When it changed: women in 1970s Science Fiction

When It Changed

Introduction

There’s a tendency in Science Fiction studies—and in Prof. ----'s class they proved remarkably good at it, despite not being abject SF writers—to try to establish the “earliest” science fiction. War of the Worlds (1897)? Surely not! Remember Jules Verne? From Earth the Moon was 1867. But Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) predated that. Then I must nominate The Man in the Moone by the English cleric Francis Godwin, published in 1638, where a man is flown to the moon by swans. But that opens up Aristophanes’s The Birds (414 BC), does it not? Sure, and so I’m going to nominate the space flight undertaken in the Epic of Gilgamesh (2100 BC)!

The question of the first woman-penned feminist science fiction is not quite as thorny, but odds are someone will mention Frankenstein, a book about how a male scientist built a living human, a creative act formerly the province of women. I would point out that the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), may have been a feminist but she surely was not a feminist in the modern sense. In 1818, for one illustrative example, women didn’t have the right to vote.

Frequently cited as a first flowering of feminism is C L Moore, author of the Jirel of Joiry stories (and wife/co-writer of Henry Kuttner). Writing in the US in the 1930s and 1940s, she was credited as an early female fantasy writer. Jirel was a tough, beautiful fighter in Moore’s classic Sword and Sorcery stories. US women were able to vote by this time: The ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution took place on August 18, 1920. But even in 1950, women in the real US were often not able to open a bank account without a male co-signer. Only the previous year, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex. The concepts of feminism had just begun to trickle in. Jirel may have been a tough, redheaded babe, but neither she nor her author lived in the modern world.

SF men were going great guns, literally and figuratively. After Verne, men reacted to the rapidly developing conditions of the Enlightenment, Positivism, the Industrial Revolution and the opening of new frontiers by writing science fiction. Much early US SF was of the “pulp” variety. Still read today is E E “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen stories of the 1930s and 1940s. Tough, square-jawed and yet intellectual, the Lensmen brought peace to the galaxy/ies with the aid of superior alien technology, a dash of faintly fascist eugenics, endless mighty space battles and lots of blowing shit up. You won’t be surprised to hear that the female bloodline of the Lensmen were tough redheads. Despite the fact that many alien genders achieved Lensman status, somehow female humans were not worthy. (There is one exception, to make the story work, but she eventually eschews her lens. Probably not feminine enough for her.) “Doc” Smith’s Skylark series was similar. His hero? Think Captain America crossed with buff Elon Musk fighting giant space battles.

Endless space battles soon transferred to the Saturday Morning Serials, comics and the big screen, and SF disentangled from the pulpiest of pulps and attempted to explore the Condition of Man. The big three—Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke—produced vast quantities of work that adequately explored science (Asimov), innovation, society and law (Heinlein) and science tinged with vague religious symbolism (Clarke). They rarely explored the interiority of their male characters, who were mostly white male marionettes draped with opinions, and the writers couldn’t explore the interiority of their female characters (at least at first) as they didn’t seem to realize women had any thoughts of their own, merely a few story-motivating emotions like love, greed and spite.

Critics have argued that this lack of interiority is not due to “bad writing,” but arises from SF’s vastly different focus from the novel. The bourgeois novel arose contemporaneously with the concept of individual identity. It often set out to investigate the individual’s place in society. SF sets out to investigate the impact on society of an idea or radical change. Critic Darko Suvin introduced the concept of the “novum.” “SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional “novum” (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic.”

Noted critic Kingsley Amis, in New Maps of Hell, is pro-cardboard character. “[Science fiction’s] most important use, I submit, is a means of dramatizing social inquiry, as providing a fictional mode in which cultural tendencies can be isolated and judged.”

Writer Joanna Russ (1975) stated, “… science fiction’s emphasis is always on phenomena—to the point where reviewers and critics can commonly use such phrases as “the idea as hero.”

