I am a pretty decent writer of erotica and was thinking perhaps I could use my talent to earn some extra money.
But I’m not sure how to get started - I was contemplating writing custom stuff and selling it on the 'net, or submitting stories to erotic publishers.
Any thoughts / suggestions / ideas?
There’s actually a book called “How to Write Erotica,” or something like that. My brother has a copy.
Is erotica like the stuff in Penthouse Letters? I’d say the first thing to do is track down a thesaurus for genetalia, and then write 'em like Mad Libs. 
go to www.erotica-writers.com (link is work safe), then go to the Writer’s Resources and see what they have to say. They have lots of good stuff to get you started.
Do you write erotica romance? There is a huge market for, in print and online, for erotica romance. The more specialized your genre (fantasy, sci-fi, 3some, m/m, some combination of all) the more you’ll sell. Do some market research using the link I provided as a starting point.
Black Lace publishes erotic novels and anthologies and accepts submissions from new authors. Their website is wwwblacklace-booksco*uk (substitute periods for the asterisks). They supposedly only accept work from female authors but I don’t know how serious they are about that.
Black Lace is pretty serious about its submission guidelines. I’ve had some contact with the editor, and she made it pretty clear that they reject manuscripts unread if they don’t fall match all their guidelines.
But if I were to submit a story “My Hot Lesbian Lover” by Nema Little and it was otherwise acceptable, would they insist on a notarized proof of gender or just accept my implied statement that I’m a woman?
I dunno. Since I’m a girl, that never came up. I guess there’s only one way to find out.
Remind me to come back to this thread. I’ve been published in the genre.
You probably won’t get rich doing it. But it’s fun. 
OK, here’s how to make a million dollars writing erotica for money … start with two millioin dollars …
Let me tell you how I become successful writing erotica.
I was delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut, and got a call from a publishing company. When I knocked on the editor’s door, I heard a woman say, “Come.” I went in and there she was, this beautiful, sultry, sexy woman behind the desk.
“I hope you brought the hot sausage,” she said…
Have you looked on (no link, maybe NSFW) literotica? I’ve submitted a couple of stories there that got decent reviews, but I was somewhat overwhelmed by number of submissions. I got bumped off of the ‘new stories’ page within a couple of days. A lot of them are boilerplate tripe (there’s a mixed metaphor for you), but there are still a lot of good writers doing this stuff just for the fun of it.
There is also some good information on their message forums, too.
But, please don’t let that discourage you if you have fun with it.
Okay, I’m back from the day job. The one where I actually earn my living.
I absolutely second the Erotica Readers and Writers Association at http://erotica-readers.com/ (entry page is work-safe). You will have to subscribe to the mailing list to post your own work and receive critiques, but you can also browse the vast array of information about writing and publishing erotica, as well as benefit from the calls for submissions. Members’ work is chosen monthly to be featured on the website itself. A lot of the writers on the mailing list are published in the genre.
Another good resource is The Fishtank at http://www.desdmona.com/ Again, intro page is pretty safe for work. You can join the Fishtank, and again, post and receive critiques.
You probably won’t get rich doing this, but you can make some extra money. You will have to write your socks off, though, and do a lot of submitting.
For paperback anthologies like Best Bondage Erotica 2 (my story is “Cuffed”) payment is between $50.00-120.00 US per story. From the time you write the story to the time it’s published and you get paid… Well, gosh, don’t wait around for that cheque to pay your bills. I’m talking a year or more.
Writing for money on online venues isn’t something I know a lot about, as I’m submitting for print publications only these days. (I’m also not writing as much due to the full-time job, commute, husband, dog, yard, housework, Christmas, and so on…)
Check out Clean Sheets www.cleansheets.com if you haven’t already. They’re now a paying venue, quite the coup to be accepted at, and feature some awesome writing. Ruthie’s Club just ruthiesclub . com if I remember correctly pays, too.
Good luck! Have fun. It is fun… If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
It took me a couple of days to get back here but I wanted to say thanks everyone for your input!
I’m just looking to make a few hundred $$ a month, so that I can quit my crappy part-time day job. (I would love to be a stay-at-home-mom and I’m trying to think of something that I enjoy that might pay me a little bit). I’m thinking of writing and selling customized erotica to meet someone’s specific requests, desires, etc.
Savannah - thanks for your offer - I may contact you at some point when I get further into this.
Is there really much of a market for erotica anymore? You can find sooooo much stuff self-published on the web that I would think published erotica would be going the way of Penthouse and Playboy.
Nothing beats snuggling up with a book else we’d do all of our reading online.
There is a HUGE market for erotica right now. Especially for the online publishers. Sure, there’s a lot of erotica available for free online, but the primary audience is women, and while some people don’t care about quality, a lot of people do. And there’s a number of people who are hesitant to buy erotica books in bookstores–or worse, going to an adult store!
Either way, I’ve sold over 1000 copies of my e-books. Sure, it’s not huge numbers compared to print publishing, but I sure make a lot more money than I would if I just posted it on a blog or didn’t try to publish it at all.
Ya know, having been in the past an occasional reader of Penthouse Forum/Variations, I always wondered if the submitted stories were rewritten by the editors or staff writers to make them conform to the “Penthouse style”. I remember that the stories were written by hundreds of different people, since they were reader-submitted, but they all seemed to have the same feel to them. Kind of like the way all those anecdotes in Reader’s Digest (Laughter, the Best Medicine, Humor in Uniform, All in a Day’s Work, etc.) all sound like they were written by the same person.
The thing that always bugged me about those Penthouse publications was this: who, in real life, calls their lover’s asshole a “rosebud”? :dubious:
People who read Penthouse. I’m guessing most of the letter writers were imitating, consciously or not, the existing style of previous letters. They were using the language they were most familiar with.
Those letters were mostly written by freelance writers, just like all the letters sent in to all the erotic letter publications that sprang up, sorry, in Penthouse’s wake. That market mostly is dead today, and many writers are sorry for it.
Did editors edit them for continuity of house style? I bet they did. And wrote more to fill up any holes, sorry, that remained in an issue.