aroslav: Blog

This is number five in my weekly blog series about my life as an author of erotica. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books. For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. I’ll post here each week with another short chapter of my life as an author of erotica. Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.

I have heard authors respond to criticism about their work with the words, “I don’t care. I write for myself, not a reader.” I always have to ask, “Then why did you post it for others to read?”

Yes, I will make the final decision regarding what I write and it won’t please everyone. But I write for readers. So, when I decided to focus on writing a story specifically for my readers, I needed to find out what they wanted to read.

How many times have you received a “Tell us what you think” invitation to take a survey for your bank, a product you purchased, or a political party? I get two or three a week. My typical response to these ‘invitations’ is to drop them nicely in the trash. Still, I needed to find out what readers wanted. I opened an online survey and announced it on SOL with no great expectations.

I was flooded with responses. The survey site was free for surveys with up to 100 responses. I had to pay the survey company so I could unlock more than 400 responses to my little survey!

Some of the data simply confirmed what I thought. The majority of my readers, 55%, were age 55 or older with half of the remainder between 45 and 54 years old. 98% were male. Well, I fit in both of those categories as well. According to the survey responses, pretty much everyone got their erotic stories from free or paid websites—like SOL. After all, that’s where the survey was announced. But about 20% also bought eBooks.

I worked in the eBook industry for several years when it was just beginning. I was an evangelist who traveled to trade shows, book shows, and writers’ conventions to demonstrate the new technology and tout its advantages. During that time, I saw a marked increase in the reading of men’s erotica. I believe it was sparked by being able to read romance and erotica on handheld devices. No one could tell what you were reading. And if I was reading my survey responses correctly, that was confirmed. There was a huge market for free and moderately priced erotica for men.

What made The Prodigal, for example, ‘men’s erotica’ rather than just general erotica? It wasn’t 150 million men who read Fifty Shades of Grey. Only 17% of that readership was male. Yet it was 98% men who read my stories.

The survey and a detailed review of my email revealed several contributing factors.
1. These older men like coming of age stories most. Second was science fiction, mind control, and time travel. Third, they liked romance, and fourth, action and adventure.
2. In my conversations, I discovered that our readers generally liked a strong male lead. It was preferred that he was an underdog. He needed to have honorable character. He needed to have a talent and/or a skill. But most strongly, he needed to develop a life-long relationship with one or more women for whom he would die if necessary.
3. My audiences liked multiple relationships with “Some Sex” according to the SOL rating system. They liked harem, polygamy, and polyamory. By and large there was a strong showing for standard heterosexual relationships, but female-female relationships were generally okay, especially if they were in the context of a plural relationship with a man.

My first three serials, The Art and Science of Love, Model Student, and Ritual Reality, all had a fundamental basis around the art world. In both of the first two, the main character is a paint on canvas artist. In the third, he was a theatrical props master. In two of the three, there was a coming of age aspect. In the latter two, there was a consistent plural relationship, and in the first, there were third parties invited into the couple’s relationship. All three were rated “Some Sex.”

I felt like I had a pretty good idea what my particular audience wanted. I decided to write a story that was based on these principles, just to thank my readers—an effort that yielded the “Living Next Door to Heaven” series.

In general, I still follow that pattern. My heroes are a kind of underdog. They exhibit a strong talent for something artistic. Brian was a short television star chef. Hero Lincoln was a crippled juggler and magician. Art Étrange was an autistic artist. Jacob was a transplanted fourteen-year-old guitarist, recovering from being hit by a bus. Dennis was a near-sighted shrimp with a magic touch for basketball. And in my current series, “Photo Finish,” Nate is a new kid in town who loves photography.

Before I ended the "Team Manager" series, I was bemoaning the idea that I would lose readership overnight if I didn’t come up with another new story right after the “Team Manager” series ended. My ex-wife, with whom I am on very good terms, said, “You know the formula and what your readers want. Write that.”

Duh!

I set to work on Full Frame.

Next week, I’ll talk about applying my research to an actual story.

This is number four in a series of blog posts about my life as an author of erotica. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books. For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. I’ll post here each week with another short chapter of my life as an author of erotica. Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon/aroslav community.

Rachel Kramer Bussel’s book, How to Write Erotica, is filled with great tips on how to write erotic scenes. She includes examples and exercises, writing prompts and testimonials. And if you are an experienced author looking to move into the genre of erotica, that’s really all you need.

