gauge the market than to read widely around the subject. Human sexuality is a complex thing, and there’s no accounting for what people get off on. But one thing’s for sure: if you’re into it, the chances are that someone somewhere has written about it. Most book shops these days have sections devoted to erotica, and the Internet of course provides an even broader and deeper well to draw on. Plunge in.
The simplest way to explore your potential market is to think of some of your favourite kinks and type them into a search engine. Be shameless, and honest, and go after the stuff that excites you the most and that you think you could do well. If you’re going to be spending a lot of time and effort working on a book, do make sure your subject is one you’re genuinely interested in. Not only will this prove more enjoyable for you to write, anything that is less than interesting to the author often becomes obvious to the reader. Your boredom or embarrassment will communicate itself through the page.
If you’re new to the game, you might like to start with the Mills & Boon Spice list of erotica. These days the typical Mills & Boon heroine is a lot feistier than she used to be, and frequently makes the sexual running herself. Best of all, she’s found that she doesn’t have to keep one foot on the bedroom floor any more. Indeed, sometimes those feet can be found pummelling the hero’s buttocks as he pounds into her, if they’re not actually manacled to his bed post. There are so many titles available that if you read enough of them, you’re bound to get a good idea of the breadth of experience accepted (and now deemed acceptable) within their pages.
Such research will also help you avoid that most typical of tyro errors: unoriginality. There may be some erotic mileage still to be squeezed out of the hoariest old situations—the artist and the model, the waitress and the millionaire, the lady and the highwayman, the highwayman and the other highwayman (!)—but the chances are that whatever modifications you may come up with on the familiar old theme, someone somewhere has got in first. The rule is, if you have an idea, before you set to work examine it carefully to make sure it is as original as you can make it, and not just a subconscious memory of something you once came across elsewhere.
The good news is that erotic fiction is a very broad church and anything goes, or has gone, or will return to come again. And not only are there definite favourites, there are also the more extreme areas of the market, which are often called ‘niche’ to differentiate them from the mainstream. How niche is niche, of course, depends on your own tastes, and again whatever suits one may not suit all. We would certainly recommend you don’t shy away from exploring the further reaches of the erotic market, if only to expand your own ideas of what the human mind and body and psyche are capable of finding stimulation in. However, be aware that the more niche a concept, the less commercial it becomes as its potential audience is therefore smaller. Prepare to be amazed and amused and, in some cases, completely flabbergasted. You might even come across something that you didn’t know existed before but which, now you think about it, sounds rather fun. (Love eggs, anyone? Or how about a quick golden shower before you leave for the office?) And while even the ‘safer’ niche areas may be more specialist or rare, that doesn’t mean that anything written for this market shouldn’t obey the same rules of good composition that apply in all other writing.
And if your darkest fantasies seem a bit extreme to you, or you think you would feel awkward or embarrassed admitting them to strangers, remember that you’re engaged on a work of the imagination. As the nation’s favourite old lag Norman Stanley Fletcher so tellingly pointed out, ‘Dreams is freedom’, and inside your head is where you can do all your best living. Besides, no one is daring you to go through with any of your most private fantasies in real life, and if for whatever reason you can’t put your own name to the book when it’s published, you can always use a pseudonym. A healthy percentage of all erotica is written by women, though not necessarily under their own names, and some authors have a whole gallery of noms de plume to suit whichever kind of book they’re writing. Queen of Crime Agatha Christie wrote romance novels under the name Mary Westmacott, and if it’s good enough for the creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple to adopt different literary personas for different facets of her endeavour, it should be good enough for the rest of us.
Besides, swapping between genres forces you to come at various situations from a different perspective, and so helps keep your imagination honed through constant use. And a lot of women writers out there aren’t even women at all, it’s just that male readers often like to see a woman’s name on the cover as it excites them to think a woman might be into the same kind of rich and fervid fantasies as they are.
Having said this, we would stress that the niche market is not likely to give you the biggest financial return on your investment of time and energy, and it’s only likely to appeal to those who are in it for its own sake. Besides, the most extreme forms of niche, e.g. non-consensual sex, obviously bypass the erotic market completely, finding themselves squarely in illegal territory. Two key words to remember when writing erotica: legal and consensual.
Besides, why would anyone want to mess with that kind of stuff when there is so much wholesome filth available at no risk to life and liberty? Here is a brief—and far from comprehensive—rundown of the most popular subject areas these days:
BDSM—Stands for Bondage, Domination, Sadism and Masochism, and accounts for a healthy majority of the most popular types of erotic fiction around today. It’s usually written from the point of view of a heroine who finds herself strangely drawn to the brooding, powerful presence of a dominant male, and in the course of the book is subjected to any number of apparently painful and humiliating acts, in the process learning to embrace her submissive nature and forging a deep bond with her pitiless tormentor. The flip side of the coin concerns a hitherto ‘normal’ man who finds a similar level of security and fulfilment beneath the whip and high heels of a cruel mistress. There is plenty to commend this subset, and it’s easy to see why it’s so popular—which of us has not occasionally longed for a holiday from care and responsibility with a powerful and trusted companion making all our decisions for us? A timid or conventional reader can vicariously enjoy the thrills of confinement and submission without putting herself at risk, and with no awkward whip marks across the buttocks to explain in the gym later. Any deeper psychological explanation for an individual’s positive response to such treatment has been keeping psychiatrists in couches for decades, and goes way beyond the scope of this guide (!). Suffice to say, BDSM is ground-floor entry level for a lot of first-time writers of erotica, and there are numerous titles and authors around to help you find out whether this is the way forward for you.
Commercial—It may well have been the publishing phenomenon of EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, or any of its competing franchises, that inspired you to think about joining the party, in which case welcome to the world of ‘mommy porn’. Like all marketing or press-imposed slogans, that phrase is more misleading than helpful—the use of the word porn is intended to be pejorative, and it’s not only housewives or ‘mommies’ who read it—but the one thing it does show is that the readership for erotica now extends into areas that just a few years ago would have avoided it like a dull cliché. There is no simple explanation as to why many more women are now enjoying erotica than in their parents’ day: perhaps it’s simply a symptom of the increasing liberality in society; perhaps when family budgets are tight we’re forced to find our pleasures in other, less traditional fields than the package holiday or the wine bar; or is it merely proof that escapism likes to keep up with the broader trends in society? Whatever the reason, mainstream erotic literature is now a fact of modern life.
Fan Fiction—Often the jumping-off point for new writers, who either start by concocting reverential homage pieces in the style of their chosen favourites, or simply plunge straight in with vivid and energetic accounts of Jean-Luc Picard getting it on with Admiral Janeway in the airlock of the starship Whatever. The advantage here is that the author can adapt a ready-made universe peopled with established characters who will already be familiar to the reader. On the down side, such franchises are generally copyrighted to the hilt, and owners are rarely chuffed at the thought of their property being misused and disrespected,
