Have you ever tried to have sex while completely stressed out about money? Your mind wanders, it takes forever to cum, at times you lose the sensation in your sexual organs so you are really just going through the motions.
The same thing happens to your sex writing when you are stressed out about money. The once steamy sex scenes you could write quickly become formulaic and base and your frankness and openness about sex, masturbation and toys now seems harsh and grating. Basically, the stress of your monetary situation makes your writing flat and demanding.
Learning how to budget your sex writing income will go a long way to making your writing sexy again. Here are just a few tips to help you:
1. Add up your monthly expenses and find out how much you need to earn just to survive.
2. Take that number and add 42 %. This is the amount you need to earn in order to live and pay taxes. This assumes you are in a tax rate of about 15% and you pay the 15.7% required for Social Security. So why multiply your income needs by 42% instead of 30.7%? Well, because you are increasing your earnings with the tax money and you’ll need to pay taxes on that increase as well.
3. Every time you get paid, take 47% of the payment and shove it in a savings account for taxes (42%) and emergencies (5%). Take another 5% and throw it in an IRA.
Whether you think of yourself as a business owner first or a sex writer first, you are both and the skills associated with each need to be maintained in order for you to be successful.
As a business owner, there are some fundamental things you must do in order to keep your sex writing business afloat:
1. Save money. Out of every paid invoice, you should take at least 5% and set it aside for emergencies. In this business, you never know when you are going to get a stiffy, or get stiffed. You never know when you’re going to screw or get screwed. You also don’t know when a check is going to get lost in the mail or a business is going to go bankrupt. Depend on no one but you.
2. Use accounting software. You can use free accounting software like Outright to track your income and expenses, and to anticipate what your taxes will be. It’s a great way to get a handle on the profitability of your business and to keep Uncle Sam happy.
3. Learn how to schedule your time. Not every project you enjoy will be a paid project. Make sure you schedule your time so that you can work on both paid and unpaid work.
4. Market yourself. If no one knows you exist, you aren’t going to get business. Query publications, cold email webmasters, and network with others in your industry to get some buzz and some gigs.
5. Start a blog. A blog is not only great exposure for you, it also creates an authority about your name in the industry. Lastly, a blog is a great way for editors and webmasters to find and hire you–just make sure this isn’t a personal blog but a professional blog.
by Joy Strange
If you’re interested in writing about sex but don’t know where to start, or have tried writing but have so far failed to sell any of your work, here’s some help to get you off to a better start.
The first thing you should know about sex writing is that it’s a business like any other type of writing. Sex as a topic is special, to be sure, but at the end of the day it’s a genre like any other and subject to the same kinds of business concerns.
Editors have deadlines, space to fill, and need reliable writers who won’t flake on their requirements. Just because you’re writing about the world’s most popular topic doesn’t mean you can skimp on the essentials like tight writing, a professional attitude, and a willingness to take direction from your editor.
When writing those early articles about sex and sexuality, it’s best to draw from your own experiences instead of relying on the theoretical. Not to put too fine a point on it, don’t write about vibrators if you haven’t actually used one. I say this because many people don’t understand the notion of authenticity in writing. Personally, it’s easy for me to tell when a sex writer lacks experience in a certain topic but tries to fake it.
Wanna know how I know? It’s because people who write theoretically or speculatively about something I’ve actually experienced miss the subtle nuances. If you try to fake your way through bi-sexual erotica, for example, you won’t fool people who actually know what it feels like.
That said, there’s a huge difference between faking it and doing your homework—if you ask people who HAVE experienced it what it was like and can effectively related that experience, you can write about a three-way with skill.
But stuff pulling out of thin air doesn’t fool people. And it won’t fool your editor, who has read plenty by people who DO know what they are talking about. Whether you’re writing fact or fiction, you’ll get the same results in faking it in print as you do faking it in the bedroom. You might fool somebody else with no experience, but the rest of us aren’t buying it.
Being a sex writer causes an interesting problem between the sheets–it’s very easy to lose romance and spontaneity when you are thinking about work. In the earlier days of my career, when I was in the middle of writing something and having trouble working out the steamier scenes, my sex with Hal would suffer. You see, I would start boiling all of our sex down to research instead of an intense, loving encounter.
I never really saw this as a problem until Hal pointed it out to me. We were trying out anal beads (forgive me if this sounds “old school” to you fresh-faced youngsters, but this was the early seventies and we were quite proud of our cutting edge sexuality at the time) and I was really focused on how they could work in some erotica I was developing. I was just short of taking notes in bed when Hal suddenly said, “You’re not here.” “I most certainly am here” I argued, “and I have beads in my ass to prove it.” He explained that I was distant, and that it wasn’t fun for him when he knew I was focused on the sex and the pleasure in an almost clinical way.
Since then, I have adopted some habits that help distance me from my work:
1. Take a walk. After working, I generally take a walk and force myself to think about non-sex related things like birds, trees, children playing ball, etc. Don’t expect the walk to take sex off your mind, this is something you have to make an effort to do.
