Vintage erotica of the week: Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife

Yeah, it’s an actual weekly feature! With thousands of years of recorded human history to choose from, I probably won’t be running out of material any time soon.
Someday soon, I’m going to write up a history of tentacle porn, which is actually a product of a very interesting period of Japanese and American history. For now, I’ll leave you with the most famous erotic tentacle image in the world. Although it's a well-known image, it may violate my blog host's content policy, so I'm going to link to its NSFW wikimedia content page.

This woodblock print is by Hokusai, who's better known for his Views of Mount Fuji series (including The Great Wave off Kanagawa). It’s arguably not the first piece of tentacle erotica in Japanese art, but it’s usually cited as a precursor to modern tentacle porn. You can read more about the print’s history here.

It's time for sexy costumes!

I love Halloween. I love the socially acceptable excuse to get drunk and eat candy all night. I love scary movies and spooky decorations. Most importantly, I love sexy Halloween costumes--not the obvious ones that are clearly made to be titillating, but the ones that make you go, "Who the fuck came up with that idea? Who approved it? Who actually allowed this monstrosity to be made?"

Join me in celebrating 2012's best boner-killers. This is only a partial list; chronicling every terrible skin-baring costume on the internet would be a herculean task.

 

 Oh yeah, it's a sexy memento mori! This is probably the least inappropriate item on the list. It's sorta kinda related to Halloween, even though her bones stop at the shoulders and knee joints for no particular reason.

Hey kids, did you ever watch Sesame Street? Now, you can celebrate your PBS-centric childhood with a horrifying sexy Big Bird costume. It's the candy-pink platform shoes that really take this costume from "possible misunderstanding" to "intentionally horrifying." The weirdest part? It's not the only sexy Big Bird costume available.

I guess the idea of sexy candy makes some sense; at least it's no weirder than the sexy bumblebee/ladybug costumes that are everywhere these days. What really cracks me up about this costume is that it's a tootsie roll, and everyone knows that brownish pieces of foul-tasting crud that get stuck in your teeth are the least sexy thing ever.

 I don't really understand the furry thing, but if it gets you hot and bothered I suppose that's none of my business. Still, this is listed as a sexy chinchilla costume. Sexy. Chinchilla. Costume. You know, the little furball in an elementary school classroom, but sexy. This has obviously been mass produced, so clearly someone thought that sexy chinchillas would be all the rage this year.

Yeah, it's sexy Chewbacca. Technically, it's a "Sci-Fi Furry Costume," but the same page has links to some fairly obvious knockoff Storm Trooper and Darth Vader costumes. This would actually be a hilarious outfit to wear with the right crowd, but you would have to be very self-assured and very drunk to pull it off.

Where does erotica sell better?

Fair warning: this is going to be a navel-gazing post about the vagaries of e-publishing on different sites. Folks who are just here for the erotica will not find this terribly gripping.
 

I’ve noticed something weird about my sales on the two sites I’ve been using: I’m selling about twice as many copies on the Nook than the Kindle. Of course, “twice as many” is only a matter of a few extra sales. This month, I’ve had fifteen sales on Barnes & Noble compared to seven on Amazon.

I’ve been puzzling over this discrepancy because I thought Amazon was the more commonly used service. Since authors guards their Amazon rankings jealously, I’d like to figure out why I’m falling behind there. Here are a few reasons why I might be selling better on the Nook:

More Competition

Amazon’s direct publishing system is so easy to use that many self-published authors ONLY put their work up there. The Nook’s system isn’t exactly difficult, but it’s probably not anyone’s first publishing choice. There may just be more titles floating around in Amazon’s erotica section for my little stories to compete with.

I’ve also notice that the Nook PubIt! content policy is more conservative when it comes to erotica, forbidding “hard-core material that depicts graphic or explicit sexual acts.” Amazon’s comparatively liberal policy forbids “offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts.” That extra word, offensive, gives writers and editors a fair amount of leeway in deciding what’s acceptable. While Barnes & Noble does have an erotica section on its website, it may be scaring other erotica writers away with its ban on “explicit” sex.

That’s not to say Amazon never censors the erotica section. Its content policy just makes it look a bit more inviting to erotica writers.

Better Apps

The Barnes & Noble site has a very visible drop-down menu right at the top of the page to let shoppers know that they can read an ebook without owning a Nook. Amazon has almost exactly the same apps for PC, Macintosh, Android, Apple and so forth, but the link is further down the page on the right hand side. Since plenty of my potential readers don’t have e-readers, the ones who go straight to Amazon might be missing the link. For anyone who’s interested in the various apps, I wrote a post about what’s available a little while ago.

Different Devices

It’s a long shot, but there could be something about Barnes & Noble’s device lineup that’s attracting a disproportionate number of erotica readers. The tablet-like Nook Color certainly would be more attractive for people who planned to view a lot of porn on their ereaders. If that’s the case, the Amazon Fire should level the smutty playing field soon.

Different Audiences

The Amazon crowd has a large author forum to sift through, so they might be more discerning readers. Barnes & Noble has a forum as well, but it’s not as well known. Amazon readers may be relying on word of mouth (or keyboard) to decide on new purchases, and they have more sources of information to choose from. I haven’t spent much time at all on the Amazon forums, so my next step as an author will definitely involve some self promotion over there.

Freelancing versus E-Publishing

Now that I’ve dipped my toes into the waters of both freelancing and e-publishing, I think I’m qualified to give my barely informed opinion about the differences between the two. I’ve been freelancing for a content mill, writing SEO articles (keyword-stuffed pieces of text that will help bump a site up to the front page of a Google search) and miscellaneous pieces of text for anyone who wants to pay me five bucks. I’ve also released one ebook, which has been sitting around at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Writing the ebook was a hell of a lot more fun, but definitely more taxing. I spent a lot of time agonizing over each turn of phrase. When you’re freelancing, if you spend your time crafting deathless prose you’ll end up earning pennies per day. The effort I’ve been putting into writing for other people has been more about my time and energy, not my creative juices.

Here’s the deal: when I write for someone else, I get 1.4 cents a word. It’s not the best payout in the world, but it is a great incentive to keep going. Write a 500 word article, get seven bucks. Rinse and repeat until you have a dollar figure you’re comfortable with. The ebook, on the other hand, was around 6,000 words. By the standards of freelancing pay, that’s $80. To date, I’ve made maybe $15 off that book.

Of course, the ebook’s at something of a disadvantage because I haven’t put much time at all into promoting my work. I do plan to do that someday, but I’ll either have to spend money (to buy ads) or put in a lot of unpaid time (to promote myself on various social media). I’m holding off on that course of action until I have at least two or three other stories ready to go.

I’m going to keep writing ebooks, of course, because I adore fiction. What I’m banking on now is the possibility that churning out prose for other people will train me to be a better author, one who can sit down and put words on the page every day instead of staring out the window for hours.

Double web page action!

I now have a website over at persephonerouet.webs.com. I like this blogger interface better, but the other site makes a mean author web page.

I'm going to keep this site active as a blog and post whenever I damn well feel like it. If you want to see my shiny author page, head over here.