5 Secrets I Know About Women (From Writing Their Weird Porn)

5 You Can Make Money Writing Smut -- But You Have To Write A Lot Of It

Our source writes under the unbelievably subtle pseudonym "Pandora Box," and this is his Amazon author page:

Pandora -- real name Peter Hayward -- writes in a particular "genre" of erotica that involves "mind-control incest," a thing we legitimately never would have guessed was a fetish. But it is, and a popular one at that; "Pandora" is one of several authors mining this rich vein of erotic fascination for cash. And he writes an absolute shitload of this stuff -- cranking out more than one book a week. "Hypno-incest has been a thing online for decades now ... but I'm probably the person who makes the most money from it. I like to brand myself as 'the #1 mind-control incest author in the world.'"

Aside from making for the best line in resume history, life as the #1 mind-control incest author is surprisingly lucrative. Peter sent us this rough breakdown of the first year of his career:

July 2012: $93.21
August 2012: $471.51
September 2012: $493.90
October 2012: $932.32
November 2012: $1,479.07
December 2012: $2,459.51
January 2013: $3,234.78
February 2013: $1,839.90
March 2013: $4,308.40
April 2013: $2,759.16
May 2013: $3,011.06
June 2013: $2,903.02
July 2013: $5,711.41

These days, Peter averages around $3,000 a month for his work, which is a particularly solid income considering how his subject matter sounds like the punchline for a Rule 34 joke. But it turns out there's a science to how you make a job like this work, and it involves throwing as much smut at the wall as possible until you've developed a solid income stream:

"You want each erotic book to be between five and eight thousand words long. They'll make you at least $50 in the first few months, but they have a long tail, and will keep making money for as long as they're available, which can be for the rest of your life. And $50 is a worst-case scenario -- a book that really takes off can make thousands of dollars in the first few months, but you never know which book is going to be a hit, so you want to put them out in bulk. I've been at this for three years, and I'm about to put out my 180th book."

4 You Need To Find A Niche (And Get Specific)

Peter emphasized that he's not at all into real-life incest, which is a terrible thing that traumatizes a ton of real people in the world today. But fetishes are fetishes, and almost everyone gets turned on by something they've been told is forbidden. So the real gold in this industry is in giving people the chance to escape into something that's a little bit ... wrong.

Thus, Peter is super into mind-control incest fantasies, and he's found that legions of smut-buyers across the Internet share his interest. Hence, books like Hypno-Sis 7: Making Her Mine:

We're going to go ahead and paste part of the summary in here, so you can get an idea of how incredibly specific this erotica can be:

EXPLICIT: This taboo tale contains mind control, hypnosis, exhibitionism, voyeurism, oral sex, taboo sex, toys, masturbation, and one teen slowly manipulating two 18-year-old girls, turning them into everything he's ever dreamed of -- constantly horny, willing to do anything he asks to serve his needs.

Stuff that isn't super weirdly specific simply doesn't sell. "It's all keywords and being in Amazon's system," says Peter. You see, author income is heavily dependent on their stories showing up when the good, sticky-Kindle'd people of the world search for them. The more weird kinks you can fit into a story, the more searches it'll show up in. "... the trick is to find something that makes money and then keep churning that out. But if you want to make a living from it, you've got to write what sells -- if you're a straight guy whose cowboy stories sell like pornographic hotcakes, you might be stuck writing about gay cowboys forever. I got lucky in that I really enjoy my genre." Peter noted that having too many keywords can alienate readers; the sweet spot is around three. So, "gay cowboy gang bang," rather than "incest mind-control gay cowboy tentacle shifter gang bang."

Also, it pays to have a working knowledge of how people tend to search for things online. "People don't type 'good erotica' into Amazon. They'll have a specific fetish in mind. So if they're into father-son gay scenes and in the mood for cowboys, they'll type in 'gay incest cowboy gang bang,' and you want to appear in those search results."

And like any other creatives, erotica writers have to distinguish themselves in order to build a fanbase of reliable buyers. "If you write a story where a guy and a girl meet in a cafe and fuck, it can be amazing writing, but no one's going to buy it. That's no one's fetish. But if you write to a kink, and it sells, people will see that you're good and buy all your writing. The more sales you have, the higher you appear in the search results, even tangential ones."

Though there is such a thing as going too niche, which is surprising, because at the start of this article, we'd have guessed "mind-control incest" was about as goddamn niche as it got. We were fools: "Then there's stuff like feeder porn -- it has a small, dedicated fanbase, so you'll make $100 in the first month and then never see another dollar from it. People who're into it will buy everything that's on the market, but there aren't many of them."

"Feeder" porn, by the way, is exactly what it sounds like: It's for people who fetishize about feeding a person to -- and well past -- the point of morbid obesity. It's not a huge market.

Peter was surprised to find that vampires actually aren't all that popular, either, as fetishes go. Apparently, they're more of a flash-in-the-pan, while werewolves are a stolid, reliable source of salable smut. "I had assumed that vampires would be popular, but werewolves -- they're the sexy ones. They've been sexy for decades. It's because they're so big and muscley and out of control."

And if you haven't figured it out ...

