What Are The Best Platforms To Publish 'Short Sex Stories'?

So long as you understand what you mean by “best,” Amazon’s KDP is still by far the largest audience and the greatest profit potential. We publish directly to Kindle Unlimited. Note, however, that Amazon’s rules for content are notoriously vague and that books can be “deleted” at any time for no clear reason. Smashwords is a great way to get into distribution with a writer-friendly platform that has a good scope of distribution to retailers such as Apple’s iBookstore, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and more. They charge 10-15% for ebooks that are non-epub (which means they convert your work for you). The largest trick to consider when it comes to publishing adult content is how each platform considers it in terms of promotion. While many platforms allow adult content, some of them refuse to promote it. As a result, it ends up getting lost in the puddle of all of the other content. So, be sure to consider this when deciding on a platform to publish your work.

Honestly, most of the Kannada content available online is fairly plain. For more meaningful tension, I deliberately avoid stories labeled as ‘sex stories’ and look for romantic fiction that’s been described as ‘mature’ or ‘slow-burn’. There’s this one story, ‘Mouna’ I think, where a married couple live in silence. Eventually the wife starts leaving notes all over the house for her husband to find, with increasing degrees of desire expressed. It was really hot because it was all about the wait and trying to read between the lines. Such content is written by Kannada authors and can be found in online forums. Most of them deal with the human mind as the ultimate erogenous zone.

Trigger warnings are one of those things that I kind of love and hate at the same time. The top dark romance authors are very particular about their trigger warnings and I think that’s really great because it gives readers some idea of what to expect and enables them to read accordingly. At the same time, it does create a kind of menu effect where people read dark romance because they want to read a particular dark trope and authors who are really clear about their content notes, who are really up front about the things that are going to happen in the book, earn a huge amount of trust with their readers.

ASSTR vaults. Ah, nostalgia. I don’t have any perfect one-to-one equivalents, but there are a lot of sites around nowadays that host pretty much identical material to what you’d find on the above sites for free: LitErotica and StoriesOnline for a start, which have been around nearly as long and host a vast amount of written material by users. Of course, the biggest exception to this is probably the Archive of Our Own (AO3), which is, for better or worse, the giant of the fanfiction space – their tagging is light-years ahead of ASSTR’s ever having been. For original content, Wattpad and Royal Road are probably now the places where most of the action of web-based serials happens. What I’m missing is the old-school archive-by-folder approach to hosting stories. While there are certainly many niche forums, independent author sites, etc., that offer this kind of experience, they’re scattered about the internet, and you really need to know what you’re looking for in terms of specific communities or tags.

There’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’ by O. Henry. I read this in school long ago but I still get chills thinking about this particularly lovely short story about a young couple who each lose their most prized possessions in order to buy the perfect Christmas gift for the other. The moral, that love is greater than any material possession and that true gift-giving comes from selfless sacrifice, is powerfully conveyed through a beautiful story and perfect irony, leaving the reader with a very warm and bittersweet feeling long after finishing the story. One of my favorite short stories is 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson. Now this is a very different type of moral. At first the story seems to be this really fun little tradition that a small town celebrates every year but in reality it is a horrid look into the dangers of blind conformity and the dangers of traditions that are continue simply because they have always been done. It is a very shocking story and there is a very horrid twist at the end that really shocks you into realising just how blindly people follow along with things that are wrong and even be cruel. We read this in book club and it really brought out a lot of discussion. Some people found it to be very horrible while others saw it as okay. Again this is not a 'feel good' moral but it is a very powerful message that really makes you think. Another piece that I find uplifting is “The Last Leaf” by O. Henry. An artist struggles to make ends meet with his girlfriend sick in an apartment right below them. He paints a single leaf on a close-by tree in order for her to know that they still have hope. The story is so beautiful in its quiet portrayal of friendship and the power of art to sustain life. I love this short story because there is no moral at the end of it. The moral is embedded throughout the whole story in the way that the characters treat one another with kindness and beauty. Every time I read it, I find something new about the characters and their relationships. It never fails to bring a tear to my eye in the happiest of ways.