Scott Sanders goes further and describes SF as refusing to deal with individuals because the age of the individual has ended. ““Character” was the focus of the bourgeois novel, at a time when the individual was the kingpin of liberal ideology, and when the economic system was still primitive enough to make such an ideology convincing. During the nineteenth century the middle classes of Western Europe and America were still persuaded that the individual was an autonomous creature, the true unit of value, capable of determining his own destiny,” he wrote in 1977. “In this respect science fiction parallels developments in the twentieth-century mainstream novel. While such writers as Kafka, Musil and Beckett have recorded the dissolution of character under the pressures of recent history, science fiction as a genre begins by assuming that dissolution, and explores the causes. Science fiction deals, in other words, with the same social and intellectual developments whose intimate effects on personality have been explored in modernist fiction; the two literary modes examine the outside and inside of the same phenomenon,” Sanders continues.

Isaac Asimov split the difference. “Science fiction stories are notoriously weak on characterization as compared with mainstream stories. [If true] there happens to be a good reason for it. The characters are a smaller portion of science fiction than of the mainstream. The double task of building the background society and developing the foreground plot is extremely difficult, and it requires an extraordinary amount of the writer’s attention. There is that much less attention that is, or can be, paid to the characters. There is, physically, less room in the story for character development.” (Asimov, 1981 quoted in enotes.)

If men were reduced to cyphers in these multiverse-spanning tales, what became of the women? Apart from the occasional Swordswoman and Part-Time Lensman, they languished.

In the Seventies, things changed. In the US the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was signed into effect on October 28, 1974, making it illegal for financial institutions to discriminate on the basis of sex, granting women for the first time the right to apply for and obtain credit in their own names without needing a male co-signer. Birth control, including the pill, was available. Comstock had recently been repealed. Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973.

(Slight digression: There’s a concept called the Long Sixties which asserts that the societal changes of the Sixties stretch back into the Fifties and into the mid-Seventies. I can’t argue for the Fifties here, as any reader of Philip K Dick will quickly realize that societal changes had not reached the lofty heights of SF yet. I’m prepared to backdate the Change in Science Fiction to 1967, with Pamela Zoline’s boundary-smashing “Heat Death of the Universe.” But that was published in the British Magazine New Worlds, and the New Wave in SF washed up five years earlier on those shores.)

Feminism developed rapidly in the 1970s. So rapidly that a table may be easier on the reader’s attention span.

Key 1970s feminist Works (Books & Articles)

Author	Title	Year	Type
Laura Mulvey	“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”	1975	Article
Kate Millett	Sexual Politics	1970	Book
Shulamith Firestone	The Dialectic of Sex	1970	Book
Mary Daly	Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation	1973	Book
Adrienne Rich	Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution	1976	Book
Ann Oakley	Sex, Gender and Society	1972	Book
Juliet Mitchell	Psychoanalysis and Feminism	1974	Book
Luce Irigaray	Speculum of the Other Woman	1974 (French)	Book
Susan Brownmiller	Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape	1975	Book
Robin Morgan (ed.)	Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement	1970	Anthology
Germaine Greer	The Female Eunuch	1970	Book
Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, Sharon Thompson (eds.)	Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality	1983	Anthology of 1970s work

Though male science fiction writers may have remained more interested in Moon landings and Voyager missions, women were “doing the work” as the kids say these days.

In 1975 the zine Khatru devoted two issues to a “round-robin” of snail-mail letters exchanged between a number of women writers unhappy with the genre (Suzy McKee Charnas, Virginia Kidd, Ursula K LeGuin, Vonda McIntyre, Raylyn Moore, Joanna Russ, Luise White, Kate Wilhelm and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro), one man (Samuel R Delany), and one woman everyone believed was a man (James Tiptree,  Jr.) (Long story.)

