You walk into a bookstore. You meander over to the fantasy area. What do you see? Lots, and lots, of girl books. Dude, where are the dudes?

I honestly didn’t think much about this until I started on Line the Stars, which features male protagonists. In fact, the majority of the cast will be male. Yet when I scan bookshelves or the top 50 scifi/fantasy reads on Amazon, the majority of the books are female-centric. It’s totally fine having female-centric stories (I’ve written a couple myself), but it looks like the publishing pendulum has swung so far that male-centric stories barely make a blip on the market. What’s especially peculiar is that even when I tried to see if anyone’s studied this conundrum, the research harks back to 2019 or 2020, when there was some more balance between the genders. A pop-culture critic out of New Zealand also commented on this, and I think his points strike at a troubling trend. (Warning: he has his profane moments, but his argument is sound.)

Another YouTuber, the Nonsense-Free Editor, also touches on the struggles men and boys face in finding stories that would appeal to them as she interviews author Jeff Putnam.

When I look at Biff and Bash, I see boys with very unique reading interests dominated by nonfiction. Currently, Biff studies Star Trek ship schematics or This Old House manuals with the occasional weird facts book. Meanwhile, Bash reads up on Transformer collections or haunted houses with the occasional retro toy catalog. When they’re self-motivated to read a text-heavy book, they do not go for fiction. That may be influenced by Autism to some degree for Biff, who struggles a lot with abstract things that he can’t visualize, but that’s not the case for Bash.

After watching these videos, would there be any fun genre fiction out there for my sons to peruse?

As the YouTuber Echo Chamberlain and author Jeff Putnam say, the only way to get boys excited about reading is to get boys writing for boys to read. 

Now initially I had a problem with this, being a woman working on a trilogy geared for male readers, but I could understand his point. When it comes to action, when it comes to science fiction, when it comes to stories focused more on adventure than, say, relationships or self-discovery, those stories tend to be written by males.

Where did that kind of masculine writing go in the fantasy stories? Or, did I just not understand what boys are looking for? I’m a mom of boys, dammit, so I better talk to them and figure this out.

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Bash loves Dave Pilkey graphic novels, and he’ll try others of a similar ilk because he likes the art. There’s a lot of goofy humor in those stories, and a lot of action. The occasionally heavier moments (like Cat Kid being abandoned by his “father”) do not last long. Overall, the books contain something I would appreciate at that age, too: fun, action, and adventure.

Biff loves the Five Nights at Freddy’s games, and so he will read those graphic novels and short stories for fun. Once in a while he’ll read manga about Kirby, another video game character. Sure, he will read the fiction dictated by school, or fiction I challenge him to try, but for his own choice? Nope. It has to be characters he’s familiar with in a lore he understands, ideally with jump scares and creepy endings. So, familiarity means a lot, and boys can expect things to get dark and a bit bloody–like Jeff Putnam said in his interview, it’s all about the risk. The characters should be facing something scary so that the reader can face that fear by proxy.

For a change in perspective, I spoke with Anne Clare’s son, who’s the same age as my twins. He said he likes trying fictional books that others he knows recommend; that way, he knows he’s getting something good. But then he also raised another important point: He didn’t want to read a book that didn’t have a boy main character.

I talked to Bo about this too, and his memories of reading as a kid synced up with Bash and Anne’s son.

1. Comics. Bo LOVED comics as a kid. Like Bash, he enjoyed the action-oriented visuals with all those dialogue bubbles. Entire comics could be devoured in a single sitting. He enjoyed books like Hardy Boys as well, sure, but most of his reading diet for a long time was comics.
2. Boy main character. Comics had and still have their share of female-centric editions, and that’s fine. But those never appealed to Bo. He loved the ensemble stories that included females, but a female solo storyline never appealed to him. (And by the market sales of comics, that’s true for a lot of readers.)

Then Bo mentioned something else he read when younger that doesn’t fit this mold: The Little House Books.

Now I had read Little House in the Big Woods because I had to for school. I never read the other ones, as they had no murders or explosions. Bo, too, had to read Wilder for school, but his class read The Long Winter. Then Bo chose to read more of the series of his own choosing. I HAD to ask why.

“Because that story is about survival. That family goes through so much trying not to starve. I got to care about those characters, and I wanted to see what else happened to them after the story ended.”

For Bo, it didn’t matter that a girl was a main character. The theme of survival overran that. It reminded me that when a story has a strong plot with clear stakes that impact characters on multiple levels, the main character really could be anyone or anything. Why? Because the reader cares about whoever’s in the situation and wants to see them come out the other side.

We are often told that, as writers, we should write the kind of story we want to read. I, a female, have written both female and male-centric stories. I enjoy them both, as I’m sure many of you fellow creatives do, too. Yes, there’s the struggle in getting male-centric stories out there right now, but we shouldn’t let the market limit us. When we create a story-world with themes that connect with our readers’ inner selves, they’ll be eager to explore with whatever character we create to walk alongside them.

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Coming up, I’ve got a podcast, another interview, some fun with poisons, and of course, a trip to summer camp…in space!

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!