What I was missing in the early part of her book was also missing in many of the stories I read online. Erotica of any length needs to have a story as well as erotic scenes. Most importantly, it needs characters that people care about. I’m frequently told by vocal readers that they just skim over the sex parts so they can get on with the story. I think many of them go back to read just the sex scenes later. Other vocal readers complain that there is no “real” sex in my story until late in the book. Bussel’s book gets to that important ingredient later (chapter 12, I believe). For me, the most important thing in an erotic story is the characters. If you don’t care about them, they are just wooden mannequins acting out a masturbatory fantasy.

I started writing and posting my second major story, “Model Student,” on StoriesOnline in 2012, thinking that it was just a placeholder so people wouldn’t forget about me while I was writing a more serious work. I realized by the end of the first chapter that it was really ready for a second chapter, so I wrote that. By then, the email started flooding my inbox. “Please keep going!” “Don’t end this story yet!”

At the end of the fifth chapter, I realized I was going to be working on this story for a long time. It ended up being a six-book series that posted two chapters a week online for over a year and a half. Nearly 650,000 words! Said one reader:

My God. I have just read [chapters] 5 and 6. Now I understand your blog and the forum when you talk about the feedback you've been getting. Your work is amazing! You have a gift. You really don’t need hints on where the story should go next, because these characters inside you will tell you exactly what you need to do, and which step to take next. That they are so alive on paper (well, on the screen), means they are living and breathing inside you, and there is no skin between them and the words you write. Oh my god. Thank you for daring to do this, to open your heart like this. I don't know whether these people exist in real life or not, but they for sure exist inside you, and now they live for us. Incredible, and thank you.

The key here was in the characters. They were so real that people began to consider them as friends and neighbors they cared about. Maybe even as lovers. They became real in this fantasy world by facing real problems of everyday life, no matter how over the top their sexual relations were. Over the years of writing erotica, I have discovered that once I develop characters that are real enough, they will insist on telling their own story, and it will not just be about the phenomenal sex they had.

A common meme among writers says, “If you hear voices in your head and they are ignoring you, you are probably a writer. If they are talking to you, you have a different problem.”

My characters talked. A lot. They were most vocal when I was driving my truck from one campsite to another and couldn’t defend myself from them. When I made camp, I simply had to write down what they’d said.

I built the “Model Student” series around a depressed freshman art student who hated school and believed he’d made a huge mistake in coming 1500 miles from his Nebraska home to Seattle where he felt like a fraud and an amateur compared to all the real artists in the school. (A feeling I fought in my own profession for forty years.) He was determined to leave school after the first semester ended.

To combat his depression, at his father’s advice, Tony played racquetball at the local gym at least three times a week. He was a good racquetball player and for a while he forgot about his depression—especially when he was playing against the women’s defending national champion, who happened also to be a very sexy model.

There were the four main themes of this entire series, driven by Tony’s narration: Art, Depression, Racquetball, and Romance. During the course of the six-book story, new problems are also introduced, as I dealt with polyamory, homelessness, abuse, a submissive, death in the family, and a conflict triggered by the competition between two of the artist/lovers in the story. I explored various artforms, including watercolor, oil, murals, fresco, mosaic, and textile. And to heat up the situation a little further, Tony’s interpretation of various parables he was painting in a new church was at odds with his nemesis, the local archbishop.

I didn’t have all that planned out in advance. In fact, I was posting the story almost as fast as I could write it and my two volunteer editors could clean it up.

And the most amazing thing happened. Living alone in a tiny travel trailer as I wandered aimlessly across the country, I discovered my own dark gloom had lifted. I owed it to the response and encouragement of my readers.

I intended to find a way to repay them. And what better way than with a story?

More about deciding what my audience wanted next week.

This is the third blog installment about my life as an erotica author. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books. For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. I’ll post here each week with another short chapter of my life as an author of erotica. Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.

BY THE TIME I’d put nine stories up at Stories Online, where readers could read them for free (two years), I decided I should start releasing them as books for sale. That required an author name somewhat longer and more serious than ‘aroslav.’ After cruising the erotica and romantica aisles at the bookstore and online, just looking at the names of authors, I chose to call myself Devon Layne. It was suitably androgenous, which I’d heard was an advantage for males writing in the genre. And it rhymed with my given name that I was still using to publish mainstream fiction.

