Is what various pundits, commentators, and other no-account shitehawks are christening that sort of low-grade third-rate erotica that's become popular since the execrable Fifty Shades of Grey has emerged from the wasteland of hopelessness that is Fanfiction.net courtesy of some slick PR and judicious use of find and replace. It's basically your average bodice ripper but with more explicit sex and the occasional lashing (pun not intended) of kink. Usually written by people who've heard about BDSM via lurid tabloid press stories but never actually experienced it or looked into it for themselves. It's so named because its target audience are, well, bored middle aged women.

Now I was originally going to write a brilliantly devastating excoriation of this hopeless genre, but then again, given that the book that set it all off contains the line, "The fisting I'll agree to, but I'd really like to claim your ass," I think it kinda excoriates itself really. Instead, I'm going to give you a totally badass and foolproof masterclass in how you can write your very own mommy porn and make large amounts of money with approximately the same amount of effort as wiping your bottom.

So here goes.

Step One: Give yourself a classy-sounding female pseudonym.

This is most important. If you sound like a man, then everyone's going to think that the novel is some sort of lecherous and exploitative wank-fodder (which, to be honest, it is) and nobody will buy it. However, if you're a woman and you write it, then people will think it's all empowering and edgy and all that happy horseshit. You go, "girl!"

Now you need to sound sophisticated and (ugh) "high end." Better still, make yourself European - sexy European, like French or Spanish or Italian. And definitely not German. German pr0n is all sick stuff involving midgets and poo. What sort of a maniac are you. Tsk. A German pseudonym. Whatever next. For the purposes of this exercise, I'll be "Jeanette de Chatain." This sounds sexy (because it's French), classy, and expensive. You pick up a novel by "Jeanette de Chatain," you know that the author is a Hermes-scarf-wearing Parisian demoiselle with a snappy Audrey Tautou haircut and as such her writings will be sexy yet classy and certainly not sleazy. Whereas if I was "Jeannie Nutland," well, it wouldn't work. "Jeannie Nutland" writes Aga Sagas, clearly. Aga Sagas are not sexy or high end.

Okay, so now what.

Step Two: The Protagonist.

She's like your audience, except younger and better looking. She has a few flaws that aren't really flaws. She's a bit insular and sheltered. Better make her brought up in a rather restrictive way. Having been to a Catholic school is a good one because we can have some easy baggage about how Sister Assumpta O'Goering used to spank her across the backside with a ladle for wearing makeup in Home Economics (which also acts as a suitable foreshadowing of her latent spanking fetish, thus killing two birds with one stone.) Mention a former or current boyfriend who was a bit dull really.

Put it in the first person. This is most important.

She also has to have a florid name. You can't call her Jane or Sally or Emma or anything normal. No, she has to be a Zenobia, or a Rhiannon, a Fionnuala, or a Gwendolynne. The more syllables the better. Also if you make it sound Classical, or Norse, or Celtic, you get extra points. Think about it. How will your fancy man sound if he has to grunt, "Oh, Ruth!" or "Oh, yes, yes, YES, Susan!" Well quite. But he can (in his syrupy voice) let something like Myfanwy or Apollonia roll off his tongue so much better once he gets to the jester's shoes.

Step Three: The Male Lead.

You already know how this goes, surely. He's older, handsome, wealthy (exceptionally so, because better a rich man's darling than a poor man's slave), sophisticated, and vastly more experienced in matters sexual. He is, in short, completely perfect. You don't need to give him any real character beyond the fact that he falls immediately and improbably in love with the protagonist and proceeds to spend the rest of the novel shagging her arse off. He has a big cock, of course. He has a six pack. He has artistic stubble. Better still, grab some pictures of male models that you masturbate to every night in your lonely bed and then cry afterwards and base your character on him. It doesn't matter that the model in general is probably, in real life, the most boring conceited earsling in the history of the universe, because you don't have to talk to this character. And neither does your protagonist. She just has to hop into bed (or the sofa, or the backs of cars, or hayricks, or the tomb of an Aztec temple) with this person at her earliest convenience.

