrote the famous book Coup d’État (Affiliate Link), is now very active on Twitter, discussing the Russia-Ukraine war. Luttwak argues that peace and conflict studies in the West have completely failed because they start from the premise that war is a disease that needs to be eradicated. This perspective ignores the fact that, for thousands of generations, a significant percentage of men have viewed war as a noble profession and a pursuit for masculine men. Luttwak believes that until conflict studies, peace studies, and war studies recognize this reality, they will never truly understand the nature of what they are studying. I found this to be a really profound insight.

All my work has very detailed battle mechanics. I won’t say my superhero stories have flanking, but they have the superhero equivalent of flanking.

Thomas: As we nerd out on talk about battle tactics from era to era, I’m reminded that this is how men talk.

If you go to a bar and listen to men who are a few beers deep, you’ll hear these kinds of conversations where you can reference a Napoleonic square formation and keep going because people know what you’re talking about.

Of course, not all men are super into history, but the history nerds are underserved in fiction right now. If you’ve been listening to your female editor who wants you to make the hero more in tune with his emotions, add more relational drama, and delete the Genoese crossbow strategies, then stop listening to that editor.

That’s not the editor you need to reach the reader you’re trying to reach.

Alexander: Absolutely.

Men Read for Knowledge & Status

Alexander: A study from the Young Adult Library Services Association interviewed boys who were active readers, and they tried to figure out what made them different.

It turned out they had been introduced to reading within boy-interest areas, such as outer space and dinosaurs. Those first books gave them a lot of information, which then gave them social credit among other boys of their age. In other words, masculinity, as those boys saw it, and reading were made compatible rather than incompatible, and that was a key point.

It’s true that not all men can talk about Napoleonic squares, but I guarantee you that if they can’t talk to you about Napoleonic battle tactics, they have very strong opinions on something like the appropriate formation of football teams.

Thomas: Exactly. When you pick a “Timothy,” you’re choosing which nerdy thing you’re going to lean into. Remember, men are more into things, and women are more into people. It’s a general observation, but you must have something that you’re really into that your book really captures.

Knowing who you’re trying to reach changes everything because now you have permission to be a nerd on that thing.

Alexander: If you were writing a book about American football, imagine your protagonist is a quarterback. To write it for men, you would describe the formations he’s adopting and the tactics he’s using to win.

To write the book for women, you would talk about the emotion of being on the field, the reaction of the crowds, and the stress of knowing that his mother is sick in the hospital and didn’t come to see him play.

There is a male nerd for every topic.

The advice that says, “Don’t dump information,” does not apply when you’re writing to men on the nerdy topic they love.

Thomas: My introduction to reading fiction was very similar to that of the boys interviewed in the study you mentioned.

As a young boy, I really struggled to read. I didn’t read well until I was eight or nine years old. My very first books were The Boxcar Children books, which were classic middle-grade novels.

Soon after that, I got into G.A. Henty’s books, and in the homeschool world, G.A. Henty is still one of the top-selling authors. Henty’s books were a mechanism for teaching history. The plots were very simple and similar from book to book.

They were about a British boy who was fighting against the Romans or for the British. Each book would take place in a different time in history, and they were a fun way to learn history. They were very masculine and Victorian. G.A. Henty still outsells most authors today. His books have enduring appeal.

My reading buddies and I would talk about the wars and battles in the stories. Those books introduced me to the Carthaginians, the ancient Britons, and the Jewish rebellion against the Romans. I knew what the Bible had to say about the Jews, but I didn’t know what happened in Jerusalem after the Bible story ended. When I read the G.A. Henty book, I understood that Christians were wise to flee the city, as Jesus had said. This gave me status with my the other guys.

Autism: The Hyper-Masculine Brain?

Alexander: There’s a theory that autism as we understand it is essentially hyper-masculinity in the brain, which is why people with autism have a massive obsession with “things” and awkwardness with people.

They have found that autism expresses itself differently in men than in women. Autistic women tend to be higher functioning than autistic men, and often, their autism isn’t noticed, but it turns out that autistic women tend to have more masculine brains than average women.

My mother and wife are both autistic, and I was introduced to fiction by my mother, who named me after Alexander the Great. She used to read me the Iliad and the Mordor Thor and eventually Lord of the Rings until I was able to read them on my own.

At a young age, I was introduced to military history and stories of Alexander the Great sleeping with the Iliad under his pillow because he was inspired by the greatness of Achilles.

When I encounter women who love military history, I wonder how many of them have masculinized autistic brains.

Certainly, I know that my audience is made up of a disproportionately large number of autists who really love the quantity, things, the itemization and quantization, and the structured social interaction.

Thomas: An RPG game says to the autistic person that the next several hours of social interaction will have very clear rules and expectations. I imagine, a person who struggles to pick up social cues would experience relief in that setting. They would understand the nature of their relationship with the game master and their party members, and that structure provides comfort.

