Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters by Dr. Helen Smith is on sale at $3.29 on Amazon Kindle. This is a good overview of how the bureaucratic/academic tilt toward rewarding feminine traits like compliance and tolerance for social hierarchies is damaging men. It’s a broader view of the social problem I discuss in Death by HR.

Here’s the description:

American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are consciously and unconsciously going “on strike.” They are dropping out of college, leaving the workforce and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this “man-child” phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility simply because they can. But why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them?

As Men on Strike demonstrates, men aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers. In addition, men are going on strike, either consciously or unconsciously, because they do not want to be injured by the myriad of laws, attitudes and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the twenty-first century. Men are starting to fight back against the backlash. Men on Strike explains their battle cry.

Legacy publishers charge too much for ebooks, so it becomes useful to note when they have a good book on sale. My books are generally priced at $2.99 or $3.99 because they don’t have to support the legacy overhead of offices in Manhattan, multiple editors, and costly staff. There is now a two-tier market, with legacy publishers holding their ebook prices much too high (often higher than paper!) to protect sales of paper copies, while small and self-publishers offer very similar quality books at half or less price. Authors make more by self-publishing but tend to sell fewer copies since self-published books lack the imprimatur and marketing of the legacy publishers. It is still true that reviews and media exposure are much harder to obtain for self-publishers since it’s simpler to ignore all self-published books than to pick through the dross for the gems, but by volume there are roughly equal numbers of “excellent” books being published each way.