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.)