Alexander: I wonder if every man is probably a little autistic about one thing in his life. Whether it’s grilling, World War II, or football, every man is a little nerdy about something. And I don’t use the word autistic as a disparaging term. My wife considers it a superpower. I’ve had that word slung against my work when people say, “You write for autists.” But it’s just that I write very passionately about intricate, detailed things.

Thomas: If we could sum up this episode with one phrase, it would be, “It’s okay to be a nerd because it can make your book more appealing.”

What have you noticed about romance elements in books for men?

Thomas: I’ve noticed that as fantasy has shifted from a male-dominated genre to a female-dominated genre, the adult content has increased.

If you were to believe the stereotype of “men are only interested in one thing,” then you would think books written by men would include a lot of adult content, and books by women would be less sexually charged. In reality, it’s just the opposite.

As women are reading and writing more fantasy, the sexual content in those books has dramatically increased. That’s not to say that there isn’t adult content in male-written fantasy. Game of Thrones has a lot of that, but many epic fantasy books close the door pretty quickly.

Even the Conan the Barbarian stories (which feature scantily clad people on the covers) close the bedroom door. Or more often, there’s no bedroom at all.

Alexander: My wife recommended I read some Sarah J. Mass novels to get an understanding of what fantasy fiction written for women is like. Those books are so steamy that I almost felt embarrassed to be reading them at certain points. I had to put them down because of the explicitness.

By contrast, I read the Gore novels by John Norman, which are infamous for being sexually charged, but by book four of the Gore series, there hadn’t been a single sex scene. They talked about the existence of sex on a philosophical level, but actual sex, and the door shuts.

I found that to be the case in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. There are only hints or allusions, and then the story moves on.

Thomas: Again, this is why it’s so important to know your reader. If you don’t understand your reader and buy into stereotypes, you’ll miss the mark.

If you believe men want more steamy scenes and that will make it sell better, then you don’t understand what men want from a story. They want victory. They want to experience the life of the winning protagonist.

Men Don’t Care About Representation: The LEGO Study

LEGO conducted a famous study to determine why little girls weren’t playing with LEGOs as much as little boys. In the study, they observed children playing with toys.

They discovered that when the little boy held LEGO Batman, he would start talking like Batman. The little boy would become Batman and start experiencing life as the superhero, which was the appeal of playing with Batman.

When a little girl would play with the LEGO Batman, it would become the little girl. The LEGO Batman would drink tea, go to the store, and have relational drama with the other LEGO girls.

When little girls pick out a doll, they want one that looks like them. They want to be expressed and represented. They want to be captured in the toy that they’re playing with.

By contrast, my sons play with cars that look nothing like them, but they have voices, and they talk to each other. My sons have no desire to see themselves represented in the toy. In fact, there’s a desire to see anything but themselves expressed in the toy. They want to live a different life.

Representation may be important if you’re writing for women, but it’s not important if you’re writing for men. In fact, it may even be harmful because men don’t necessarily want to see themselves represented in the story. They want to escape to live another story.

Alexander: What those little girls did to Batman is what the female-led publishing industry as a whole has done to science fiction, fantasy, Star Wars, Marvel, and to actual Batman!

We don’t have to wonder what happens when you put all women in charge of Star Wars.

I don’t begrudge them. If you put me in charge of Lifetime movies, I guarantee you, Lifetime movies would become World War II movies in Rome. I don’t begrudge people for making content that appeals to them, but I think we have to admit that’s what’s happening.

How to Stir Up Word-of-Mouth Among Men

Thomas: If you just focus on thrilling your reader, much of the marketing will take care of itself. The first thousand copies of a book’s sales depend on your promotion, but after that, and especially after 10,000 copies, the book’s sales will rise or fall based on word-of-mouth reccomendations.

The market for men reading male-oriented fiction is so low. At Barnes and Noble, you may not find a single book written by a manly man for manly men. The act of writing a manly book for manly men is remarkable.

I interviewed Larry Correia because he’s one of the few authors doing this really well, and he is making millions of dollars writing books men love to read. He’s playing on that fantasy that every gun owner has where they kind of wish that vampires were real so they could use their shotgun to defend their family.

If you’ve ever had that feeling, a Larry Correia novel is very satisfying. Men want to imagine the adversity, the bad thing, so that they can overcome them. “I want vampires to be real so I can kill them.”

As Neil Gaiman wrote, “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

That’s the essence of fantasy. When I’m feeling poor, I want to read about someone who’s rich. When I’m feeling powerless, I want to read about someone who becomes powerful. The ultimate fantasy is the story of someone who goes from powerless to powerful and learns to wield their power well.

