The beatings will continue until morale improves.

A guest post by Dave Freer

Dave Freer is one of my favorite authors (I may be biased because he tuckerized me extensively in one of his books for Baen) and he writes books that delight my inner twelve year old. Not coincidentally, most of his books delight actual twelve year olds too although all of them also contain themes that delight the “grown ups” too.

Anyway, in a desire to gain the widest possible publicity for his new book - Storm Dragon, he’s guest blogging and substacking here and there and I’m delighted that one of the places he’s doing it is this one.

So with out further ado Dr Monkey Dave Freer

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Seriously, Traditional Publishing has done everything in their power to discourage men from reading for at least 30 years. Now there suddenly a discovery that the fruit of their efforts is sour and sparse.

A huge market niche doesn’t want their products, won’t pay for what they don’t want, and, for reasons entirely beyond the Publishers’ comprehension are not particularly keen on getting them some sweet government succour (well, someone is a sucker). Money laundering of political donations (we pay politician a handsome advance for a book no-one actually reads, cheaply ghost-written, which may adorn coffee tables. Their campaign spends campaign finance buying copies which they then hand out to party members) is a great racket, but it can only take you so far.

Besides the utter tragedy of discovering that, while working in publishing in NY is socially acceptable to right cocktail parties… you need a trust fund because there’s just not really that much money, and a lot of books tick all the right boxes for a wonderful virtue signal, but don’t actually sell that well, if at all, there are wider implications. There’s no getting around the fact that education – and thereby publishing, were always a target for social engineering. There’s no getting around the fact that from the employment point-of-view they have succeeded.

Speaking as the guy who has actually given up meals to buy a book (yes, I was that poor) it’s quite hard for me to acknowledge that books are not, in fact, the basic stuff of life, like water or food or shelter. They’re not even essentials in the second order of ‘needs’ – some form of escapism and entertainment. There are, I admit, reluctantly, alternatives. I personally believe there are collateral effects which are not so dispensable, but I’ll get to that later.

It appears that Traditional Publishing’s invaders had the same delusion, but could not rise above it. People don’t have to buy your books if they don’t like them. Because reading is quite private, they don’t even have to buy them if they pretend to like them. I recall, to my great amusement, two radical man-hating feminists whose reading at a conference was crammed to standing-room only with virtuous adulation… saying if only they could sell one copy for every person there (yes, their sales numbers were indeed that dismal). This means your ability to social-engineer their lives through your books is limited to the people who actually read them.

You do, of course, engineer a large group who… don’t read at all, which has a far greater social impact… and very likely one you won’t like, and possibly one that’s no good for anyone. Now they’re acting all surprised to find that, well, straight men – that they’ve minimized in their ranks, whose work they won’t publish, who they have denigrated at every turn, have unsurprisingly little interest in reading the books they publish. Their reaction seems to have been to put up the prices, and to berate and abuse the customers who fail to buy. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

They could have got some good advice – better than they obviously have had – from the average drug pusher on the street corner. Firstly: that first fix free (or pretty cheap¹) and good. Just what the customer wanted. It made them feel good, so they wanted more. And… you had to keep getting new customers, because the old ones suddenly and mysteriously stop buying. Oh, and if you adulterate the stuff too much, so it doesn’t do what they want it to do, your customers will find a different supplier, or different stuff, or both. Both your money and ability to social influence will crash.

But then there is second tier of unintended consequences comes in. The Jesuits had a recipe that worked for centuries: get them young, and they are yours for life.

My level of concern about how I unfairly disadvantage other people’s children is, by reading to mine is, to put it mildly, well below the magma. My concern that my kids have to grow up and live in a world where other parents didn’t at least try to give their own genes this sort of advantage is stratospheric. It doesn’t of course stop at ‘being read to.’ They have to move on to reading themselves. You see, reading (or listening) rather than video requires the reader to ‘make’ the images of the story in their own heads. That in turn fosters a whole level of mental creativity of neural connections that will not develop otherwise. The person is poorer for it (often literally) as is their society, and in the end the world. I see it as people who have never seen a wheel, can have no idea what you could do with one. They cannot imagine carts or think of cogs. Assembly-lines and rocket ships are simply magic. They lack the basic tool to start the process. And frankly, while you can teach someone numeracy and literacy as an adult, I suspect they will always be at a disadvantage, even if it only lost time.

As for those who grew up with the opportunity – but found reading unappealing (School prescribed reading, I am looking at you), well, you do realize to ever get them again, you’re going to have to over-ride the negative and give them something they WANT? Berating them is not going to work. You can’t even apply society’s mirror – because reading is such a private action.

Beatings are of course, much more popular with authoritarians than incentives, especially if the beatings can be delivered to suitable scapegoat, that can’t hit back. It’s been the latest fashion in the UK for the last while, the most current incarnation being this Netflix production ‘ADOLESCENCE’ – which despite the British PM calling it a ‘documentary’ is a work of fiction. If you had to work your way through British knife-crime stats, white male ‘Incels’ might scrape a couple of percent. If you actually bring that to 13 year-olds… supposedly made into misogynists by role modelling on Andrew Tate… you’re down into the decimals. But this must be shown in UK schools – look, sweeties, if anything it might move your problem from near imaginary to actually existent, via the Streisand effect. It’s not, guaranteed, going to have a single positive effect. Because if anything these kids need its male role models, aspirations, things they can identify with and believe in. Of course, ONE of the places they might find that in is books, and if they were really seriously concerned about the issue, and thought about it -- they’d be trying that. But I think it is just case of scapegoat… which is a pity.

Because, frankly, they are breeding a problem, and not just among the poor white boys of the UK.Tangent here, but I read this post about… building wells in Africa

How MrBeast is Keeping Africa Poor

It’s well worth a read, and quite correct about the corrosive effects of ‘aid’. What the author does also identify is the issue of self-pride. Now, as it happens my parents were idealists… in Africa. They spent years volunteering for a program to help Africans… not building wells with pumps no one could be bothered to maintain (because they had no value, being free) or building helplessness, or putting local businesses out of business. Instead they taught adult literacy and numeracy classes. What they gave needed no maintenance. It did give the beneficiaries dignity, and – even if it was just by the fact they could read signboards and not be abused for being stupid and walking into an exit, or not getting ripped off with the wrong change - benefit. It gave them a little bit of pride, a little bit of a better future.

Which, to wrap this rather wandering essay is what is needed. Stop beating men, let them have what they actually want to read, and do it while they’re young and keep doing it, year after year. And you can’t ‘give it to them’ from a publishing industry almost wholly devoid of people who they can identify with – who write what they want to read. They might be your scapegoat class, but they’re actually far too large a group to do that safely to. Unless you want a real problem they too need dignity and pride in themselves.

Which is why, when I was asked to write a book for teen young men… I didn’t use the chance to bash them down and tell them they were useless misogynists, with no hopes, but rather to give action, adventure, problem solving and respect, on a frontier world with strange beasts and a great deal of danger. We’re going to need them.

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Dave’s book is published by

Raconteur Press

who also publish many other fine works, almost all of which have a positive uplifting message.

Go buy it now!

Update: Dave’s also guest blogging here on a somewhat related topic

1. Some Notes on Pricing

(coincidentally JVS also has a recent book published by Raconteur Press - it’s probably not as YA as Dave’s but still a good read)