Hello all!! Time for a guest post. Today I welcome Phil Stern. Please follow him: @thebullyears titled after The Bull Years, a novel of America’s most disillusioned generation (available now on Kindle and Smashwords) and @philstern100.
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The ebook revolution allows authors, and readers, to let it all hang out.
Remember television before Sex And The City? Bland and almost sexless, it would have been unthinkable to have four professional women sedately sitting in a restaurant discussing orgasms and vibrators. But now, it’s the standard. Today one couldn’t have a successful cable show without a healthy dose of sex and nudity, and even broadcast television is much racier than before. A revolution had taken place before our eyes, yet its full impact would take several years to settle in.
The same is going on with e-publishing. Sex has gone literary mainstream, and the genie’s never going back in the bottle. Without literary agents and publishers to censor such work, it’s going directly from writers to readers in the blink of a digital eye. And just like with cable television, the publishing industry at-large is finding a far greater acceptance of such material than they had ever dreamed possible.
However, there needs to be some steak with the sizzle, and writers need to remember that sex in of itself doesn’t always sell. A new breed of literary star will soon emerge from this titanic collision of the publishing and digital worlds, authors who can bring erotic sensations to tantalizing life, creating sexual tension and conflict, engaging readers in the deepest, most primal way imaginable, while also spinning a good story. Character, plot, writing style… all require the same caring, loving attention to craft that good writing always demanded.
So always be a writer first, and an erotic writer second. After all, just think what Sex And The City would have been like if the characters didn’t have jobs, apartments, and full social lives? Just poor, wild women having sex on park benches with anyone who wandered by.
And at the end of the day, that wouldn’t have been very interesting at all, would it?
The Manicheans 