Getting men to read fiction is the holy grail of publishing. Can the British male be weaned off newspapers and books about the SAS?

Jonathan Heawood
Sunday June 6, 2004
The Observer

On my way in to work on Friday morning, I did an extraordinary thing. I looked at the other people on the tube. There were eight men reading newspapers, four women reading novels, a couple of tourists looking at a map and one man mumbling into his beard. I got out my book and began to read.

According to new research commissioned by Penguin Books, men who are seen reading a book are more attractive to the opposite sex, and I was keen to see whether this was true in practice. At Victoria, the experiment was temporarily suspended when a troop of schoolchildren got on and began swinging from the rails above my head. When the carriage was clear, I tried again. The lady tourist looked at me with interest, but then she was French. As usual on the tube, all English eyes were averted. When I tried to catch the attention of the girl sitting opposite - holding my book prominently in front of my nose and looking over the top of it - she clung rather more tightly onto her handbag.

Perhaps my attempt would have been more successful if I'd been reading something more laddish than Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty - a novel featuring liberal amounts of gay sex. Penguin's 'Good Booking' campaign, to be launched tomorrow, offers a prize of £1,000 each month to any man caught reading one of Penguin's carefully selected titles.

July's book will be Doing It by Melvin Burgess, the teen sex novel which scandalised many parents, and has already been repackaged to appeal to adult males. Other authors in the promotion include Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby. The idea is to get more young men reading, thereby releasing a huge reservoir of marketing opportunities.
Teams of scouts will scour the UK and Ireland in search of men comfortable enough with their sexuality to be seen reading in public. The project will be promoted through a nationwide poster campaign featuring the slogan 'Are you good booking?', and backed up by a website, www.goodbooking.com, which will include a Readers' Wives section, showcasing the attractive partners of literate males. In the words of a Penguin source, this says to young men: 'Look at these guys who read: look at how pretty their girls are.' I don't know about this. I've been reading books in public for years with nothing to show for it except myopia.

Just to make sure their message is crystal clear, Penguin is offering £1,000 to any woman prepared to chat up a man reading one of the featured books. But isn't the risk of pulling a short-sighted nerd greater than the promise of £1,000? And what if a man chats up another man? What if, for instance, two men, both reading Doing It, catch each other's eye? Do they get to split the money? And how will men prove that they are really reading the book, and not just holding it open over a football programme, or a bag of crisps? Will there be questions?

Whatever the mechanics of the Good Booking initiative, there's a serious issue at stake. Why don't men read books? Despite the popular myth that women buy far more books than men, the overall sales figures for adult book are roughly equal. Of 216 million adult books sold last year, 99 million - almost half - were bought by men. Where women pull ahead of men is in fiction. According to research by Book Marketing Limited, only 44 per cent of men read fiction, compared to 77 per cent of women. If Penguin can make inroads into the 33 per cent of men whose wives and partners are reading, but who don't read themselves, they will pull off a miracle.

Publishers have been trying for years to find a winning formula for men's fiction. From lad lit to dad lit to bad lit, men have been barraged with an array of reading matter since Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary stormed up the bestseller lists and into our lives in 1997. The New York Times reported last week on the failure of American publishers to find a satisfactory male equivalent for chick lit. Kyle Smith's Love Monkey and Scott Mebus's Booty Nomad , both published earlier this year, have failed to make any impact. As one blogger remarked, 'Mebus's antihero isn't a character, he's a demographic marketing fantasy.'

Kyle Smith seemingly confirmed this when he said that he set out 'to speak up for that dwindling minority: the non-metrosexual straight male'. But non-metrosexual straight males are the last people to buy books about the search for Miss, or Mrs, or Mr Right. Non-metrosexual straight males are mostly interested in Mrs Right Here, although sometimes they'll buy a magazine to have a look at Mrs Over There.

Rob Williams, who devised Penguin's Good Booking campaign, explained that he was targeting 'men who don't see books as a viable entertainment option, but who buy magazines, DVDs and music'. The challenge is to get these men interested in the fictional world of novels.

But, as psychologist Dorothy Rowe explains, many men are fazed by the kind of fictional situations that chick lit and its male equivalents generate. Even the basic Pride and Prejudice model (Mr Right vs Mr Wrong) puts their problem-solving heads in a spin. She believes that the most successful lad litterateurs - Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons - produce 'pretty simple-minded books, which are reflecting that fairly simple male way of thinking: you limit the amount of things you can feel anxious about. If you're cursed with an imagination, you've got an infinite number of things to feel anxious about'.