In the early part of the Khatru document, writers take time to state that the genre has not done justice to either sex. Ursula K LeGuin wrote, “‘Golden Age’ writers were not writing a fiction of character or of passion; they were writing in an impersonalized genre of ideas-technology-adventure; and so all their characters were necessarily two-dimensional. Male characters were more frequent than female, but just as wooden, vapid, and stereotyped. SF now has vastly enlarged its artistic range, and so has room for people in it. Both sexes.”

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro wrote, “Many of the fans I know who read sf read it entirely for the ideas, and they don’t like characterization to get in the way. I find this incomprehensible, but I have seen enough of it to know that a significant number of our readers would prefer cardboard cutouts for people so that they don’t have to deal with anything more than the idea. This might be immature (I think it is, but that’s my opinion), it might be all kinds of unrealistic, but face it, my dears, a good number of those readers give out the Hugos [then as now the pre-eminent awards for the genre].”

As the round-robin progresses, the writers delve more and more deeply into the reasons why women rarely wrote, and even less rarely starred in, SF until the 1970s.

The Khatru conversation is worth reading in its entirety as it illustrates the extent of the writers’ dissatisfaction. The contributors and their fellow SF writers also, of course, attended symposia, and produced articles and books of theory of their own.

 

1970s Non-Fiction Books and Articles on Feminism by SF Writers

Author	Title	Year	Type
Joanna Russ	“The Image of Women in SF”	1970	Essay
Joanna Russ	“What Can a Heroine Do? Or, Why Women Can’t Write”	1972	Essay
Joanna Russ	“Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction”	1975	Essay
Ursula K. Le Guin	“American SF and the Other”	1975	Essay
Ursula K. Le Guin	“Is Gender Necessary?”	1976	Essay
Suzy McKee Charnas	Non-fiction essays on feminist SF (various articles)	1970s	Essay Collection
Marge Piercy	Review essays on feminist SF (various)	1970s	Essays

And of course, the contributors and their cohort continued to write SF books and short stories incorporating these modern theories.

1970s Feminist SF Novels

Title	Author	Year	Main Theme/Significance
The Female Man	Joanna Russ	1975	Multiple realities; gender and identity
Woman on the Edge of Time	Marge Piercy	1976	Utopian futures; mental health
Walk to the End of the World	Suzy McKee Charnas	1974	Misogyny, oppression, survival
Motherlines	Suzy McKee Charnas	1978	Matriarchal society, independence
Dreamsnake	Vonda N. McIntyre	1978	Healing, nontraditional heroism
The Dispossessed	Ursula K. Le Guin	1974	Utopia, anarchism, society
Kindred	Octavia E. Butler	1979	Race, gender, time travel
We Who Are About To...	Joanna Russ	1977	Bodily autonomy, anti-colonization

 

1970s Feminist SF Novellas and Short Stories

Title	Author	Year	Notes/Significance
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”	James Tiptree, Jr.	1976	All-female society; male violence
“When It Changed”	Joanna Russ	1972	Gender & society on an isolated planet
“The Women Men Don’t See”	James Tiptree, Jr.	1973	Women’s alienation, survival
“The Girl Who Was Plugged In”	James Tiptree, Jr.	1973	Media, bodies, gender agency
“Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand”	Vonda N. McIntyre	1973	Healing, female protagonist
“The Funeral”	Kate Wilhelm	1972	Family, mourning, women’s experience

The change in SF demographics (both of readers and writers) that began in the seventies gathered momentum like an asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere. The SF landscape in 2015 barely resembles the landscape of 1955—which many would say is a good thing.

 Why 2015? I would argue that the gyroscope began to wobble with the advent of the Sad Puppies in 2013, but that’s a story for another day.

 

OK, fine. Here’s a short list of feminist, woman-written stories that I found compelling.