I had limited success. eBook sales didn’t seem to be a real money-maker for me—paperbacks not at all. I’m very poor at networking and at social media. At the very bottom of my list of things I like to do, social media ranked at number 938, just one slot higher than making an actual phone call. That was tied with pulling my fingernails out by the root. I learned the harsh reality of something I’d been teaching my publishing clients for years: The day you don’t actively sell your book is the day your book will not be sold.

I had to stop and evaluate why I was writing this stuff and whether I should continue. No one else was going to sell my books for me because I wasn’t going to call anyone or try to get someone else to publish them. So, with no sales, was it worthwhile to keep writing in this genre—or, in fact, at all?

Mentally and emotionally my life had improved, despite my recently concluded divorce and my nomadic lifestyle. I enjoyed creating covers and laying out books both for paper and eBook. I’d been doing that for several years. I guess I could have said that I write and publish books for my own enjoyment and don’t care about anyone else. But then, why post them online or create books? All I needed was the manuscript for personal enjoyment.

On SOL, my stories were incredibly popular. I received dozens of emails from fans each week. I still receive anywhere from 20 to 100 emails per week. I had over 200,000 downloads my first year on the site.

Most of all, I liked the interaction with my fans and I felt I was doing some good, as well. I received this response to the second half of the Model Student book Triptych, which I later renamed Odalisque.

"I had to share that last chapter with a few of my friends. We met together to discuss it and then went out and bought food to take to the local food shelf. Thank you for inspiring us."

Wait! People met together to discuss a chapter of erotica? And were inspired to donate to a food shelf? My erotica must be doing something good.

In that volume of the “Model Student” series, I’d explored a polyamorous quintet in every combination I could put them in. I’d dealt with issues of homelessness, abuse, depression, submission, murder, art, and racquetball—stories of real life my characters wanted to tell about themselves. I decided what I really wanted out of my writing career was that connection to readers that changed things—that, as Tony Ames put it, “made the world a better place.” I wasn’t interested in making a mint with my books. I was used to living on a shoestring. I wanted to touch people and to connect.

Oddly, I discovered at the same time that nearly all my book sales had been to people who had already read or were in the process of reading the story online for free. That was a phenomenon that continued and grew for the next ten years. People paid me for free stuff! I’d never experienced anything like that before. I’d always heard that people wanted things artists sell given to them for free. I decided I should focus on giving my books away.

Perhaps the most important thing to me as a writer was that I was writing—not only erotica, but mainstream mystery, thriller, and literary fiction as well. It became my full-time passion and I’d seldom been happier.

Oh. How did it become full-time if I wasn’t getting paid for it?

At the age of sixty, I was laid off from a high-tech position and struggled to provide for my family for the next four years. At sixty-four, I was divorced and wandering. I filed for Social Security and lived on that and a couple hundred a month from my IRA. I traveled around the country in a pickup truck and sixteen-foot travel trailer. Money was limited, but I could live cheaper on the road than I could if I settled down anyplace.

I could truly tell people, “I don’t write for a living. I write to live.”

Thus began my career as a peripatetic (traveling from place to place) author, and my decision to always make my stories available for free. I was committed to writing erotica.

I’ve started this weekly blog about my life as an erotica author. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. I’ll post here each week with another short chapter of my life as an author of erotica. Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.

2011 was an enlightening year. E.L. James released Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel featuring explicit erotic scenes including BDSM practices. It was a phenomenal success, the trilogy of books selling over 150 million copies in five years.
But, my erotic writing (not the works, but the act itself) was looked down upon. Relatives did not want to know that I was writing ‘that kind’ of book. Serious writers who had enjoyed James’ novel shrank from admitting they knew me. One sanctimonious mainstream critic said, “I suppose there are some people who would like this.” Ouch.

The email and comments I received were completely contradictory to that opinion. Readers reaffirmed how wonderful my writing was, how they cared about the characters, and how they wanted more stories from me. I just had to not tell anyone I was writing it. But in many ways, it was the same thing I’d been writing for thirty years!

Lesson learned: I have come to believe that people change as they get older, and men and women change differently. Tastes change. Desires change. Social conventions change. I read the first full-length novel I’d written to my then fiancé, nearly forty years ago at a chapter a night. She loved it. She asked me each evening to read the chapter again. Perhaps she was just using my voice to put her to sleep, but she still said she loved the story, an occult fantasy that included some sexually charged pagan rituals. Even my mother, a minister, read the story and enjoyed it.