If men are befuddled by fiction, they are hungry for factual writing. In the UK, 60 per cent of men read non-fiction, compared to only 52 per cent of women. And in the US, Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House, the true-life story of a circle of fast-living MIT students, has spent 39 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Mezrich boasted that 'men don't want to read about dating and relationships. They want to read about money, sex and people beating the system'.

What does this mean for authors who set out to write books about dating and relationships from a male perspective, for a male audience? Mike Gayle, author of My Legendary Girlfriend, agrees that women are still better equipped for fiction than most men: 'Women have a greater imagination; they imagine the lives of my characters to a degree that I suspect male readers don't.'

So marketing chick lit for men is still an uphill struggle? 'The thing is,' he says, men prefer Boys' Own stories about the SAS and true-life gangsters because it's men living life the way you suspect men are supposed to live their lives but are a little too scared to do so.' Men respond to books like Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero because 'they reflect the culture of men down the pub telling stories about the time they did something very stupid and could quite easily have lost their lives. Fiction is far too obviously made up'.

According to Dorothy Rowe, men and women's reading habits reflect an underlying difference in the way we view the world: 'Women have always had to try to understand what other people are doing,' she explains, 'because women have always had to negotiate their way through the family; they have always had to get their power by having a pretty good idea of what's going on inside other people and using that knowledge to get them to do things.'

So novels teach women how other people think? 'To read fiction you've got to have a certain suspension of disbelief, you've got to be able to enter the imagination of another person.' Rowe suggests that, as well as providing a sentimental education, novels offer unparalleled training in mind control: 'If George Bush had the faintest clue about what goes on inside people he would have known that the Iraq thing was going to be a disaster, but he doesn't understand that other people see the world differently.'

Tim Lott, author of The Love Secrets of Don Juan, agrees that there's a practical problem involved: 'There's something about the sheer inefficiency of reading. It's something to do with men's literal minds; they want to get to the point. Books are like the smell of coffee, they often promise a great deal more than they deliver.' Lott himself has 'dozens' of unread books lying about. 'If something hasn't grabbed me after 100 pages I'm done with it.' He believes that women are more patient, more respectful of detail, whereas men want things to keep moving. 'Why should I plough through a thousand pages to find one or two very small truths?' he demands.

Although it deals with masculinity, Lott's own writing is deeply introspective, and he admits that he gets a lot of fan mail from women, and that more women than men attend his readings. In fact, like all the authors I speak to, he's anxious not to be seen as a 'male writer'. At the same time, like many men, he's more comfortable reading books by other men. He quotes Martin Amis: 'I'm almost entirely homosexual in my literary tastes.'

Dorothy Rowe points out that many men write novels. 'But they always write them about themselves. Women read novels by men to find out which planet they came from.' This explains why, no matter how hard publishers try to produce novels about relationships that will appeal to men, women keep on buying them. Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons are both widely read by women. It seems that the harder male authors try to write fiction for men, the keener women are to see what they've come up with.
As Mike Gayle puts it: 'Women are quite interesting emotionally. It's not enough to know themselves; they want to know the other side. They feel that through men's fiction they're getting an insight into a hidden world.'

Phil Hogan, author of Hitting the Groove and The Freedom Thing, gets a lot of feedback from women - some of whom are far from thrilled to find out what's going on inside men's heads. One woman told him that his books had taught her a lot about men she'd rather not have known. On the other hand, Tim Lott believes that 'men are clearly not as fascinated by themselves as women are by themselves'. Moreover, he says: 'Men are naturally less introverted, less reflective, as a group, than women.'

Of course, not all men are pubbing, anecdotal extroverts, and books about sensitive males have been around for a long time. Mike Gayle pinpoints the start of his own writing career to the moment he first heard Adrian Mole's diaries on Radio 4, back in January 1982. 'The male confessional genre has its origins in the Adrian Mole books. Although they were written by a woman, they gave a very true portrayal of a 13-year-old boy. As far as I'm concerned it's all grown out of that.'

Perhaps publishers should stop chasing the elusive dream of books by men, for men, and be content with books by women, about adolescent boys, written for everyone.

