I often cruise around the erotica section of Smashwords and
Amazon looking at what high strangeness can be found for one’s reading pleasure. What toDo When You Accidentally Titty Fuck the President’s Daughter Twice?; Drag QueenAstronaut and Other Stories; The
Alien’s Dairy Queen: Pumping Paula; Whatto Do When a Girl Seems to Only WakeUp If She Can Taste Cum in Her Mouth?; Man& Woman Can Equal Sex, and a BabyToo; and Bigfoot and the Kinky Couple are just a few of the random
offerings available for discriminating tastes that I found with just two very
basic searches. This erotica is like the
Sigue Sigue Sputnik of the publishing world.
Amazing. Garish. Description defying. Sublime.
Ever since authors have discovered the world of electronic self-publishing,
erotica (and romance) has exploded with some of the oddest subgenres
imaginable. This is a good thing for
fans of Bigfoot sex books.
That’s not to say these bold subgenres and other weird
erotica didn’t exist before epublishing.
Collectors and historians need only point to the output of Sally Miller
(Jersey Girl Fantasies) to prove that
high strangeness existed before the world of digital. Digital, however, has blown the doors wide
open, and there is no turning back.
Major publishers, and even most of the fringe ones, won’t
even consider printing some of the books currently being offered in the world
of the self-published erotica genre, and it has nothing to do with the quality
of writing. It has everything, though,
to do with content. Everything from
cryptid sex to incest to bestiality to forced lactation can be found, and those
are the things that scare traditional publishers. 50
Shades of Boredom this ain’t. Those
terrified publishers may say it isn’t hurting their profit margins, but online
retailers would say otherwise.
Amazon and Smashwords, the two biggest online retailers,
both have content guidelines, and a lot of these books they offer fall outside
those guidelines or are very close to going over the line. Nothing usually happens to the authors unless
someone complains (I’d love to hear some of the complaints), though Amazon does
do regular purges of “questionable” material.
The bottom line, however, is that these ebooks contribute to the bottom
line of both companies. The money is
nowhere near the level of the Young Adult vampire, zombie, or dystopian fiction
that multiplies like herpes, but it is sizable enough to matter, and it draws
people to the web pages. Sex sells, and
everybody is buying.
Perhaps in the future traditional publishers will be
unafraid of pushing the boundaries of erotica, but it seems highly unlikely. The industry has been slow to respond to
every single advancement in publishing for as long as I can remember. It is ridiculous to think this will be any
different. Some would even argue it
shouldn’t be, as a novel about dinosaur pimps just sullies the entire erotica
pool.
They would be wrong.
We progress when we push boundaries. If boundaries weren’t pushed, we wouldn’t
have things like interracial marriage or women voting. One can say bestiality erotica is a bit
different, but is it? People want to
write about it. People want to read
about it. It’s not everyone’s cup of
tea, but it doesn’t have to be. For now,
however, if you want to read a new bestiality story, chances are you’ll only
find it as a digital copy or self-published paperback. The traditional publishers, the ones who want
you to think they are at the forefront of carrying the First Amendment torch,
won’t touch things like that. They live
in fear, and that fear drives content.
Maybe someday that will change … but don’t hold your breath. In the meantime, enjoy Step Lust and the Dog.
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