3 This Job Gives You Tremendous Insight Into People's Fetishes

"Billionaire stuff has been huge in in erotica since 50 Shades." By "billionaire stuff," he means erotica about being abducted and repeatedly fucked by extremely wealthy men. And as you've no doubt realized, some of those billionaires happen to be time-traveling werewolves. Of course.

Also, "Breeding -- as in making someone pregnant -- that's always been a popular genre."

Sometimes, enterprising authors will combine niches in order to rake in cash from both demographics. Take this billionaire breeder erotica, for instance:

Peter also takes requests (contributing a certain amount on his Patreon lets you commission a story), and that's where he starts to get real insight into the filthy minds of his readers:

"I'm doing a piece of Buffy fanfiction for a client, and one particular request stood out to me -- the Cordelia character becomes super-muscular and horny, but no one wants to fuck her because she's too masculine, so she's just craving sex and getting rejected. This guy is paying significant amounts of money for me to write this." How much is a "significant" amount? It's in the thousands of dollars, but to be fair, it's for quite a bit of work: "It'll be 150,000 words when done." That's about 20,000 words longer than The Silmarillion, for reference.

So is there a line that e-book smut isn't allowed to cross? Lots of them, actually. Which is why ...

2 Some Fetishes Are Code For Other Fetishes

Our source makes no bones about who buys most of his material: bored housewives looking to spice up their erotic life. Kindle has made his business, and their continued fantasy life, possible. Not only does it allow them to read smut in public with no one the wiser, but the purchase receipt only says "Amazon," so their spouses can't possibly know they've been buying hundreds of dollars' worth of werewolf billionaire incest leprechaun porn:

"The trick is to think of your readers as the typical repressed housewife with an average sex life -- I pretend every time I get a sale, it's Marge Simpson buying a book -- and they're paying to get the dirtiest sex imaginable. They want it to be as raunchy as possible. If rape fiction was available on Amazon, it would sell more than everything else put together: I make my money from incest because it's so wrong. The more messed up the story is, the more it'll sell."

That means there's a lot of money to be made in going dark, but not skirting too far over the edge. There's also a lot of money in filling a story with as much testosterone as possible. "When the woman doesn't really want to be gang banged, but there's a guy on every side. The readers just want MAN MAN MAN all around. That's why gay stuff sells well -- it's MAN on MAN. Gang bangs are one woman and a whole lot of MAN. It's all about getting MAN in there ... Bigfoot is a big seller for just that reason. Go search for Bigfoot erotica on Amazon."

Wait, what? Did he misspeak? Let's do a quick search ...

In addition to loving MAN and Bigfoot, a lot of readers have fetishes that are straight-up forbidden to write about in Amazon, like bestiality. And that, friends, is why werewolves are so huge in that market:

"Werewolves turn into wolves at the full moon. That's a guy turning into a wolf and fucking a woman -- very different than a woman having sex with a real wolf. Bestiality is straight-up banned, but a guy turning into an animal is okay ... so you find werecats, werehorses. It used to be a clever way of getting bestiality around Amazon."

You see, that's the other thing ...

1 Amazon Enforces Its Own Arbitrary Censorship

There's nothing explicitly illegal about writing up your fantasies of siblings boinking each other under the influence of some fantastic mind-control device. But there's the law, and then there's Amazon law. The company regularly bans entire categories of erotica, with zero warning or explanation to the authors who rely on those sales for income:

"They change their rules with no warning, and -- worst of all -- no way of us knowing what their new rules are. There's a huge erotica-writing community because we need each other; if we didn't keep in constant contact, any one (or all) of us could lose our income instantly and permanently. About two years ago, they outlawed incest being mentioned on the cover of books. If you have that on the cover or in the blurb, your book gets banned. Overnight, 70 books in my catalog were taken down. I had to go through and rewrite the blurbs and covers and rebrand every book in my catalog."

And keep in mind that the authors of banned erotica aren't, you know, informed or anything. Their titles are abruptly removed. "A year after that they were like, 'no more mind control.' They didn't tell anyone. They just banned my whole catalog. They never told me why; I just lost my income overnight."

So here's the thing: We realize a lot of the people reading this are kind of siding with Amazon on this one. There's no question that a lot of what's being published there is, uh, problematic. So is it wrong to intentionally make pornography that's just different enough from something like bestiality or rape that you're technically allowed to sell it? Maybe? To be honest, we don't even know anymore. The justification on the creators' end is that it's providing people with a safe outlet for those desires, and let's be frank: Approximately 100 percent of humans have at least one sex fantasy they wouldn't want the world to know about.

There are volumes to be written about why so many women get a thrill out of domination fantasies (the 50 Shades series has sold more than 125 million copies -- one for literally every adult woman in the United States). There is probably even more to be written about why the guy doing the dominating needs to be a billionaire lycanthrope. But that is, unquestionably, what they want. Where there's a market, there is someone to fill it.

"There's a specific type of person who can't orgasm without a story in their head," says Peter. "Even having sex with their dream lover they're imagining a narrative, and they aren't necessarily in the narrative. But they need that narrative to have sex in order to reach orgasm. And you generally have favorites you return to over and over again."

And if cheap erotic fiction stops even one hypnotist from mesmerizing some siblings into fucking while a Sasquatch masturbates nearby, maybe it's all worth it.

Peter Hayward has a website called Lessons in Smut and a Patreon.

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