Getting men to read fiction is the holy grail of publishing. Can the British male be weaned off newspapers and books about the SAS?

Jonathan Heawood
Sunday June 6, 2004
The Observer

On my way in to work on Friday morning, I did an extraordinary thing. I looked at the other people on the tube. There were eight men reading newspapers, four women reading novels, a couple of tourists looking at a map and one man mumbling into his beard. I got out my book and began to read.

According to new research commissioned by Penguin Books, men who are seen reading a book are more attractive to the opposite sex, and I was keen to see whether this was true in practice. At Victoria, the experiment was temporarily suspended when a troop of schoolchildren got on and began swinging from the rails above my head. When the carriage was clear, I tried again. The lady tourist looked at me with interest, but then she was French. As usual on the tube, all English eyes were averted. When I tried to catch the attention of the girl sitting opposite - holding my book prominently in front of my nose and looking over the top of it - she clung rather more tightly onto her handbag.

Perhaps my attempt would have been more successful if I'd been reading something more laddish than Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty - a novel featuring liberal amounts of gay sex. Penguin's 'Good Booking' campaign, to be launched tomorrow, offers a prize of £1,000 each month to any man caught reading one of Penguin's carefully selected titles.

July's book will be Doing It by Melvin Burgess, the teen sex novel which scandalised many parents, and has already been repackaged to appeal to adult males. Other authors in the promotion include Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby. The idea is to get more young men reading, thereby releasing a huge reservoir of marketing opportunities.
Teams of scouts will scour the UK and Ireland in search of men comfortable enough with their sexuality to be seen reading in public. The project will be promoted through a nationwide poster campaign featuring the slogan 'Are you good booking?', and backed up by a website, www.goodbooking.com, which will include a Readers' Wives section, showcasing the attractive partners of literate males. In the words of a Penguin source, this says to young men: 'Look at these guys who read: look at how pretty their girls are.' I don't know about this. I've been reading books in public for years with nothing to show for it except myopia.

Just to make sure their message is crystal clear, Penguin is offering £1,000 to any woman prepared to chat up a man reading one of the featured books. But isn't the risk of pulling a short-sighted nerd greater than the promise of £1,000? And what if a man chats up another man? What if, for instance, two men, both reading Doing It, catch each other's eye? Do they get to split the money? And how will men prove that they are really reading the book, and not just holding it open over a football programme, or a bag of crisps? Will there be questions?

Whatever the mechanics of the Good Booking initiative, there's a serious issue at stake. Why don't men read books? Despite the popular myth that women buy far more books than men, the overall sales figures for adult book are roughly equal. Of 216 million adult books sold last year, 99 million - almost half - were bought by men. Where women pull ahead of men is in fiction. According to research by Book Marketing Limited, only 44 per cent of men read fiction, compared to 77 per cent of women. If Penguin can make inroads into the 33 per cent of men whose wives and partners are reading, but who don't read themselves, they will pull off a miracle.

Publishers have been trying for years to find a winning formula for men's fiction. From lad lit to dad lit to bad lit, men have been barraged with an array of reading matter since Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary stormed up the bestseller lists and into our lives in 1997. The New York Times reported last week on the failure of American publishers to find a satisfactory male equivalent for chick lit. Kyle Smith's Love Monkey and Scott Mebus's Booty Nomad , both published earlier this year, have failed to make any impact. As one blogger remarked, 'Mebus's antihero isn't a character, he's a demographic marketing fantasy.'

Kyle Smith seemingly confirmed this when he said that he set out 'to speak up for that dwindling minority: the non-metrosexual straight male'. But non-metrosexual straight males are the last people to buy books about the search for Miss, or Mrs, or Mr Right. Non-metrosexual straight males are mostly interested in Mrs Right Here, although sometimes they'll buy a magazine to have a look at Mrs Over There.

Rob Williams, who devised Penguin's Good Booking campaign, explained that he was targeting 'men who don't see books as a viable entertainment option, but who buy magazines, DVDs and music'. The challenge is to get these men interested in the fictional world of novels.

But, as psychologist Dorothy Rowe explains, many men are fazed by the kind of fictional situations that chick lit and its male equivalents generate. Even the basic Pride and Prejudice model (Mr Right vs Mr Wrong) puts their problem-solving heads in a spin. She believes that the most successful lad litterateurs - Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons - produce 'pretty simple-minded books, which are reflecting that fairly simple male way of thinking: you limit the amount of things you can feel anxious about. If you're cursed with an imagination, you've got an infinite number of things to feel anxious about'.

