Conduit Books Bucks the Trend

Jude Cook’s decision to launch Conduit Books, a U.K.-based publishing venture with an explicit focus on male authors, has set off a torrent of online snark from  commenters who cannot fathom why anyone would take the interests and concerns of men these days seriously, given the unfinished task of tearing down structures of power and privilege. Admittedly, not all the reactions have been hostile. Here and there, bright bursts of iconoclasm from the least-expected quarters have broken through the monotony of predictable reactions.

The new publisher has no lack of ambition. Besides its emphasis on the non-distaff side of the literary realm and on promoting authors who might otherwise have a hard time finding a publisher in this woke age, Conduit Books bills itself as a house with a taste for “speculative or dystopian fiction with a literary slant.”

That raises some intriguing possibilities. Here, perhaps, could be a home for the next Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon, Harlan Ellison, or Frank Herbert. Or George Orwell. Or Yevgeny Zamyatin. Nowadays, the possibilities for satirical and seditious takes on ideologies that bend and distort reality in service of an arbitrary and antiscientific dogma making diversity that highest end of human society are as rich and vast as the excesses of such ideologies are rampant. Now that’s saying something.

So, bring it on. Conduit Books could even help bring to the world the vision of an as-yet unknown author writing under the influence of Robert Merle (1908-2004), the French genius whose works include Les Hommes Protégés, a 1974 novel envisioning a nightmare world where a deadly virus has made human males an endangered species.

As men languish in so many areas of professional, academic, and social life and continue to get the bad end of fashionable doctrines that compel an obsession with demographic and gender identity, the launch of a publisher devoted to their perspectives and viewpoints hardly seems objectionable. Under the right guidance, it could well be a force for good in the world.

But that is far from the view of the likes of author Erin Nudi, who in a recent tweet held up for ridicule the notion that the new venture seeks to redress a situation where publishers find male voices inherently problematic.

Literary agent Hayley Steed posted a link to The Bookseller’s coverage, writing: “Publishing truly trolls itself.”  For some people, the beauty of ill-defined phases, such as any derivation of the verb “to troll,” is that it gives them license to indulge in ad hominem abuse under a pretense of calling out bad behavior. We see it all the time.

But the best is yet to come. How about this tweet from commenter Bibi: “Some books and publishing houses need to be burned.” (Bibi’s credo: “I love hating men and complaining about my job.”)

Some books and publishing houses need to be burned. If you harbored any doubt about what the devotees of woke ideology—people supposedly dedicatedto fostering diversity of viewpoint and expression—have in mind for any publisher, writer, or book that dares to be a little different, then that tweet should dispel it. These folks are not nice, and they aren’t fooling around. They believe so strongly in the obvious truth of what they believe, and the illegitimacy of even a shade of disagreement, that they feel free to act like history’s totalitarians even while maintaining a pretense that they are on the side of the powerless and marginalized.

But, as noted above, not nearly all the reactions to the launch of Conduit Books have been pro-cancellation. A few are surprisingly thoughtful. On April 30, Gail Lynn Brown came online with a tweet asking what could be wrong with a new publisher doing for men what countless other entities have done for women and other demographics. “What’s wrong with this? There are women only lit mags, lit mags dedicated to other demographics and topics … why not one for men?”

Some of the immediate reactions to Brown’s tweet expressed incoherent rage and sought to uphold orthodoxy without making any substantive arguments against her point. If you pursue an identitarian ethos that justifies the founding of one or another venture with an explicit mission of promoting the work of this or that demographic to the exclusion of others, don’t act shocked when a publishing house gets off the ground with a view to doing just that–except the authors on its slate will be ones you happen not to have chosen to champion yourself.

Cook himself took some heat online for raising questions about the Guardian’s stance on this question. In a May 3 tweet, he asked, “If, as Sheena Patel proclaims in today’s Guardian, that ‘men are doing just fine’, how come the @thebookseller’s top 10 fiction picks for April featured no male authors? Now if it was the other way round…” How right he is. If it were the other way around, we would hear the online denunciations of “Bookseller picks so male” from here to the moon.

The larger point is that Conduit Books fills a deep gap in our contemporary culture. Those who have spent time in the trenches as a writer or journalist understand well how much the zeitgeist has shifted against male authors and how much they need any help and support they can find. Woody Allen is only one of many examples of a creator who ran into trouble even in the face of persistent doubts about his guilt. Fortunately, even in 2025, not every single publishing venture in the world holds such assumptions. Even now, there are those who dare to buck the trend and offer a lifeline to writers who have the ill luck to be born male. The launch of Conduit Books may just be a shot heard around the world.