The short answer, I suppose, is competition. I found during an agent query for a novel a few years ago, that many agents and publishers prefer writers with a platform, as that gives them a better shot at making an ROI.

A longer answer is that many of these publishers don't know or care to market new books anyway. If you're not a big name, or one of the higher-ups isn't in love with your story, you're likely to just get some fresh college grad or intern to help with maketing. And they may not know anymore than you do.

Then you have the competition from self-published material on Amazon and elsewhere, blogs, websites, etc. TV has a similar expanded landscape, with a glut of programming. Most of which goes uknown or unwatched. The days where a show like Breaking Bad or Lost would be watercooler discussion topics are rare. You basically only saw that with Game of Thrones more recently, and that waas five yearsa ago. No one I know even knows what Succession is. I've only heard of it, but apparently it's "amazing."

Then you have compeition from social media. There's only so much attention span "bandwidth" out there in human capacity. If so much of it is being clogged up with whatever the latest hashtag outrage is, that's less time allowed for page turning for Mr. John Q. Newauthor.

This competition has made it harder for publishers to survive. As someone with 10 years in printing, I've seen how the internet and digitization have wiped out a whole industry, including numerous publications that could not make the transition online. Even Google algo-friendly sites like Buzzfeed have been suffering lately. And that site was tailor made for goldfish attention spans.

I also see less and less material on the charts that interests me as a man. It's constantly either a romance, some James Patterson thing, or a variation of something like Where the Crawdads Sing. Fluffy and feminized. Many English departments and publishers I think turn off legions of male readers, and writers, and are openly hostile to white men. A former English prof of mine claimed Shakespeare was overrated and only ever popular because he had to be read in schools. Most of my literature classes were centered around colonization and racism themes. They are obsessed with "diversity" to the point of throwing out classic works that connected with readers for centuries. Another prof of mine hurled Moby Dick in favor of some book about immigrants trying to fit into America, where the worst offense suffered was someone's hair was pointed out as being different. Give me the giant killer whale back, please.

I also see less innovative stuff by say, a Harlan Ellison or a Bret Easton Ellis. Instead it's books that either A., feed a narrative, or B. feed the porn/romance/Fifty Shades demand. It seems publishers think all readers are female liberal arts grads aged 35-50.

Having said all this, I'm not cynical on the whole deal. I self-publish my own stuff. I don't care about the industry. I'm happy to learn how to market my work and build my own platform. For me writing is its own reward. If people read my stuff, that's a bonus. I have zero expectations with the publishing industry, and am more than happy to keep writing, while building my YouTube channel. If you build your own thing, the industry will eventually come to you. But you may not even need it by then.