2. Practice tunnel vision. If you find your mind straying into research mode while you have sex, focus yourself on the “now.” I will often say in my mind what Hal or I are doing during sex and how it makes me feel to get myself back and focused into the act itself.
3. Set specific guidelines for research sex. Whether you need to try out a new toy, lube, or position, there will come a time when you simply must have sex for research purposes. This sex should be separate from the personal sex you have with your partner. For Hal and I, we actually do this during business hours which makes our workplace the best one in America.
So many noob sex writers don’t understand one of the basic concepts of marketing yourself as a writer–any kind of writer–and as a result, they fail miserably in their first year or so to land gigs in their chosen genre.
You might think I picked the photo for this post based on the sex appeal factor, but actually I chose it for a specific reason. Our swimsuit model here is going to school you on how to put together a sex writer’s resume and cover letter and make yourself every bit as appealing as she is.
When you try to land a freelance writing gig in any genre, whether it’s sex writing or not, the editor wants to know how well you can write in that genre. The editor really doesn’t care that you had a column about video games in the college paper, or that you can write a how-to business plan for e-tailers.
A swimsuit model shows her portfolio to get a gig in the pages of Sports Illustrated. She doesn’t whip out her GPA, her list of sororities and her hobbies. She shows how she struts her stuff in front of the camera. That’s all.
Sex writers, take a lesson from our swimsuit model. Strut your literary stuff and don’t bore the editor with your non-sex writing crap…unless it’s somehow relevant to the gig at hand. Are you trying to sell an article about the financial pitfalls of being a freelance sex writer? Then by all means whip out those finance writing clips and include ‘em.
But don’t try to sell me on your sex writing with unrelated material that has no bearing on what you’re trying to sell right now.
I know what some of you are saying now. “How can I get publised as a sex writer without any sex writing clips?” And that is another topic for another post. Stay tuned.
Image courtesy Piotr Bizior http://www.bizior.com/
I highly recommend Louisa Barton’s FictionCraft post at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association. It’s part of their Author’s Insider Tips series which is archived all the way back to 2006!
I just re-discovered the Bi Writers Association, which is chock full of excellent links and even more resources for erotica writers. They also have a collection of suggested book titles including the naughty-sounding Jesus In Love, The Best of Both Worlds bi erotica compilation, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Desdmona.com has a section called The Fish Tank which is a writer’s group for, you guessed it, erotica writers. I haven’t participated in this so I can’t say whether the forum is any good, but I’d love some feedback from anyone who has used it…if this is a valuable resource I’d love to do a profile or interview with these folks!
Non-fiction sex writers might want to give HisandHerHealth.com’s sexual health forums a look. Seems like a great place to network with subject matter experts and ordinary people alike. There’s at least one actual doctor as a forum moderator here, so it could be a gold mine for research or networking at the very least.
On the heels of yesterday’s post by Euni R. I wanted to throw my own sexy two cents in here. I had a conversation with an anonymous someone who said her friends were giving her a very hard time about writing sex-related topics.
To which I said, “What, you cheapen yourself by writing about HPV and reproductive health?”
Sex writing is not all about erotica. And while we’re on the subject, there’s nothing wrong with writing erotica either, but it really irks me that people associate sex writing solely with the steamy stuff.
Sex writing as a genre is much, much bigger than that. Erotica has a long, rich history and if the kinds of prudes who judge you for your erotica writing actually knew their history, they’d soon learn that most, if not all the major advances in freedom of speech were the result of controversy over “indecent material” and “harmful matter”.
Fact—once upon a time it was illegal to send dirty books through the mail. Amazon.com would not have survived in the 1920s, for example, because you couldn’t mail Lady Chatterley’s Lover. You also couldn’t mail Burroughs’s Naked Lunch until after the landmark court case vindicating Burroughs as a legitimate writer and not a purveyor of “obscenity”.
But that gets away from the main point. Erotica does threaten many people for reasons I’ll never fully understand. People are scared of sex because it’s a powerful force not entirely controlled by free will–our hormones and our evolutionary programming create a set of parameters where folks automatically respond to some sexual stimuli. What sex stimulation gives you those responses varies a lot from person to person, but fact is, we have PROGRAMMING in there making us salivate and get all excited when the right conditions are present.
We’ll always have some kind of shame attached to our sex writing until this society we live in stops being so repressed.
Some of us lucky sex writers have never had the burden of children placed upon our forever-perky bosoms. For us, mornings spent writing erotica while half naked and afternoons spent testing the scenes from chapter two for accuracy are happy realities. Children do not interrupt us during sex or masturbation and there is no one to dress presentably for…so we can always dress in character.
There are some unfortunate sex writers who must somehow balance the life of a sex writer with the life of a parent. While I would never expose children to the writing I do, I don’t feel guilty about it and I certainly don’t think a sex writer with children should either. Sex is one of the most natural and instinctual topics one could ever write about, and sex writers should feel proud and empowered by what they do.
