“From within the tufts of matted hair, the creature released a huge pale c*ck that defied logic.” That purple-headed prose sprang from the mind of Virginia Wade [not her real name], a stay-at-home mom from Parker, Colorado, who stumbled upon a way to make huge sums of money from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. The quote is from Cum For Bigfoot, a bestseller in the subgenre of cryptozoological erotica (AKA “monster porn” or “monsterotica”).
Wade has published sixteen short novels about messin’ with Sasquatch, in addition to less successful erotica about pirates and dark lords. She told Business Insider that she makes up to $30K per month in Amazon sales alone from her Cum for Bigfoot series. It still pulls in $6K per month during slower times. Why the hell am I still typing this when I could be writing dinosaur porn?
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing pays 70% royalties for books priced at $2.99 or more, and it pays 35% royalties for books under $2.99. Meanwhile, authors for mainstream publishers receive only 8% to 15% royalties. Wade’s first Bigfoot porn novel (only 12,000 words long) was priced under a dollar, but it sold over 100,000 copies on Amazon in 2012. The book was also selling on iTunes and other stores.
Wade tells Business Insider that her Bigfoot porn was her most profitable series.
“I started cranking them out,” she says. “If there was a market there for monster sex, I was gonna give it to them.” She even brought in her family to help with the workload. “My dad, who’s an English instructor, was my editor,” Wade says. “My mom did the German translations” — including the equally popular “Komm für Bigfoot.”
[…] “I was putting my daughter through college with the profits,” Wade says. “I used to joke with her, ‘Bigfoot smut is paying for your school.'”
So many things about those quotes. Referring to a writing career as “cranking them out”. Asking your parents to edit and translate your Bigfoot porn. Telling your daughter that Bigfoot porn pays her tuition. This is mesmerizing.
Wade ran into some trouble last year when more than half of her ebooks disappeared from Amazon after The Kernel published a story about businesses allowing the sale of ebooks with “rape fantasies, incest porn and graphic descriptions of bestiality and child abuse.” The Kernel’s article triggered a kerfuffle in the UK, and many stores (Amazon among them) pulled several titles, including some featuring mythological creatures.
Wade got around the ban by renaming and re-submitting some titles (Cum For Bigfoot became Moan For Bigfoot). Giving tamer titles to erotic ebooks takes a toll on sales, however. If you want to make the big money on self-published erotica, you’ll need to have an especially on-the-nose title.
Current titles on Amazon — most of which were not written by Wade — include Ravaged by the Hydra, Mounted by the Gryphon, Frankenstein’s B*tch, Taken By Pirates, Taken by the Tentacle Monsters, Fertilized in Space, Sex With My Husband’s Anatomically Correct Robot, and the conversely vague yet direct Gang Banged by Mysterious Monsters in the Woods.
Those are all real and we’re not linking to any of them.
(Banner image courtesy Amazon / Business Insider.)