If men are befuddled by fiction, they are hungry for factual writing. In the UK, 60 per cent of men read non-fiction, compared to only 52 per cent of women. And in the US, Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House, the true-life story of a circle of fast-living MIT students, has spent 39 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Mezrich boasted that 'men don't want to read about dating and relationships. They want to read about money, sex and people beating the system'.

What does this mean for authors who set out to write books about dating and relationships from a male perspective, for a male audience? Mike Gayle, author of My Legendary Girlfriend, agrees that women are still better equipped for fiction than most men: 'Women have a greater imagination; they imagine the lives of my characters to a degree that I suspect male readers don't.'

So marketing chick lit for men is still an uphill struggle? 'The thing is,' he says, men prefer Boys' Own stories about the SAS and true-life gangsters because it's men living life the way you suspect men are supposed to live their lives but are a little too scared to do so.' Men respond to books like Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero because 'they reflect the culture of men down the pub telling stories about the time they did something very stupid and could quite easily have lost their lives. Fiction is far too obviously made up'.

According to Dorothy Rowe, men and women's reading habits reflect an underlying difference in the way we view the world: 'Women have always had to try to understand what other people are doing,' she explains, 'because women have always had to negotiate their way through the family; they have always had to get their power by having a pretty good idea of what's going on inside other people and using that knowledge to get them to do things.'

So novels teach women how other people think? 'To read fiction you've got to have a certain suspension of disbelief, you've got to be able to enter the imagination of another person.' Rowe suggests that, as well as providing a sentimental education, novels offer unparalleled training in mind control: 'If George Bush had the faintest clue about what goes on inside people he would have known that the Iraq thing was going to be a disaster, but he doesn't understand that other people see the world differently.'

Tim Lott, author of The Love Secrets of Don Juan, agrees that there's a practical problem involved: 'There's something about the sheer inefficiency of reading. It's something to do with men's literal minds; they want to get to the point. Books are like the smell of coffee, they often promise a great deal more than they deliver.' Lott himself has 'dozens' of unread books lying about. 'If something hasn't grabbed me after 100 pages I'm done with it.' He believes that women are more patient, more respectful of detail, whereas men want things to keep moving. 'Why should I plough through a thousand pages to find one or two very small truths?' he demands.

Although it deals with masculinity, Lott's own writing is deeply introspective, and he admits that he gets a lot of fan mail from women, and that more women than men attend his readings. In fact, like all the authors I speak to, he's anxious not to be seen as a 'male writer'. At the same time, like many men, he's more comfortable reading books by other men. He quotes Martin Amis: 'I'm almost entirely homosexual in my literary tastes.'

Dorothy Rowe points out that many men write novels. 'But they always write them about themselves. Women read novels by men to find out which planet they came from.' This explains why, no matter how hard publishers try to produce novels about relationships that will appeal to men, women keep on buying them. Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons are both widely read by women. It seems that the harder male authors try to write fiction for men, the keener women are to see what they've come up with.
As Mike Gayle puts it: 'Women are quite interesting emotionally. It's not enough to know themselves; they want to know the other side. They feel that through men's fiction they're getting an insight into a hidden world.'

Phil Hogan, author of Hitting the Groove and The Freedom Thing, gets a lot of feedback from women - some of whom are far from thrilled to find out what's going on inside men's heads. One woman told him that his books had taught her a lot about men she'd rather not have known. On the other hand, Tim Lott believes that 'men are clearly not as fascinated by themselves as women are by themselves'. Moreover, he says: 'Men are naturally less introverted, less reflective, as a group, than women.'

Of course, not all men are pubbing, anecdotal extroverts, and books about sensitive males have been around for a long time. Mike Gayle pinpoints the start of his own writing career to the moment he first heard Adrian Mole's diaries on Radio 4, back in January 1982. 'The male confessional genre has its origins in the Adrian Mole books. Although they were written by a woman, they gave a very true portrayal of a 13-year-old boy. As far as I'm concerned it's all grown out of that.'

Perhaps publishers should stop chasing the elusive dream of books by men, for men, and be content with books by women, about adolescent boys, written for everyone.