Project Gutenberg has an 'interactive fiction' section with a number of classic choose-your-own-adventure style gamebooks from Project Gutenberg. While not exactly interactive fiction in the modern sense, some of the books, such as the ‘Lone Wolf’ series and ‘Heart of Ice’ are classics of the genre and have complex stories with a surprising amount of player control. Reading them online through an interpreter that handles the page turning and inventory management for you makes them easy to read. For adults interested in the roots of interactive storytelling, the ‘interactive fiction’ section of Project Gutenberg is a rich and free resource. Often the prose is dense and the challenges to the player are merciless and need to be solved through careful planning and mapping of the game world.

So, I was messing around with my local library’s digital portal, and I found out they have a whole collection of erotic memoirs through their partnership with Hoopla. The ratings on the books I found are from library journals, which are more concerned with rating a book for literary value, rather than how sexy it is. So, it’s really a great resource for people looking for smart, literary erotic works. I found a great book of poems, ‘Apology’ by Jon Pineda, for free. Although not entirely erotic, the intimate scenes are incredibly honest and beautiful. I can totally recommend searching the online catalog of your local library for smart erotic literature.

A blast from the past! While Mastram is often referred to as a single book, it is actually a pseudonym for a large number of very cheap, erotic pulp novels published in North India in the 80s and 90s. While the plots of the individual books are repeatedly repeated, the basic structure is always that of a young, naive girl from a village, a corrupt landlord/stranger, lots of melodramatic plot and many build-ups to the sex scenes, described in very flowery and coded language to make as much as possible of the restricted nature of the publications. Most Mastram stories follow the basic pattern of a secret, forbidden affair which is swiftly followed by blackmail and then revenge of some kind or another. Much drama, sudden switch of emotion and character, and much over-the-top behavior is the stock-in-trade of this bizarre brand of popular culture. Melodrama and cliché are written into the very fabric of the novels, and the vast majority were read in secret by the author and by his readers, who passed the books from hand to hand in guilty, forbidden pleasure. Not exactly literature, but then again, they managed to carve out a unique and very distinct place in the culture.

From a reader-for-fun perspective, this blend is everywhere. Search online for “romance” or “general fiction” on indie platforms or in online forums (e.g. Wattpad, Fictionpress) to find tons of stories, including the example above right: a conservative family’s daughter discovers her sexulity during her study abroad program. Or, a tech CEO returns to his hometown and finds that he has reconnected with a childhood friend in a way that challenges his modern beliefs about relationships. The traditional story often provides the conflict for the character to overcome or even the forbidden situation. Meanwhile, the modern story explores the same situation through the character’s inner feelings and conflicts as they grapple with their desires. You can find plenty of examples of such stories on any serial fiction app under Indian romance or ‘desi’ tags, although most of them vary in terms of quality.

It's half the fun of the secret relationship, navigating the logistical nightmares, the elaborate co-ordination, the obscure language and the plethora of alibis. Deception is a practical business and if you’re going to have a secret relationship, you have to treat it as a business. Stories about the mechanics of secrecy are about competence, about teamwork and the dull grey details of the pragmatic relationship. Yes, it’s not all passion, there’s also the matter of lipstick on collars, who told what lie to whom and checking the couple’s shared calendar to make sure you’re not booked for anything else at the same time. It makes for a very interesting relationship and explores how even the most grey of missions can form the most intense of bonds. But, it’s also very exhausting and ultimately unsustainable. There’s a lot of mental energy to maintain the deception of the secret relationship and it starts to take over your life. You begin to neglect your friends and family, you start to neglect your career. The cracks start to appear not through some dramatic revelation but through the slow and agonizing process of fatigue. It’s a very real and relatable way to explore the secret and raise the stakes.