It’s a strange time on the web. Not because tech seems to get even richer than it already is without improving our lives, but in my current century, sex between consenting adults is worse than tech making money and not helping people.
When I say sex, I really do mean sex. I’ll be focusing on sex and art because I’m an artist. Erotica writers and even some romance writers are facing a backlash like you wouldn’t believe. Book bans are at an astronomical high in my country than they ever have before, platforms like Patreon and others are banning any kind of erotica. Visual. Written. You name it. They’re banning it, trying to make the web more friendly. Advertiser friendly? Sanitized? Who knows? It all boils down to the same kind of soft bans all around the tech sphere.
Unless you have your own website, like I do, it’s inevitable you will get banned from somewhere if you post erotica or the steamier side of romance for adults. Why? Because banks and payment platforms don’t like art with sex with consenting adults. Period.
All banks and or payment processors decided that adult sexual art isn’t good for anybody, and this included consenting adults. Hopefully times will change, and hopefully we can find a balance of keeping child pornography away while letting adults and of age, consenting, young adults, exist on the internet.
I usually don’t write erotica. I have done it, and wow that was very fun, but I’m a romance writer. While I do read erotica from time to time, that isn’t usually my genre. Still, there are reasons why erotica is empowering for some people, especially marginalized people.
Because platforms have decided that they’d rather ban erotic work than fight for their artists, I’ve been working on taking all of my trunk writing down from websites, platforms, and, either giving it away for free or doing one of the below.
To find my work, of all kinds, browse this category and learn about a serial publishing experiment and a pay what you can model.
Serial publishing my trunk writing.
I’ve always been interested in serial publishing. The platforms for serial publishing though were remarkably bad design, and they wouldn’t let me retire my books if a traditional publisher wanted to pick it up. Serial publishing has always intrigued me, but I just never liked any of the apps and or websites until, well, I found Leanpub.
I created an account and started publishing stuff on there. What’s really great about Leanpub is they let me retire my book if I want to take it elsewhere. They allow a lot more stuff for authors. Readers can get a lot out of them too. They were the only serial publisher with an accessibility statement. Is there site perfect? No. Still, all the books are DRM free, and I can even opt to do Creative Commons work if I want to.
The point is to read books as I update them. You get to watch a book being crafted as it’s actively being written or edited, and you get the ability to share your email with the author if you want to follow them on their mailing list or something.
Also, Leanpub is also DRM free!
Because I’m traditionally published, I don’t know how much I’ll use this, but still, it’s something that caters and or even welcomes romance and erotica books, which is vastly different from a lot of other platforms.
My plan is to publish a mixture of fiction and nonfiction books on Leanpub so check out my Leanpub store here.
In addition to just reading stuff for free, if interested, you can also become my beta reader!
About being my beta reader
In addition to beefing up my website, adding things to it, and more, I decided to also beef up my community as well. I know many other authors have beta readers. These are people that want to see their favorite authors improve so they give first impressions feedback on a freshly completed work. As I spend less time on social media, and more time on my website and mailing list, I wanted to start making my own beta reading community.
Everyone needs an editor, of course. I’m no exception. I really do value editors and otherwise, including authenticity editors that collaborate with me as well as, ahem, beta readers.
I just did a test run with a small pool of beta readers and it went well! Everybody was able to leave comments and or suggestions on my work without any hassles or having to jump through a million hoops. We use Google Docs because Google Docs is accessible to screen readers and is platform agnostic. I tried Only Office and, sadly, it’s not as accessible as Google docs is. I know all my writing is going to feed some garbage AI, or LLM, Large Language Model, but, well, thanks to inaccessibility of other software platforms, I’m locked in.
All the same, it’s great, because my beta readers get to be the very first people that see whatever I want to publish. They get to discuss amongst each other, and a few of them have even asked for help with their own work, which is epic!
Learn about what beta readers get and join the beta reading crew if you’re interested in helping a writer you love grow!