Consider Luke Skywalker. He’s a worthless farmer whining about going to Tosche Station to buy some power converters, and by the end of the story, he is a sword-wielding knight who rescues the princess from the “castle.” He has gained power, learned how to wield it, and continues to learn throughout the story.

That story resonates with men. If you want to write stories that resonate with male readers, your story must be in tune with the music in their hearts. If you’re a man, it means listening to the music that’s already in your heart and not listening to people who tell you that music is wrong.

Women can write for men, but they have to listen to the music that’s in the heart of men. J.K. Rowling did this well. Harry Potter starts as a loser living under the stairs. By the end of the story, he is beating the bad guy.

The Male Fantasy

Alexander: My own story follows that narrative. I initially went to West Point as a young man, hoping to become someone like General Patton. However, I ended up resigning because I wasn’t doing well physically. At West Point, you get graded on physical performance, and I was struggling. I was in the top 5% academically but in the bottom 5% physically. My career counselor there told me, “You would excel in any career except a military one because you don’t have the necessary athletic ability.” So, somewhat reluctantly, I left West Point.

I continued my military history major at Binghamton University and later went to law school. While in law school, I studied internet law and wrote my thesis on how the evolution of cyberspace and its code essentially function as the laws governing it. I also designed some games in my spare time and eventually started a video game company.

Then, in 2001, when the country went to war, all my friends who stayed at West Point were suddenly off to fight. I experienced a terrible crisis, feeling like I had failed as a man. I wasn’t the masculine person I thought I should have been. Instead of going to war, I was left with this unusual skill set: military history, law, and game design.

Then, out of nowhere, I get a call from DARPA. They say, “Hi, Mr. Macris, this is DARPA.” I reply, “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA?” And they confirm, “Yes, DARPA. We need you to come to the Pentagon for a project.” I ask, “For a project?”

It turns out that DARPA had decided to test a new way of detecting terrorist activity using its learning algorithms on massively multiplayer online games. However, they were concerned because they didn’t understand how these games were designed and were also worried about the legal implications of the study. So, they searched their database for someone with military experience, a security clearance, a law degree, and expertise in game design, and I was the one dude.

So, I got shipped to the Pentagon to do my little thing, and my work went into a tightly bundled compartment that no one heard about for 20 years until finally, it was revealed that this study had taken place.

That is the essence of the male fantasy. That one thing you nerd out about turns out to be the most important thing. The helicopter lands and picks you up, and you get to be the hero.

You might be the world’s leader in understanding NFL strategy, and we’ve just discovered an alien race that thrives on competitive space sports games, and you’re the only one who can save the earth from them.

Find that one unique, nerdy skillset and double down.

Thomas: I love that.

There’s actually a passage in the Biblical book of Proverbs that captures that idea. It says, “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will stand before kings and not before obscure men.”

My favorite commentary on the passage is in the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin reflects on this verse and attributes all his success in life to it. By any measure, Franklin was incredibly successful. He excelled in many fields. He was among the top scientists, diplomats, and politicians of his time. However, he credited his success primarily to his work as a publisher and author. He mentioned that his skill in publishing allowed him to have audiences with kings and even have dinner with the King of Denmark. Franklin believed that his success as a publisher laid the foundation for his achievements as a scientist and in his other pursuits.

It’s a great autobiography. If you haven’t read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, you really should check it out. It’s considered one of the great works of American literature, and I’d probably put it in the top five of 18th-century American literature.

He lived that fantasy. Ultimately, he negotiated with kings. He’s one of the few people to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He was the one who saved the Constitution. Arguably, the Great Compromise was his creature. He was the guy who was able to get all the different factions to get along.

My point is it’s okay to be weird. Nerd out on something.

If all you have is a sling and a few smooth stones to battle giants, that may be all you need. In fact, it may be better than trying to put on Saul’s unfamiliar armor, trying to be something you’re not.

Be that weird author. Write that weird book and write it for the weird people who would love it. In this, you’ll find quite a bit of marketing success.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to write for men but feels discouraged that it’s not clicking?

Alexander: Disregard everything you read online about how to write because it’s written for a different audience than the one you’re trying to reach. Pick a topic you’re passionate about. Create a character who’s an expert in something that you’re an expert on and that you feel really comfortable sharing information about. Then, don’t be afraid to nerd out as you write.

Thomas: If you want to hear more from Alexander, he’s got some amazing thoughts about fiction, writing, and the world.

Connect with Alexander Macris:

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J.S. Living, author of The Covenant of Blood

Elizabeth Bathory-Tepes wants to find the mother that abandoned her. She wants to find her father’s soul. And she wants to know why she blackouts from time to time. But getting what you want comes at a cost. And, sometimes, the cost of blood is too high.

What would you do if someone granted your deepest desire for one tiny favor? What would you give up to gain your freedom? And, if it came down to it, who would you save: yourself, or a loved one?        

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