Bloggin' Umholtz

Erotica Anyone?

         Okay, I’ll admit it. Ever since Tor introduced me to the My Summary Statistics page at Writingdotcom I’ve been fascinated with it and hardly a day goes by that I don’t check it at least once to see what stories of mine are being read and from where the hits are coming. The demographics are interesting, and it’s fun to see what type of audience is attracted to what type of story.

         Over time I’ve noticed a thing or two that caused me to wonder. There is, or rather was one story in my port that had a XGC rating. Way back when someone challenged me to write an erotic story. Since this was an area I had never explored before and since I remembered someone on this site telling me you should always challenge yourself and write in the genre’s you are not comfortable with I took the challenge.. The result was my story, “A Penny For Your Thoughts”. No, I’m not going to link to it. If you want to read it, you’ll have to go to my port and find it.

         I wrote “Penny on Dec 13th, 2005. Since then it has had 188 hits, 5 ratings and 4 reviews. Not bad I guess. It has an average 4.5 rating. At the time I thought, boy, wouldn’t it be neat to write a short novella around Penny? So I set out to do just that. Only, I was never able to come up with “Chapter 2”, so Penny languished, my only erotica type story.

         When I looked at the stats for the story, I became intrigued. 39 unique members had read the story, or at least clicked on it. The average unique member was between the ages of 18 –24. No surprise there, huh? Horny young men reading erotica, right? Wrong. Horny young women it seems. That’s right I said women. 27 of the readers were female, only 12 were male. 16 of the 39 were between the age of 18 and 24 and, 12 were between the ages of 13 and 17!

         Where are the dirty old men reading porno in the bathroom?

         24 of the 39 had either some college or a college degree. No surprise there.

         But, I was completely amazed by the number of female readers. I know the majority of the members here at WDC are female so that may be part of the reason but I don’t think it’s the whole story. After all, the story is rated XGC, it is clearly marked erotica, and the majority of the hits were from people actually searching WDC for the erotic genre. These folks knew what they wanted to read before they read it. Of course, maybe this was all a fluke. Maybe the story was too “soft” (no pun intended) in its content to attract the hard-core male porno reader. So I decided on a little experiment.

         I wrote a story called Harrigan’s; Chapter 2 of Penny, if you will. It also is rated XGC and plainly labeled erotica. Only this one is a little more hardcore. I posted it 4 days ago on the 16th. And I waited. In four days 30 unique writingdotcom members have read the story. It has received zero reviews and zero ratings. That’s the other thing I noticed. People who read erotica don’t rate and don’t review, even anonymously. The breakdown? 21 women. 9 men. The average age? You guessed it, 18 – 24 with 13. The next largest group was 25 – 39 with 9 and those pesky teenagers 13 –17 are still hanging in there with 5. Where are their parents? My average reader is 18-24, single and female. Again most of the hits were from people actually searching for erotica.

         In contrast, at the same time I posted Harrigan’s I wrote a quick story for the Writer’s Cramp called Carbonella’s. E rating. Comedy. I posted it on the 18th. To date it has had 15 views from 11 unique members. It has received 3 reviews and 3 ratings. My average reader is 25 – 39, single and female. There were only 2 in the 18 – 24 range and 2 in the 13 – 17 range.

         What does this all mean? Well if you’re trying to pick up a girl between the ages of 18 and 24 and have any skill with the written word, I’d write her an erotic story. But remember those 13 – 17 yr olds and ask her for ID before you give it to her. If you don’t want to or can’t write erotica, wait a few years and write a funny story. Seems their tastes change as they get older. Maybe they finally see the humorous side of sex. If you’re waiting for Chapter 3 of the Penny story, maybe I will, maybe I won’t. We shall see.

         And if you read one of my two attempts at erotica, at least leave me a review and a rating. I really do want to know if it’s any good…then again, please don’t go into too much detail.