Is the title of this blog post kind of clickbait-y? Enh, fuck it.

After posting the blog on Friday, for three days something interesting happened. Sexstories.com, the place where I first became an erotica writer, suddenly and without announcement of any kind, shut down views for anyone without an account on the site.

It may not sound like too big of a deal, but at the time I was genuinely worried. While this may not be the case for everyone, sexstories.com was the only place where I, and I’d wager a few other erotica writers, could get six figures of views. Everywhere else I post (and it’s a long list) gets me maybe five figures of views on a new story if I’m lucky, even this website. Every time I write a new story, I maybe get one new patron. Given I’m trying to work towards making a living at this, I can’t really afford to have my biggest audience cut off from me. This wasn’t just affecting a few writers either – the ‘most recently posted’ section had gone from having stories posted the day before boasting four and five figures of views, to literally two or three figures of views. The view counts were quite literally decimated. It was the equivalent of trying to make your living posting videos online, to find that YouTube was seriously culling its audience.

To this day, I have no clue if it was an error or the management of sexstories.com thought it was a good idea, I’m just incredibly relieved to see it’s back to normal. If I didn’t have that outlet, I wouldn’t stop writing, but it would be very evident that I most likely would not make a living writing erotica and relying on patrons, meaning I’d either need to charge for it (which would be terrible and cause me to be a pandering marketing machine instead of a lovable idiot that writes what they want) or accept that it’s just a hobby that I can’t dedicate much time to. And wow, was this ever a wake-up call to me – I need to be super careful about over-relying on certain outlets. If any of you out there are erotica writers, take my experience as a cautionary tale – post to more than one website. If nothing else, you get more views if you go to more websites. Perhaps if you’re more famous, there’s more to gain by being exclusive, but I sure as hell am not there yet. So here are some of my more recommended websites:

sexstories.com – It’s not the best-managed, but it’s the most popular by far. Even if your story is a flop, you’re guaranteed four figures of views. Not only that, but the community is generally pretty good to each other.

storiesonline.net – Super lax on rules, so if you have a kind of taboo story, odds are you can post it there. Decently popular, and the people there are friendly.

lushstories.com – Good management, however stories can be buried a little too easily there. Nevertheless, decently popular and a good community.

reddit.com/r/sexstories/ – This one surprised me with how good it was. The community are surprisingly friendly and talkative, though you won’t get as many views as you might like.

Make your own – not only does this do wonders for archiving purposes, but making your own website also tells others and yourself you’re dedicated to this. Post your stories there, then have a gimmick for it, like also having a lbog, or putting your story notes there, or having a forum/guestbook. My gimmick is that stories are posted here first. If any fellow writers reading this already have their own website or want to make one, send me a link to it – I’d love to take a look. Impress me with it and I’d love to feature you on the ‘friends’ page. Erotica is an underrated medium and I’d love to grow the community.

Needless to say, I was scared this week that my dream was not going to become a reality. Now that the crisis is over, I’m going to work even harder to make sure the dream becomes a reality. I’ll talk to you all next week.