The Great FEM-SF access debate

Yesterday I was in Chichester, West Sussex, a city on the south coast of England, checking out the SFF offering at a leading bookstore there.  I felt depressed about the lack of female representation yet again.

There's a perception that women don't read SF.  Certainly I've had a lot of women say that to me.  I think this is part of a vicious circle.  Analysing the covers of SFF books, the majority colour is black.   They're designed to appeal to what publishers think their male audience wants.

It's got me wondering if there's a case for FEM-SF, a separate genre of SFF fiction written by women, with feminist heroines as main characters, marketed to appeal to women.  SFF has such a bad rep with some part of the book buying public that they won't even look at it.  Which feeds the vicious circle, and the belief that it's a minority genre for men.

Perhaps more women would be attracted to the genre if the books had bright colourful covers.  And an absence of big guns, or the fantasy equivalent, big swords.  I'm not attracted to the military look, and probably most women aren't either.

And then there's the matter of the blurbs on the back of the books.  Check out how many of them are about someone slaying whole civilizations.  Hmm.  Maybe to draw women into the genre we need less macho blurbs too.  Even Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series has as many civilian characters and storylines as it does military.  On second thoughts, it has more.  And that's the whole point of those books.  They're about defending civilian freedoms from pirates who want to remove them.  It's a distinctly different slant to the universe-wide slayer war.

But mainstream publishers won't change the look of their books until they're convinced that it won't lose them market share.  Maybe this is a case for indie publishers to test the water first.

So how about it, Amazon?  Add a FEM-SF category to your book listings.  Maybe we indie authors might consider categorising our work as FEM-SF, specifically targeting a female audience.  Just maybe, if we show women that we're writing about them, about issues that have relevance to them, issues that will impact on their personal futures, we might just get them into the genre in big numbers and change the future of SFF.