Cover of the Smashwords edition of Greek Harem. Here's the link!
Cover of the Amazon edition of Greek Harem. Here's the link!
In the third installment of the Honey Trapp Snappy Stories, Honey infiltrates a Greek shipping oligarch's harem of pay-for-play slavegirl beauties. Her goal: to help discover how the oligarch's shipping firm is sliding past regulations aimed at preventing the use of bunker oil as fuel. "Something funky in the bunky oil indeed!" (Bunker oil is basically what's left over when you refine crude oil into gasoline. It's very low-grade stuff, full of sulphur dioxide and particulate matter which is toxic to human beings and other living things, which is why there are regulations concerning its use, pathetically limited though those regulations are.)
This plotline gives me plenty of chances to indulge in some really fun orgy scenes and also some ultra-kinky public bondage sex action at the Art Institute for the Sexually Insane. It was great fun to write those scenes, which is probably why they constitute the bulk of the novella. And it was fun to play with the personalities of the four slavegirls other then Honey, their perceptions of themselves and one another, and to contrast a pay-for-play harem where anyone can leave if they want to, and the issues of historical harems which were not consensual and which sometimes led to bad results, like people getting killed.
I also had some fun with nomenclature and myth. All of the local slavegirls have names from Greek mythology. One in particular stands out. Her name was initially Iris, but I decided for some reason, which was probably my subconscious at work/play, to base her on a the face of a remarkable woman I'd seen in some porn photo. (I've looked all over for it, I know it's somewhere in the huge folder I call my "Archives" but I can't find it.) She had a bull-like quality to her face, except that it was very feminine, not masculine at all. You might think cow-like, but we associate cowlike with being kind of placid and sleepy-looking, and that didn't match this woman's face at all -- she was very alert and aware-looking, just very confident-looking as well. Like a bull that absolutely owns its paddock.
While writing the description, I remembered that there was a Greek myth about a woman mating with a bull, and sure enough, there was. A quick trip to Professor Google showed that a woman named Pasiphae offended the gods somehow, and she was cursed with lust for the Cretan bull, even though she was married to King Minos. She subsequently gave birth to the Minotaur, and also several human children, including a woman named Ariadne. I decided it would be fun to rename Iris the bull-faced woman Ariadne, thus ever-so-subtly implying that she is a distant descendant of the mythical Pasiphae, and the bull traits still show up in her children, however watered down. I didn't make Ariadne's descent part of the plot, but I did have some fun with the characterization. I'll say no more.
Also, check out the covers of my book. They are a good indication of the differences between Amazon and Smashwords censorship rules. There are two main differences between the two images. The Amazon image wears no gag, the Smashwords image wears a gag. And the Amazon has a thong strap and a but of cloth covering the portion of her butt that's visible from the side. The Amazon image does not.
I very much wanted a gag on the Amazon cover, I thought it kicked up the sexiness and kinkiness of the image a lot, but I did some research and other Amazon books with the words "Gagged" right in the title (like "Bound and Gagged") did not have pictures of gagged women on them. I've gotten away with such imagery in the past, but after looking at all the boos with "Gagged" in the title and no gags on the cover art, I decided better safe than sorry. I also covered up the butt bits, negligible though they were, because Amazon does not like to acknowledge that women have butts. I wasn't so put off by that because I don't think it affected the image much.
I also put the collar, leash and wrist cuff on the woman, because those do show up on the covers of kinky titles on Amazon. Plus, the cuff is plausibly deniable, there's nothing to distinguish it from a bracelet. And I also used the "Scale" tool to make the woman's body a bit thicker than in the original: she's one of those leggy fashion model whippet types, which is great, but I suspect erotica readers like a little more flesh on their models. That said, I absolutely love the strutting stride of the model, the way her head is thrown back, the general go-for-it attitude her whole body projects. Sales of this book are going VERY well, I suspect the cover might just have something to do with it.
What do you think? Leave your comments, oh, just anywhere.
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