Recommended Reading

Writer	Type	Story Name	Date	Subject
Octavia Butler	Short Story	Bloodchild	1984	Male pregnancy
Joanna Russ	Short Story	When It Changed	1972	Gender & society on an isolated planet
Pamela Zoline	Short Story	The Heat Death of the Universe	1967	Entropy and womanhood
Joanna Russ	Novel	We Who Are About To…	1977	Bodily autonomy

 

Sources

Joanna Russ (1975) Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction

https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/6/russ6art.htm retrieved 07/23/25

Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, 1960

Jirel of Joiry basic background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jirel_of_Joiry

Darko Suvin1978 https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/14/suvin14art.htm retrieved 07/23/25

Khatru Issues #3 and #4 https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Khatru/Khatru03.pdf retrieved 07/30/25

Scott Sanders 1977 https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/11/sanders11.htm Retrieved 07/23/25

Isaac Asimov: Asimov on Science Fiction. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981

enotes: https://www.enotes.com/topics/golden-age-short-science-fiction/criticism/criticism-major-golden-age-short-science-fiction/patricia-ferrara-essay-date-summer-1987 retrieved July 23 2025

**

The above was written for a class in Fiction writing. Given it isn't fiction, did it get a good grade? It was an ungraded class but the prof did say I "did a lot of work" and he "always enjoyed" having me "in the class," a masterwork of not actually grading it.  I did also submit some fiction. Those pieces did well.

Fiction: Angel City (short story)

 

Angel City

Eastern American legends tell of a tribe who founded a golden city in the far west, led by their divine foremother Eve Angelica. The Royal Treasurer asked us to determine if her city existed, and if so, to locate the gold these ancient people amassed and sequester it for our Queen.

For our trek, I assembled a team of five women; a geologist, a botanist, two ethnologists who had lived with a remaining eastern tribe, and an interpreter, Skilar, who was brought up in an east coast village. She could read several hundred written word-glyphs as well as speak latter-day Inglish fluently.

The first westerners we met, living outside the ruins of Angel City, call themselves the Lost Feelies. They do not know of Eve. They say their founders were white men and women from the east who all arrived together on iron horses. They call these ancients the “Rubber Barons,” and say they built Angel City in one hundred years. The Lost Feelies told us that the tribe now dwelling in the inner city are not related to them, arriving long after the city was built.

When asked why their people abandoned the city, the Lost Feelies say supernatural enemies from the Land of the Setting Sun sent two plagues: “Bee Die Off” killed all the flowers and “wheat rust” (a fungus) ruined their grain fields. The city dwellers starved or dispersed. From the size of trees now growing in the ruins our botanist agreed that a major disaster occurred around four hundred years ago.

We followed the course of the river, which is a mere trickle in a vast channel some thirty paces wide, now much overgrown. On once-paved streets near the remaining great buildings, which they call “Those-Who-Scratch-The-Sky,” there are numerous dwellings made of ephemeral materials. They include cartonnage boxes and blankets of animal and plant fibers. There exists a great stock of paper in the abandoned buildings, which the people scavenge for cartonnage-making. A popular coating for the papier-mâché homes is a variety of green paper cut into hand-length rectangles. Each bears a portrait of a man in the center and a selection of lucky numbers. The tribe living in the streets call themselves “Skidro.” They too claim to be descendants of those who built the Sky Scratchers. They say they have an “American Dream” that material wealth will “trickle down” from the Sky Scratcher, and so they live in its shadow, waiting.

A Sky Scratcher

We asked the Skidro where they kept this treasure. They pointed to the largest Sky Scratcher and said it is concealed “inside the block-chain.” Skilar elicited from them that the ultimate source of wealth is the “bite coin.” Our ethnologists believe this must be gold, since gold will readily take teeth marks, but I feel the concept of “trickle down” strongly suggests that wealth was spiritual, distributed by a sky god.

We soon reached an impasse, despite Skilar’s fluency. I quickly learned that the highest Skidro moral value is “Freedom of Speech.” They permit and even encourage untruths. They call lies “Alternative Facts.” They recite a mantra, “Do your own research!” When we asked for verification of statements, they cry “I plead the fifth,” and “We refuse compelled speech!”

