What Kind of Erotic Writer are You?

If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you either want to write erotic stories or write them, as a hobby or a career. First of all, good for you. I’m glad you’re dedicating time to create, and to create what you enjoy. What’s more, you’re giving it to other people, for free, for their enjoyment. That’s very admirable. Secondly, I don’t need to tell you you’re in for a world of competition. The world of creating writing is either very sparse, desolate and lonely, or very cutthroat. Either you’re throwing a book out onto Amazon and getting maybe one review and feeling like you’re stuck in a desert with no water, or you’re posting somewhere like here and you were riding in at 93% in hour one of your story going live, only to sit at 87% and off the ‘top rated, last 30 days’ chart a couple hours later because other writers wanted their story at the top, and they very maturely think that burying everyone else’s story is a better strategy than borrowing their friend’s laptop and giving their story another anonymous vote (or better yet, writing better stories to begin with).

This place is very crowded, and very cutthroat. In order to survive, you can’t even let it be to allow your stories to speak and breathe for themselves. You can’t just pen erotica. You have to become an erotica writer, and be a name on this website yourself.

Perhaps that’s confusing in theory, but odds are if I said ‘Melanieatplay’ or ‘Squatting_Eagle’, then hold up my other hand and say ‘mypenname3000’ or ‘White_Walls’ you’d get where I’m coming from. You can easily compare and contrast these writers, and what’s more, if you’re familiar with any of these names, you associate them with something, more often than not their style or their most successful story. If you’re really obsessed with reading erotica, you might be able to answer a short list of attributes about them. Well, let’s replace that window with a mirror – let’s take a look at you today. You, the budding erotica writer or household name among this site’s community. Knowing what you write is very important – it helps you understand your priorities as a writer, and will help you get better as you learn your strengths and weaknesses. Get out a notepad and get ready to take notes on the most interesting character you’ve ever come up with – yourself.

Long or Short?

As sick as I am of hearing every story describe the male protagonist’s penis in vivid detail somewhere in the first three or so paragraphs, I have to concede that size matters. The size of one’s story is very telling about the writer.

I will say this gingerly and hesitantly – longer stories seem to do better on a whole. I can’t think of a single well-known writer on this site I’ve come across that had all of their stories be 3000 words or less. That doesn’t mean you can’t be the first, of course, but smaller stories demand precision writing. I’m not good at precision writing myself, so I write very long stories. Sometimes the sex scene itself can take several thousands of words, in a story only partially about sex. Do you write long or short stories? Why are they long or short?

If they’re short because you can’t commit to writing something too long, fair enough, but don’t expect to top the charts. If you write shorter stories because you wrote well and you don’t need to say any more, bravo. I hope what you wrote is good. If you write long stories because you have a lot to say or like to embellish, that’s a good strategy. People like to read longer things in general sometimes because finishing it is more of an accomplishment. This is true with movies, video games, books, etc. Longer stories have their own appeal even in the “Wow, I read all that?” appeal. That said, unnecessarily padding is going to bore readers. So again I ask, are your sex stories short or long?

Continuous or Standalone?

Is ‘long’ not good enough for you? You don’t care that you just wrote a 10,000 word story about Sydney the Serbian Slut, you want to make a Sydney the Serbian Slut Part 2. Well then, you would prefer continuous works to standalone pieces.

If you want a following, continuous works are the greatest way to go about it. There’s no better way to pull readers into your author page and have them hitting the refresh button every hour than making an unfinished series that people want to resolve. This is the same kind of thing that makes people like long stories – people like closure, to see things through to the end.