Those of you with a vaguely critical mind will be thinking, what does he do all day bar tup the female lead - always most enjoyably, I hasten to add, and multi-orgasmically, and without the annoying things that get in the way during real life sexual encounters such as going off half cock, erectile dysfunction, elbows, the wet patch, alarming squelchy noises, varts, queefs, mattress spring failure (come on, you've got on average 140kg of flesh writhing atop the damned things, the odd sproing can't be helped) or not being able to get anywhere (trust me, this is horrible). Well, the answer to your question is that he's some sort of independently wealthy magnate, a rich idiot with no day job. Make him the head of a multinational corporation, an Air Force test pilot, a peer of the realm, or similar. A common one is to make him a boss of a Greek shipping firm which gets the exotic box and the wealthy box ticked, but given that the capital of Greece is now about €4.60, this maybe isn't such a good idea. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Do you honestly think the audience is going to care? Don't be silly. They're too busy buzzin' the bean to care.

Of course, you could go out on a limb and, having considered that what's really erotic isn't trite cliché lust objects but, yano, real people having real sex involving what really turns them on, you're welcome to. But let's take a parallel here to non-mommy porn. For every pound spend on sites like Ifeelmyself or Abby Winters or Beautiful Agony or suchlike which shows real people doing it and enjoying themselves massively, there's over a hundred pounds, surely, spent on endless vistas of bottle-blonde pneumatic bimbos from California making exaggerated noises at each other and leering out from DVD covers with vapid, slatternly expressions on their rubber-infused faces. For you, as an aspiring mommy porn author, this is the difference between subsistence and starving artist-dom and being able to bathe in twenty pound notes. Between Ernest Hemingway and Stephenie Meyer, in short. Ernest Hemingway killed himself. So there.

I trust you have now got those stupid, puerile ideas of "artistic integrity" out your mind.

Good.

Step Four: The Sex.

Just rip off someone else, they all do it.

Naturally, your male lead has got a manhood (I hate that word. It's so unimaginative. Also, it's like using "cunt" to mean a woman, which you will be shouted for doing and rightly so. There's more to being a man than having a cock, as anyone who's seen The Jeremy Kyle Show will attest.) like the colossus of Amenhotep - and twice as hard. He will be able to rise to the challenge on command and will, of course, be able to avoid the Vinegar Stroke until the female lead is properly satisfied. Yano the bit I said about about preternaturally perfect sex? We'll repeat that bit here.

You can be as explicit as you want but the best thing to do is also to be florid and try (badly) to be poetic and lyrical. You get a point for ever time you rip off Fanny Hill or Lady Chatterley's Lover. Because the sex will always be perfect and florid and soft-focused, the trick is to avoid drawing attention to the messier aspects of sex. So you can excise that passage you had about how Clytemenestra ends up having to sleep in the wet patch. Because there is no wet patch, okay. Only boring, old, ugly, or brutish people leave wet patches after sex. Similarly, Theodoris or Marcus or whatever the male lead is called never, ever, gets a stray pubie in his mouth when munching the carpet, and certainly never has to go and find a glass of water.

Speaking of which, nobody mentions bodily fluids, at least not directly. The protagonist never cracks a moistie, she feels a delicious, longing ache between her thighs. She never gives him a BJ, she takes his organ (another word that annoys me - what is this, a Hammond recital?) into her mouth until love's sweet lava flows.

Oh yes. One other thing. Everyone goes in bareback. STDs do not exist. Any mention that a character might get the Syph should be avoided like, well, the plague, really. Probably because having to slide on a lubber breaks up the flow of the scene when writing it (in real life, it doesn't either, and if it does, you're doing it wrong. Haven't you got any imagination, you dolt? Actually, silly question, you read mommy porn so you probably don't.)

Step Five: The Plot

Don't be ridiculous.

Your job is to basically write a single "master" sex scene, which you will then repeat several times throughout the novel but with slightly different spins on it. The rest of the novel is basically long-windedly taking the characters from poorly-written tryst to poorly-written tryst until you come to some sort of natural conclusion - which you can basically handwave, because the audience are just going to re-read the juicy bits over and over again and replay them in their heads while having one off the wrist. They won't notice that the plot is non-existent and that the characters are as flat as Paris Hilton. Because they don't care.

Step Six: ????

You can basically go round and tart it up from here on in, just read over it to check that you've not done anything boneheaded like given the heroine a cock (unless it's that sort of erotica), and just change the wording of a few bits around so you don't look too obviously like you've plagiarised yourself.

Step Seven: Profit!

Get it published and see those royalty checks come barrelling in!

Congratulations! You have written a mommy porn novel! Proud of yourself, hm?

You'll probably get demands for a sequel. That's okay. Just repeat the above steps but make it slightly different each time. Better still, write a really long mommy porn novel, then cut it into three pieces and sell each one separately for triple profits! It can't possibly fail (depressingly enough...)

