Lacking cabbages and kings to talk about, let us consider erotic lit’rachure and budgeting.
To start with the budget: the AMEX bill came in: only about $2100. Before you faint dead away: that includes the $1200+ for a new crown, plus $158 for routine dental cleaning. If that’s correct (and I have no reason to suspect it’s not), then it means this month I spent all of $742 on regular expenses.
That’s some kind of a miracle: normally I budget $1100 to $1200 for day-to-day costs. So in reality I’m only about $1,000 over budget despite some $1350 dumped into the dentist’s coffers. Hallelujah.
I guess.
As a practical matter, this came about because my nose has been glued so tightly to the grindstone that I haven’t been frolicking around in places like Costco. Really, all of the standard supplies like paper towels, TP, and olive oil are stashed in gay abundance. Trips to grocery stores suffice for almost everything else.
And also as a practical matter, it means I’m not eating very well. I hate grocery stores and will put off going until I’m totally out of everything, and that means most of the time there’s no fresh produce in the house: no veggies, no fruit, no salad stuff. Instead of eating, I’ve been browsing out of the cupboards: rice, pasta, cheese, canned this and frozen that, whatEVER. Not very good for one.
Oh well.
This afternoon I decided to do a little research on the market for erotica lite, preparatory to writing a short essay to post on LinkedIn (thereinatupon, i hope, to garner some attention from my august colleagues in publishing).
Interestingly, there appears to be surprisingly little data, except for information kept hidden by Amazon. We can see that the market is quite large and has been booming for at least a decade. However, who exactly comprises said market remains to be seen.
A few studies dating back to the 1990s suggest the market is largely female. One set of statistics, whose provenance is decidedly shady, suggests the median age of female erotica readers is around 30. Well, I’ll believe it when I see it, and I ain’t seein’ it there.
However, some more serious studies published in scholarly journals suggest that very probably a large portion of the readership consists of women. We can deduce a few characteristics of Racy Writing that particularly appeal to women. They tend to like “romance,” which is broadly defined in these studies as stories that involve a relationship. They like stories in which one or both characters are hurt and comforted. And they apparently like the racy passages to be part of the plot. A study of “slash”–a contemporary phenomenon that involves imagining popular characters such as Harry Potter or Captain Kirk in gay or lesbian tales — showed that 60% of readers/hobbyist writers (again mostly female) liked PWP: “porn without plot.”
Moving along… It was off to find some sources for the proposed annotated edition of The Romance of Lust.
Ohhh those Victorians! I found a bunch of stuff, some of which I just ordered up from Amazon. Most hilariously, those folks were into sexy furniture, notably technological marvels that comprised all sorts of mechanical wonders. Some of it is truly bizarre.
I’ll leave that to your imagination (which may not be up for the task, if you’re even remotely normal). But rest assured, when my version of the Romance is ready, you’ll be able to read all about it in the headnotes!
My first time here and what a post to stumble upon, I was going to say I was a funny about money virgin but I thought it a little too punny 🙂
I know my wife enjoys some of the slash and recently the 50 shades of grey which I believe started as an amateur slash novel, but this has been popular for a lot longer than ten year. Mills and boon has been dominating romance sales for years, I remember my mum reading them 20 years ago and my wifes Grandma has a huge stash probably from the 70-80s.
I think this is definitely a genre that is ready to be exploited however it seems like not many people want to confess to liking this kind of thing, until the 50 shades of grey hullaballoo came around that is. But since that’s died away it’s gone fairly quiet, in the main stream at least.
Good luck to you anyway, I think theres always room for another great novel and books are also a fantastic continuous revenue source, I love the idea that you can put the time and effort in now and stil lbe reaping rewards in 30-40 years.
Welcome, Dom! I dunno if there are any great novels lurking in slash or the softer forms of smut, but I do think there’s a lot of fun to be had. Life’s short; we might as well enjoy while we can. If we achieve greatness, well…what the heck. That’s for the next generation to decide.
I think I love your grandma-in-law. 😉
Hee, I always understood PWP to mean “plot? what plot?” but with the same general context of “vapor thin reasoning to get character A and B into bed together”
Dom,
As I understand it, Fifty Shades was originally a Twilight-based fan fiction posted at an online fanfic-sharing site, which was then picked up by a publisher. It’s dreck, both as writing (and the sequels are reportedly worse) and as a representation of the kink community–but apparently it doesn’t need to be good…
For a much better treatment, I recommend Exit to Eden by Anne Rice writing as Anne Rampling. It was made into an abysmal movie, but the book itself is top-notch.
My gut feeling about erotica as a genre is that the line is increasingly being blurred between it and other mainstream genres. I’ve read things in mainstream fiction (including romance, thriller, science fiction, fantasy, general fiction…) explicit enough to make me think, “Wow! Ten years ago, you had to go to a special section of the bookstore for that!” And I’ve seen erotica slotted into each of those genres.
It will be interesting to see what the future holds!