One of you asked me the other day which online writers’ group I recommend. Many of these groups exist on Facebook.
Ten years ago I would have been able to heartily recommend several of them.
Today, there are none that are very useful to me. Here’s the problem.
Over the last five years, the online writers’ groups have become inundated with writers of “spicy” (i.e., sexually explicit) romance and outright erotica (i.e., even more sexually explicit material).
Now let me be clear here. I am no prude. Oh…far, far from it. I am quite sure that some of my off-hours activities would shock and/or offend the prudish among you.
But there is a limit to how much I enjoy talking about sex, writing about sex, and creating stories around it. My tolerance for that sort of thing is fairly limited.
I don’t like sex stories for the same reason I don’t like pornographic videos: watching other people have sex is a bit like watching other people eat.
Similarly, talking about sex is like talking about eating. I eat lunch every day. But I don’t wish to spend more time discussing my lunch than I spend actually eating it. I have a similar approach to matters of the bedroom. Some of these writers and their readers need to spend less time with their noses in books, and more time with living, breathing people. (Nothing cures a chronic preoccupation with sex like a little of the real thing.)
From a business perspective, the marketing of romance/erotica has much more to do with the marketing of OnlyFans or other pornographic material than it does with traditional book marketing. A person who picks up a Michael Connelly novel is not responding to the same motivations as a person who watches pornographic videos, or who reads pornographic stories.
No ill will for all the “spicy” romance and erotica writers out there, mind you. But they’ve made the online writing space more or less useless for everyone else, with their sheer numbers.
-ET