Would you read a book called The Fucking Time Machine and The Titanic ?
I've been toying with the idea of writing erotica with elements of sci-fi and magical realism mixed in. It's crazy because I used to take myself more seriously and I even went to school for writing, but what motivates me to write more than anything else is sex. Is there something wrong with me for not having loftier literary goals? I've been struggling with writer's block with short stories, but the sex just seems to flow.
What do you think?
College roommates, Chuck and Sam are best friends and kind of an odd couple. Chuck is a physics major and a big nerd. Sam is the opposite, a lacrosse-playing ladies' man with sexy muscles.
After drinking magic mushroom tea at a hippy sex party, Chuck has a dream that he is fucking a beautiful blue skinned alien with hypnotic eyes and tits to die for. When he wakes up he has new insight into the physics behind quantum mechanics and time travel.
Chuck researches the equations from his dream at the library and tracks down a mysterious ancient scepter which allows them to time travel.
In a stroke of genius, they decide to travel through time to the night the Titanic sank, so they can be on a sweet boat and bang women who were going to die anyway.
When they loose the magic scepter, they may be going down with the ship. Their dick's may have got the best of them in this sexy adventure.
Paranormal romance is very lucrative, but your grammar is appalling and your writing style won't appeal to the middle-aged women who read that sort of thing. Oversexed male students don't buy romance novels, they watch Brazzers.
Change Chuck and Sam into a timid librarian called Mary or Kimberly. Swap the hippy sex party and the ancient scepter for a chance discovery in the occult books archive. Instead of banging on a sweet boat, Mary is seduced by an oil tycoon in a doomed love affair.
Sort your grammar out, get a sexually frustrated aunt to preview it, have your manuscript professionally proofread and launch it via Kindle Direct Publishing. Give away a few dozen copies on a suitable forum in exchange for reviews. Do a 5 day free promotion, then slowly increase the price from 99¢. With a bit of luck, you'll net several thousand dollars for a few weeks of work.
Writing shitty erotica is a well-known way of prostituting yourself for a cheap buck in the literary world but the market is quite well saturated and you're definitely overthinking the plot if that's the aim. Nobody reads erotica for the plot.
Here are some good books about sex:
Erotica In Praise of Older Women (Vizinczey)
Emmanuelle (Arsan)
House of Incest (Nin)
The Story of O (Reage)
Delta of Venus (Nin)
Little Birds (Nin)
Tropic/s of Cancer/Capricorn (Miller)
Juliette (de Sade)
Lost Girls (Moore, Gibbe)
Colette (Holmes)
Story of Eye (Bataille)
Research A Billion Wicked Thoughts (Ogas & Goddam)
Perv - The Sexual Deviant In All Of Us (Bering)
Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Science And Sex (Roach)
Sexual Desire (Scruton)
My Secret Garden (Friday)
Forbidden Flowers: More Women’s Sexual Fantasies (Friday)
Men In Love (Friday)
The last three are probably the most important if you're interested in writing erotica as they're compendiums of collected male and female sexual fantasies. Nancy Friday is probably a fantastic resource for that, read enough of her research and you'll know exactly what to write about for women, who are almost the entire erotica market.
> Change Chuck and Sam into a timid librarian called Mary or Kimberly.
It's time to update this trope and get with the times, we've had librarians and secretaries; now is the to start writing literotica about girls called Becky who work doing something in media and who really, really like Netflix, pizza, beaches and their besties. The sort of girl who is so utterly basic that she had a gap year in Asia, an entire "beret phase" during her A-levels, and thinks Paulo Coelho is the height of literature.
This will be your new erotic literature buying demographic once the tinder dreams come tumbling down after their twenty-fifth birthday.