That does not mean, however, that society is ready to embrace the sexually satisfied sex writer. For many people in our society, the thought of acknowledging their sex sounds, juices, smells and foibles is too much and they can’t face the reality of what you do as a sex writer. I often wonder if they are really just afraid of facing those few sublime moments when sex’s thirsty need-filled craving and subsequent orgasmic reward drive all of the conformity and control right out of them. Because in those moments, instead of being socially acceptable mini-van driving PTA members and golf playing CPA’s, we are all just grunting, sweating, non-thinking animals acting solely out of the most primal need our overly opulent lives allow us to feel.
When you have children, you must be exposed to other parents, and chances are you will be obligated to “talk shop” at some point; and you’ll be talking shop with the same people who can not face what you do in a rational way. So what do you tell them? Do you perpetuate the image that sex writing is somehow naughty and just say you are a writer? Do you say you are a sex writer and risk your child becoming a kindergarten pariah? Or do you fall somewhere in between and say you are a “relationship writer” and then go to bed feeling dirty because of all the wonderful gifts your writing bestows on readers that a relationship writer doesn’t even get close to?
I wish I had an answer for you, fellow sex writers, but I don’t. It may be that there is no one right answer, you simply have to decide based on the factors in your individual situation. We would love to get your input and find out how you have handled this situation in the past and what you might do differently now. Drop us a comment and tell us where you stand.
Writing about sex is only half the battle–the other half is getting an editor to buy your work and publish it. This process is a lot like hooking up at a singles bar, you have to woo your editor and play the game.
Step One: Don’t spin your wheels. It’s a bad idea to write non-fiction before you’ve made the sale, unless you’re writing creative non-fiction. Query the publication first with articles, then write. You’ll save LOADS of time. For fiction, I recommend having a publication or at least a group of them (the ones friendly to the genre you’re writing) in mind before you start telling your story. At least you’ll have a general idea of where to sell the piece.
Step Two: Write a query letter. Tell the editor about your story–but make sure you SELL it. Don’t go overboard on the descriptions, just explain what it is, why it’s unique and why it’s important to the readers. Don’t worry about the query being too long or too short–make your pitch and go with what feels right.
Step Three: Be sure to include some relevant published clips you’ve got under your belt as a sex writer. If you don’t have any, try sending your strongest writing or consider not sending any at all unless the editor asks for them.
Step Four: Include your contact information. You’d be shocked at how many people forget in the excitement of the query writing process (at least in the early days) to include a phone number, resume website address, etc.
Step Five: Follow up. Some editors will get back with you in two hours, some will get back with you in six months. It all depends on the site or magazine. Don’t be surprised if you get e-mails out of the blue about queries you forgot about months ago. It’s part of the game.
This is a very oversimplified explanation of the process. We’ll get into some good sex writing nitty gritty in the weeks to come.
Lately, fellow sex writers, I have been subjected to a horror so profound that it has shaken me to my very core. A horror so pervasive it seems to be saturating every online sex site I touch. It is the horror of terrible sex writers who don’t seem to have had sex very often.
As most of you know, being a sex writer is not about trying to use words that are not appropriate at most cocktail parties in an effort to shock your parents. It seems that many new writers don’t understand that.
They string together words they aren’t allowed to use in public into a nonsensical sex scene that defies logic, physics and, quite frankly, reader arousal. As a reader, if I spend too much time distracted by your inexperienced and sloppy sex scenes I don’t get wet, I get confused.
Add to this the amount of sex writers who have no way with words, no finesse, and a piss-poor understanding of the mechanics of writing, and you are left with nothing more than the pre-teen ravings of a foul-mouthed child.
If you want to be a successful sex writer who is respected rather than repulsive, you must see this as a craft like you would any other writing. Sure it is a casual-tongued craft with fun subject matter–but it is still a craft. You have to understand what works during sex and what doesn’t. What makes sense in a scene and what doesn’t. You must construct your stories and essays with an intent to provide joy–arousing, smoldering, exciting, educational, satisfying joy–not just to show off how many different slang sex terms you know, because the rest of us know them too–and we are not impressed.
Have you ever tried to have sex while completely stressed out about money? Your mind wanders, it takes forever to cum, at times you lose the sensation in your sexual organs so you are really just going through the motions.
Whether you think of yourself as a business owner first or a sex writer first, you are both and the skills associated with each need to be maintained in order for you to be successful.
by Joy Strange
Being a sex writer causes an interesting problem between the sheets–it’s very easy to lose romance and spontaneity when you are thinking about work. In the earlier days of my career, when I was in the middle of writing something and having trouble working out the steamier scenes, my sex with Hal would suffer. You see, I would start boiling all of our sex down to research instead of an intense, loving encounter.
by Joy Strange
by Joy Strange
by Joy Strange
Some of us lucky sex writers have never had the burden of children placed upon our forever-perky bosoms. For us, mornings spent writing erotica while half naked and afternoons spent testing the scenes from chapter two for accuracy are happy realities. Children do not interrupt us during sex or masturbation and there is no one to dress presentably for…so we can always dress in character.
by Joy Strange
Lately, fellow sex writers, I have been subjected to a horror so profound that it has shaken me to my very core. A horror so pervasive it seems to be saturating every online sex site I touch. It is the horror of terrible sex writers who don’t seem to have had sex very often.