Our geologist told us that this area suffers frequent quakes. Eight Sky Scratchers still stand, but ten or a dozen have fallen. These cluster, with lower-height wooden buildings (and some stone) surrounding them as far as the eye can see. Some still have metal glyphs attached to the upper façade. Skilar told us they were single words without a common meaning, denoting the name of the god to whom the edifice was dedicated. 

We explored the tallest intact tower.  It is rectilinear at the bottom, quickly becoming circular, and built in a series of reducing steps, or setbacks, which eventually shrink away to leave a round tower above, surmounted with a crown. According to Skilar, the building is composed of 73 “floors” (as each layer is called, though they are not on the ground). Each “floor” is about the height of two women and each has many window bays inset into the outer surface. The core and cladding are made of white “concrete” which Skilar described as a stone the ancients liquified, then poured from spinning machines, after which it resolidified. Concrete is usually white but sometimes beige, like a cheap sandstone but with far more strength (as I found when I tried to chip a piece off as a souvenir).

From the remains of the roadway, broad concrete stairs ascend to the “ground floor.” The step height is designed for women, but they measure a dozen paces in width, suggesting ceremonial processions ascended the steps.  Skidro told Skilar that workers, both women and men, walked up the steps to spend time sitting in chambers at the top of the building. We were unable to verify this. The structure is so austere that it seems likely to me that only priests would be allowed to enter it.

At the top of the stairs are two flat, rectangular areas filled with small rocks. Skilar learned these were fountains that propelled water through hidden pipes into the air, after which it would sink out of sight. I assume this water was used for ritual ablutions before ceremonies. The river is a mile away but our geologist pointed out that, judging by the size of its concrete channel, it must have been a veritable torrent in the Classic Period. Perhaps the depletion of this resource provides another reason for the city’s abandonment.

Beyond this ritual cistern, against the concrete wall, stand four metal sculptures. These resemble serpents adorned with red, serrated crowns. Each has a glyph affixed which Skilar read as “Fire Riser.” She did not know what relationship snakes have to fire.  I asked her if the glyphs could be an example of “Freedom of Speech,” but she said that both here and in the east, glyphs sanctified by the “Fire General” were always true, as the gods required the General to be literally truthful in all her dealings with the populus.

Serpent sculpture at the top of the broad stair.
Traces of red paint remain visible.

The main entrance on the “ground floor” (many steps above the ground) was originally composed of large sheets of curved blue glass, some fitted with hinges to form doors.  We saw no evidence of fortifications or guard quarters. The doors lead into an expansive open chamber. Large concrete pillars inside the space reveal the method by which the immense weight of the building is distributed to the ground, but the size of the open space is remarkable. It is some six “floors” high. The space—Skilar read the glyph as “atrium”—retains traces of wood flooring and there is a long, chest-height counter with remnants of red-stained wood. Skilar said that easterners believe the ancients stationed four “recessionists” in military garb behind these counters to repel invaders and escort invited guests.

Light pours in through the upper windows, lower windows and doors. It seemed a barren glare to us, but while the blue glass remained intact on the now open side of “atrium,” daylight must have been calming and tranquil.

Skilar and I climbed the ribbed metal staircase at the far side of “atrium.”  It leads only to a balcony (or half-floor with a short wall) overlooking the entrance and “atrium.” Further ascent, Skilar said, was undertaken in a box winched on cables. We explored, finding two arrays of the winched boxes and many rooms of unknown use. We saw several blocks and chains, but I did not find any bite-coins.

We saw several other glyphs Skilar believes the “Fire General” must have written.  Signs include “Occupancy” followed by a numeral, which must be the number of celebrants in a religious ceremony, and “Emergency Exit,” a reference, I believe, to the doorways which are thrown open during an “Occupancy” and through which Disaster Demons are expelled. From the balcony, we saw that the principal contents of the vast “atrium” comprises many ceramic containers, the size of coffins, each one filled with soil. Around them, the Classic Period tribe placed stools with backs, for comfortable viewing of the vessels’ contents.

