There's a 1993 book by a Valerie Kelly called "How to Write Erotica". I recall having a copy of it back in the Nineties. The book itself was well-done, and it had a lot of advice about the craft of writing that was very well-taken. Very good advice, really.
The book had lots of suggestions about writing erotica and had a long list of places where aspiring authors could submit manuscripts. All those little magazines are gone now, replaced for a while by websites, and nowadays simply...gone. Erotica isn't in favor these days.
Some 1993 suggestions-- writing copy for the boxes of VHS porn cassettes (and DVDs?) --are almost funny now. I don't even know that 2025 porn is put on DVD at all. And even in 1993, the publishers of paperback porn novels were mostly gone. Literary porn? Where would you go for that these days? There are no more sites like Nerve.com or Filthy Gorgeous Things.
On Booktok people have taken to unironically referring to any book with sex scenes as "smut". Maybe that's just a way of dismissing what's called "romantasy" out of hand, or maybe Gen Z really doesn't have any use for sex and erotica. I really dislike that use of "smut". "Smut" back in the 1950s-1990s had a connotation not just of graphic sex, but of self-conscious irony and amused transgression. The Gen Z types don't seem to have any sense of humor about sex and don't like irony and especially don't like transgressive fiction. My God, there are twenty-somethings on Booktok and YouTube that are terrified that sometimes characters in YA novels actually have sex. I just want to facepalm about that. They're actually afraid that high schoolers will be corrupted by knowing that people do have sex.
I'd still like to write erotica, but I don't think that what excites or arouses me would be commercially viable. As I've always said, any erotica that I'd write would probably have footnotes and a bibliography. (Please note that I mean "footnotes" in the academic way, not in any fetish sense) And my characters would...talk. They'd talk a lot. They'd talk before, during, and after sex.
I mean...that's always been my own experience of sex. Lots of talking, and very much lots of talking during the sex itself. The girls and women who've been with me down all the years have been adventurous and experimental and willing to try lots of transgressive things...and we've always talked while doing things. My young companions and I have always narrated what's happening and done lots of serve-and-return badinage during sex. I suspect that most audiences wouldn't get that.
I also suspect that most audiences wouldn't see s/m as an occasion for social climbing and/or irony. They wouldn't get the idea of the two very different people (yes, sometimes age-disparate, too) talking themselves into bed or into new and untried experiences not so much out of lust as out of a sense of the excitement and sheer fun of trying something outrageous. I think, too, that Gen Z would dislike the idea of pushing past limits just to see what's out there.
One day, maybe. Maybe one day I will write something that would've gone on a slightly louche erotica website back in the Noughts. All I have to worry about is that the sort of people who become self-righteous about "smut" on Booktok aren't going to like stories about exploration.
