Inkyswill

“Men Don’t Read” We know from the start that there ARE books for male readers. Plenty of them. We know for a fact that there ARE male readers. Nothing else explains the zombie popularity of books with the deceased person's name “Tom Clancy” printed on the cover. Tolkien remains popular despite what Amazon did to his world. Male readers do exist. The problem is connecting the two. That’s what publishing companies used to do. It wasn’t that they created books. It was that they knew how to get a manuscript in front of people who would enjoy it. They have stopped doing that for certain segments of the market. It won’t work to post on X telling them they need to fix that. They’re making money on what they’re doing now; they have no reason to try something new. If we want to solve the problem, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. We need a sales vector that male readers will WANT to open, want to get in on, want to check out. First we must build that audience. Once we have an audience, we must—MUST—serve them first. If the readers can’t count on this sales vector to give them books they are going to love—books they will not be able to put down—then they will not tune in to the sales vector. My idea is, essentially, “BookBub for men.” Now, BookBub already includes books for men. But they’re generalists, and they’re not really *trying* to aim at men. They’re just sweeping up a few men in their general hunt for readers. Gathering the audience means doing what BookBub does: paying for ads that entice the male readers we want to sign up. We’re going to have to reward the audience for looking at our sales vector. Every email opens with a snack-sized little tidbit guys will like: a 300 word history of a historic last stand, of a hero who rose against the odds, etc. It’s not just books. Every email should have stuff guys really enjoy: craft beer, bourbon, guns, military history. And also a few books on sale. Next comes the part that’s hard, but that I personally believe is indispensable: We can never give a charity review. Never. If we’re focused on the audience, we must serve the audience. If we tell them, this book is good, they must be able to trust our word. That’s why BookBub works. You can buy a book that makes it into BookBub with reasonable certainty that it doesn’t suck. As you, I hope, can guess from the way I’ve worded all this, I don’t want to do it on my own. But I believe we have a solid group of writers here who produce books for men. Working together, I think we could put something like this into practice. The @basedbooksale already has a big piece of this. Spotlight on Indie (@spotlightfic) has a big piece of this. @upstreamreviews has a big piece of this. Where I see this idea as offering added value is a relentless, fanatical devotion to the audience, rather than the authors. The books are out there. The readers are out there. All that's missing is the connection between them.