I asked our botanist to examine the plant material remaining in the soil-containers. She found desiccated leaves and stalks from Swiss Cheese plants, remnants of Bromeliads, dried leaves of Velvet Philodendron, and stalks of Dumbcane. All of these, she told me, originate in rainforests far to the south of Angel City.  They are all inedible and some are noxious, so were not grown for food.

We left the city precipitously, as an earth tremor shook the ground. The Skidro told us it presaged another “big one” strong enough to collapse a sky-scratcher.

From our brief visit, I conclude that the ceremonial cisterns before the entrance, the dim, filtered blue light, the serpent sculptures and the large ceramic pots filled with rainforest trees and shrubs surrounded by observation platforms and resting areas—even the belief that beneficence ‘trickles down’ like drips from trees—suggest an attempt to recreate the tropical home of their gods. I further believe, contrary to their own origin myth, that the city-builders came from the south, bringing their gods with them. The Sky-Scratchers were their temples.

Accordingly, we feel that any subsequent expedition in search of bite-coin should contact the more indigenous tribes, beginning with the Lost Feelies (since we have already made contact) and their neighbors, the Hollyweird.

***

This piece is a travelogue in the style of Fr. Diego de Landa. It is a fictional account of an expedition to the ruins of Los Angeles.

The Classic Maya civilization collapsed five centuries before Father Diego de Landa arrived in Yucatán, Mexico. He set to learning Mayan history, relying on contemporary villagers’ stories and his own primitive ethnography. In 1562, de Landa burned the 27 bark-paper books he had found, believing them to be the work of demons. In doing so, he wiped out almost all written Mayan historical records. Because of his vandalism, his account of explorations in Yucatán paradoxically provides much of what we know about Maya life.

***

07/17/25 - edited the image of ruined LA

MIcro-retirement

 Silicon Valley occasionally invents something really useful. This week they invented "micro-retirements" - two weeks off work every 12 to 18 months.

Fission #5 now available

 

Fission #5, edited by Gene Rowe and Eugen Bacon, is available now from wherever you get books. 

Among many others it features my short story "Hey, Marilyn."

Demos, a member of the Atropian sect pledged to end human life on Earth, learns Marilyn may be incubating a young AI.  Paul, one of a loose group of her friends, wants her to live--Marilyn, that is, not the AI.

Science Fiction: How to find an Agent and how to promote your book

A friend asked me for advice on publishing and promoting a Science Fiction novel. I’ve never published one, so I researched it. I hope it will be of use to others.

Generally, advice for how to get your manuscript accepted and published is the same as for non-genre novels: Find an agent or find a publisher which accepts non-agented submissions.

Finding an agent

You can research agents and track submissions through sites like QueryTracker, MSWL (Manuscript Wish List), Reedsy and Publishers Marketplace. Some agents want you send to them exclusively (i.e. they do not accept a simultaneous submission) but given that they have up to six months response times, you may prefer to ignore that and send out queries in batches of 5-10 and wait for feedback. Based on the feedback, if necessary revise the query letter and/or manuscript and then send out the next batch.

In a hurry?

Lists of literary agents for Science Fiction:

https://blog.reedsy.com/literary-agents/science-fiction/

https://literaryagencies.com/science-fiction-literary-agents/

https://www.tckpublishing.com/literary-agents-accepting-science-fiction-and-fantasy-submissions/

No Agent?

Some book publishers accept non-agented submissions. They tend to keep it on the down-low because when they open up to submissions they get a flood of manuscripts from writers who have not bothered to read their guidelines and send unsuitable material. If you want to succeed, read the publishers’ guidelines. If possible, read some of their books. (This goes for finding an agent as well. Know what they want before you write them.)

Unrelated Picture Because Posts
Without Pictures Get Less Engagement

How to find a publisher who accepts unagented Science Fiction manuscripts:

Authors Publish send out regular lists of publishers accepting manuscripts.

