Here’s the short blurb for you blurb fiends:
Penny Paxton’s peaceful life among the Free Foragers of the Forest is rudely interrupted when the Patriarchal Raiders raid her village and capture her. She winds up tied to a bed deep in the passion pits of the Maledom Dominion, a sex slave. What is the ultimate secret that will allow her to escape her life of endless forced sexual bondage and rape? Read this 15,000 word novelette and find out!
OK, here’s the straight skinny on this story. My previous short story, Butterfly went over a freaking cliff, that’s the story. It went over a cliff on Amazon. It went over a cliff on Smashwords. I’m not going to report the numbers, they’re embarrassing even to me. He’ll they’d be embarrassing to my goldfish if I had one.
Thing is, “Butterfly” was a pretty clean story. Clean, hell, it was WHOLESOME for being a kinky erotic romance. Tons of explicit maledom/femsub sex with lots of sexual bondage of course, but everybody in the story was totally onboard with what was going on and having a wonderful time. Dancing, eating out (the restaurant kind!) and tons of fun, exciting consensual sex.
And that’s how I marketed it, as a fun, clean, wholesome sexual bondage romance. And it went over a cliff on Amazon. And it went over a cliff on Smashwords. I mean, publishing that story was like dropping a penny down a well and never hearing the “splash.” If it weren’t for the fact that I have considerable backmatter built up, I might not have had any sales at all. Jeebus.
And that’s why “Your Body Or Your Life” is such a rapefest. It starts off with sex slave rape and proceeds to a mass capture and kidnapping with a public mass virgin gang rape. Consensuality? The characters in my story never experience it. Hell, they never HEARD OF it.
And me being me I added an ending that will Ruin… er, Change… Everything and force readers to re-evaluate the entire structure of modern society, something not normally found in hardcore nonconsensual rape erotica, but lemme tell ya… it works!
The rape erotica takes place in part of a mythical (because I just made it up) 1990s B movie that’s like most of those B-movies where the Peaceful Forest Dwellers’ village gets attacked by Grubby Raiders. We’ve all seen them, the Peaceful Forest Dwellers are all standing around in filmy togas grooving on how sweet they’ve got it hanging around in the forest, then the Grubby Raiders ride in, generally on horses, sometimes in SUVs or jeeps or motorcycles (curiously, almost never on bicycles) and they start beating, killing, robbing, kidnapping and raping everyone, as Grubby Raiders do.
I don’t have any brief for or against consensuality per se. Some stories consensuality works in, others it doesn’t. Some stories demand both nonconsensuality and consensuality (such as all the trad romances where the pirate rapes the main character and then falls in love with her, i.e., bodice rippers). I kind of hate that publishers push so hard to keep things consensual. What, do they think that the generally female readers who enjoy rape fantasies constitute some kind of danger to the public? It’s insane. Fantasy is fantasy, reality is reality. Readers can tell; most women who enjoy rape fantasy stories have NO interest in being raped in reality. Why can’t prudes and publishers tell?
Anway, we’ll see how this one does. It’s 15,000 words long and about 10,000 of those words is kidnapping and rape scenes with bondage throughout. Woo-hoo!
The only downside here is that trying to promote a story like this is like walking a minefield. On this blog I can write frankly about what the story is about, but on other media I have to tiptoe carefully lest prudes take offense and get whatever promotional effort I’m making censored. The social media providers are not at all concerned abut what’s fair or reasonable, what’s fantasy and what’s not. They just stomp reflexively if anyone complains, fair or not.
Still this is the sort of story that should attract readers all by its lonesome. We shall see.
(Note: in its first day of sales, "Your Body Or Your Life" has doubled the sales of "Butterfly" in the three weeks since its release. And the backmatter sales have been great. I think I have my answer as to which sort of story sells better.)