Now if you need me, I'm off to the basement, because I've got one of my firm's receptionists chained up down there, Lavinia, her name is, and she's at the flushing, lip-biting, and being so wet stage and I need to go and give her time to admire my corded muscular thighs and sexy as hell jade-green eyes before I have my way with her.

As funny and tongue-in-cheek (pun intended) as Hazelnut's node is, I've actually published erotic novellas under five pseudonyms. I'll compare my results to the five step program.

Step One: Give yourself a classy-sounding female pseudonym.

Most folks do this, and all five of my pseudonyms are either generic (initials and a last name) or full female-sounding names. Two have Facebook accounts and all have their own websites. One uses a picture of my wife while the rest use original paintings for the images of the author. Since I've been using them a while, I did make a mistake by making full-on personas for the pseudonyms. Should one of them suddenly become the next Nora Roberts or Erica Jong, or should one of the novellas accidentally win a Rita Award from the Romance Writers of America, it will cause some blowback because readers will be irked that their favorite mommy porn was written by a graybeard named Rancid_Pickle.

Step Two: The Protagonist.

Mostly right, as far as how I write. All my protagonists are women, all of them have flaws that make them relatable to the reader, and all of them are active in what they want. A protagonist who is basically a Real Doll who is used, abused, then dumped (at least "on camera") is a weak character. She may have had that happen in the past, but this story will be about a change to her life. She learns, she discovers what she wants sexually, then she geoes out and gets what she desires.

Step Three: The Male Lead.

There are plenty of sub-genres in the erotica field, and one of the most popular happens to be about billionaires who encounter a working girl (either variety) who catches their eye. This is the basic "Person of power notices person with no power and they learn from the encounter", and hopefully vice versa. There are many, many, many series that use this one premise over and over. I was thinking that folks would get bored, but apparently not. They should be hunky and have some flaws, some of them concerning, but they will learn to treat others better by the end of the novella...if only for a little while.

Step Four: The Sex.

You'd be surprised how true Hazelnut's statement about ripping off other folk's sexual encounters is. Sex is sex, and many authors just look at someone else's stuff on Amazon Kindle Universe and copy it to get rich.

Wrong.

The sex has to have some kind of connection between the characters beyond bumping uglies. It is a stylized and idealized event for the most part, but having something like a wet spot and who gets to sleep on it can be used as a source of levity, which can break the tension as a half-step to the next scene. It also works towards building the bond between the characters.

The toughest part is to avoid purple prose and to come up with different words for the human bits. Many times one doesn't have to directly name the part getting stuffed inside the other part because we know what they are. 

Jack crammed his enormous twelve-inch manhood into Jaqueline's miniscule quim.
 or
Jaqueline felt Jack enter, the pressure building up until suddenly he was fully inside her, the sensation of stretching almost too much to bear.

One is a boring "part A is placed in part B", the other is more involved and includes sensory details. Yes, it is enjoyably cringe-worthy on purpose.

Step Five: The Plot

Yes, you need a plot. Erotica is more than just "get to the fucking parts" unless you're in a hurry and need a quick masturbation sidequest. Erotica should be erotic, and that means bringing in the emotions and needs of the characters. The difference between a person who writes erotic-ish step-by-step fanfiction and a working erotica author who earns a living from writing is the plot and erotic situations. People will return to a story about how a MILF librarian found herself involved with the college quarterback, a situation that turned into ongoing sexual encounters as compared to Jane who has a delivery guy show up at her front door with a sausage pizza when she's horny. The first plot generates fans, while the second scenario generates snores.

Step Six: ???

Get your work edited, then proofread. Get a good cover that does not get your work tossed into the Amazon sex dungeon. Naked tits and ass? Dungeon. There are a lot of things that can cause Amazon to hide your book, so consider "going wide" and publishing in several ebook outlets like Smashwords or one of the websites dedicated to erotica romance.

Step Seven: Profit!

You would be surprised how much you can make writing erotica. Focus on writing novellas that have a complete story arc because you can write three of them for every one full novel. Explore a series, like a nymphomaniac construction traffic flagger who enjoys having trucker sex on a lonely Wyoming two-lane blacktop paving job. My wife and I used to come up with erotica plots whenever we were driving to sci-fi conventions and comic cons. We have spiral-bound notebooks filled with plots. You can write three or four erotica novellas in one NaNoWriMo. Once people find out they like your work they will go through your back catalog. If you have twenty novellas or more you will have plenty of sales assuming you can write a decent story.

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