Aethon Books, Flame Tree Publishing, Arcadia, and Dark Age Press all have open submission periods occasionally, so you can check their websites.

A place of intent blog has a list of publishers https://www.aplaceofintent.co.uk/blog/science-fiction-and-fantasy-publishers-accepting-submissions

Science Fiction Book Promotion

Your book is published. Now you have to publicize it. This goes for both self-published and trad published books. Somehow, your book has to stand out from the 80,000 other books published this week.

Here are some places you can promote the book.

1. Social Media and Online Communities

• Goodreads: Join science fiction groups and participate in discussions or book clubs to build relationships with potential readers.
• Facebook: Create an author page and join large sci-fi/fantasy groups such as "International Sci fi and Fantasy Book Club " or "Fantasy-Faction - Fantasy and Science Fiction Book Discussion." These groups sometimes allow self-promotion for active members.
• Twitter/X, Bluesky: Use hashtags like #scifi, #amwriting, and #indieauthor to reach a broader audience.
• TikTok: I know nothing about it but people are always talking about BookTok.
• Instagram: Cover reveals and photos of your cat sitting on your book

2. Book Promotion and Advertising Platforms

• BookBub: Discounted book promotions. BookBub features can significantly boost sales and visibility. Be prepared to pay.
• BookBaby: Paid promotions, but also has a lot of helpful articles, written as “You would have to do this and this and this unless you hire us to do it for you” where this and this and this are perfectly doable if you’re motivated.
• Other Promotion Sites: Consider sites like Freebooksy, Book Barbarian, and Books Butterfly. These platforms specialize in promoting books to genre-specific audiences.
• Amazon Ads: Run targeted ads to reach readers interested in similar books. Amazon’s advertising platform allows you to set your own budget and track performance.
• Facebook Ads: Boost posts or run targeted ad campaigns to reach sci-fi fans on Facebook.

3. Newsletters and Email Marketing

• Substack: Free platform to start an author newsletter and build a subscriber base.
• MailChimp: For managing larger email lists and automating campaigns.
• StoryOrigin and BookFunnel: Use for newsletter swaps and group promotions, helping you reach new readers and grow your email list.

4. Book Reviewers and Influencers

• Book Bloggers and YouTubers: Reach out to influencers specializing in science fiction for reviews and interviews.
• Online Review Sites: Submit your book to sites that accept self-published sci-fi, such as those listed in Erica Verrillo’s compilation of 269 reviewers for speculative fiction.

5. In person promotion

• Sell at Science Fiction Conventions, Comics and Games conventions. If appropriate for your work, conventions often have a dealers’ room/hucksters’ room. Rates for tables and booths vary.
• Network at Conventions (WorldCon, New Zealand National Science Fiction Convention, Eastercon)

6. Free and Discounted Promotions

• Free Ebooks: Offer free short stories or novellas to attract new readers and encourage sign-ups to your newsletter.
• BookBub Featured Deals: Discount your book for a limited time to drive sales and climb bestseller charts.

7. Networking and Community Engagement

• Writing Forums: Engage in forums like Writing Forums to network, share experiences, and promote your work. (To the extent allowed—note that spamming forums with self-promotion may get you shunned or banned.)
• Writing Workshops: If the workshop allows it, discuss or promote your work at workshops. If not (or in addition) network with the other authors and share promotion success stories.
• Beta Readers and Critique Partners: Use platforms like Voracious Readers Only and BookSirens to get feedback and early reviews.
• Book signings at local stores: Ask your local bricks-and-mortar bookshop if they will host a book signing for a local author.
• Book signings at local libraries: Ask your librarian if they have local author days.
• Book signings at Friends of the Library bookshop: Ask your local Friends of the Library if you can place your books in their bookshop and if they would be open to hosting a talk or book signing for a local author.

 Good luck on your publishing journey!