The business of pleasure isn't always as rewarding as it ought to be for an author of erotic fiction.
Aiming to raise the bar of quality for sexy narrative on the Net, a new Web site called Erotasy is pitching pulse-quickening short stories and a weekly erotic serial. By charging US$2 for each story (the serial is free) and paying authors a royalty fee, the creators of Erotasy not only hope to build a site for one-handed netsurfers, but also to make it a little easier for erotic writers to make a living.
It's not that stories about sex are hard to find online -- the trick is to find writing that is readable enough that you can get off on it.
When Erotasy founders Tom Deerfield and Louise Baquero started casting in the bitstreams for erotica, they found a lot of what Deerfield calls "toxic waste" floating out on Usenet in newsgroups like alt.sex.stories, but little well-crafted prose.
"There are mountains of stuff posing as erotica," says Deerfield, "but it's terrible."
Baquero adds, "We live in San Francisco, which is bookstore heaven. You can walk into a bookstore and see shelves of erotica anthologies in different flavors, like Baskin-Robbins ice cream. But it's not like that all over the globe. We felt there was a huge void on the Web for people [like us] who love to read short stories."
Baquero distinguishes Erotasy from the standard-bearer of "literate smut" online, Nerve, by saying that Erotasy will not offer social commentary or images, but will concentrate on fiction.
"We're starting out very simple. We're going to do one thing well."
Jack Murnighan, Nerve's senior editor, trolled the Net for promising new writers and sites for Nervelink, a highly selective index of sex-related sites that will launch at Nerve this Friday. He concurs with Deerfield and Baquero's appraisal of erotica available online.
"It's pretty dire out there. You get tons of nerdy-guy rape fantasies and general sordidness, with a couple of worthy exceptions, like Angela Preston's X-Stories," he says. "Erotic fiction on the Web merits all the usual criticism of writing on the Web -- there are tons of typos, and no editorial hand whatsoever."
To find contributors for Erotasy, Deerfield and Baquero ran ads in Poets and Writers magazine, the National Writers Union newsletter The American Writer, the International Women Writers Guild newsletter, and on savvy mailing lists like the List Foundation.
They ended up with 11 stories for launch, penned by a stable of writers including Don Shewey, who published an X-rated interview with Madonna in The Advocate, and Elizabeth Engstrom, the author of such books as When Darkness Loves Us and Black Ambrosia. The stories are grouped into the very broad categories Heterosexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Other, and delivered to the readers as Adobe PDF files. (A bug for Macintosh users will be fixed by Tuesday evening, Deerfield promises.)
Lisa Verde's poignant "The Boy, Louis" describes the seduction of a dark young man by a married woman in lushly written prose: "He shuddered and tried to keep still. A smug drop of creation glistened at the very end of him. It was salty, and viscous."
Shewey's "The Nether Eye Opens" is clumsier and more arch, dripping with condescension for its middle-aged overweight subject: "For a lot of young gay men, the idea of having anything to do with a guy like Jerry would be absolutely unthinkable. I don't mind. In fact, I like it. I like the feeling of control."
At $2 per textual money shot, is there a market for pay-to-read adult fiction on the Web?
Nerve's Threads stories pull in 100,000 readers a month -- but they're free. Many adult sites levy a monthly membership fee, however, and then charge additionally to download XXX stories and images. Deerfield and Baquero are betting that someone who's willing to pay $15 for an anthology on paper would be happy to pay $2 for a story they can preview online.
The anonymity of reading on the Web can broaden a reader's perspective on what's sexy, Deerfield observes.
"Before I got on the Net, I pretty much stuck with straight, heterosexual, white-bread type anthologies, because that's what I felt comfortable with. It's easier to expand your categories online," he says.
The largest publisher of erotic books in the world is Masquerade, which pumps out 10 books a month, and takes in $4 million a year. Masquerade will be publishing an anthology later this year that draws some of its material from online sources, called The Best of the Underground.
Publisher Richard Kasak thinks there's room for a site that emphasizes quality over extreme bedroom sports.
"A lot of the stuff on the Web deals with stuff that I won't touch: underage, rape, bestiality," he says. "We do a lot of S/M, but we draw the line at death."