I didn’t get around to cleaning up the story and publishing it until twenty-five years later. At that time, my wife considered it vulgar and obscene. She definitely didn’t want our family name associated with such a thing. I published it under my erotica pseudonym and The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality proved to be a 4-star novel, both in eBook sales and as a serial. A review said:

Delightfully Different
Devon has created a good world for a modern paranormal story. This story takes place in both America and England. It is about an old Wiccan circle and the power struggle within it. The young man is the props master for his college’s theater program. He has a triangle with an English professor, a fellow theater student, and a late-night coffee house waitress. As tensions and rivalries build, the scene changes to England where things get more sinister. Enjoy this change of pace novel.

But the difference between it being a romantic adventure and it being erotica was measured in years, not in content. The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality by Devon Layne placed third in the 2013 Clitorides Awards for Best Erotic Fantasy, judged primarily by older men and not by older women.

My male readers had changed in a different way than my wife. They largely yearned for that day gone by when they were youthful and vigorous and sexually potent. They weren’t thankful that it was finally past. This was true, even of people I thought of as physically liberated.

I caught a conversation in a nudist park between a man and a woman in their sixties or seventies-both single, either widowed or divorced. I didn’t detect any attempt to start a relationship between them. The man had just started dating a woman he was besotted with. But he suggested that the woman he was talking to needed to get back into a relationship with a good man. He was obviously enthused about his own new relationship. Her response was, “I did my time. I don’t need to do that again!”

I don’t present those as universal truths, but as representative of what I found in my readership during my first year or two of writing erotica. Men liked erotica. Women liked erotica. But they didn’t like the same erotica. I’ll go into that in a future installment.

I guessed I was writing men’s erotica.

Most people know that I write erotica under the pen name Devon Layne. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a weekly blog about my life as an erotica author. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books or subscribe to my Patreon for free access.

I’ve been reading Rachel Kramer Bussel’s new book, How to Write Erotica. I figured that after ten years and fifty-some books, I should maybe check to see if I was doing it right. Turns out, I’ve been doing okay, but still had plenty to learn.

For example: I appreciated her simple definition of ‘erotica.’ She called it simply, ‘writing that is intended to arouse.’ That is a sufficiently broad enough definition to cover a wide range of descriptive literature that includes sex as a core component. Note, I say component, not totality. There is a lot of writing that, as Regina Kammer described it, “… is merely describing physical acts of sex and the choreography of body parts performing sex.”

A reader (orblover), reviewing Model Student: Triptych, expressed it in these words:

Not the typical “insert tab A into slot B” nor the bizarre “masturbatory fantasy played out with wooden models.”

I believe sex is a component, but not all there is to it.

I wrote my first piece of erotica—at least that I considered erotic—back almost thirty years ago. I shocked myself. I was trying to be a serious literary writer. This piece had sprung from the dark recesses of my mind as a motivation for someone in my work-in-progress being blackmailed. I read it over and then put a password lock on it. I hid it, because “I don’t write stuff like that.” But I didn’t delete it.

Then in 2011, I wrote my fourth mainstream book that would be published as a literary mystery, and the ending of it was so devastating to me personally that I cried as I wrote it. I’m a pretty emotional person. I’d written a dozen other books that I would ‘get back to someday,’ but this one would be released in just a few months as a prequel to another of my early works. The detective solves the case but loses the girl. What could be worse?

News that I got later that evening was even more devastating. I won’t go into details, but I began to slip into a dark chasm of self-induced depression and anger.

Suffice it to say that I needed to write something with a happy ending. What better to write for a happy ending than romance, and the steamier the plot, the happier the ending.

I surprised myself by remembering the password to the locked file from some twenty years before. Using that story as a stepping off point, I wrote my first short erotic novel, called The Art and Science of Love. But I didn’t know what to do with it. I certainly couldn’t publish it under my real name, or even through my company. People would know.

So, I adopted the short moniker, ‘aroslav,’ at StoriesOnline, and released the story here, not expecting all that much. It was a raw first draft and I released it a chapter at a time over six weeks. I was overwhelmed with the response from the story site. Praise that I had never heard from the readers of my ‘serious fiction.’ Over 10,000 downloads in the six weeks it took to post the story. Email pleading for me to please write more. My depression eased a little and I decided being an author of erotica wasn't so bad.

I’ll continue this series next week. For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. Feel free to visit my website or join my Patreon.