Men are still writing and trying to get published but women control the publishing industry now. If it's not made for women they will not publish it. it's why masculine genres like fantasy have become romance novels with Elves. The genre is being held at gun point
Self publishing on Kindle has less of that problem, but then you won't have the backing of a big publishing company and won't make any money, unless your book takes off, so I can see why it would be a less appealing option. You also have the problem of having to wade through a lot of slop on Kindle to find something decent to read. I've heard that some authors try to start on Gumroad before moving to Kindle so they have a fan base already, and I've definitely seen it work, but that sounds like a slog.
Unless you're mega successful like Sanderson or Wight (who wrote Cradle), and start your own publishing company you get gatekept out of making any money, or anyone seeing your book really, by a bunch of HR harpies. That's gay as fuck.
I'm sure it's been talked about to death in this thread, but I was at the bookstore the other day and they had a table with about two dozen different books that all had covers that looked like this:
I know it's usually the publisher who handles book covers, but god damn can people be more creative with their covers?
Not YA, but on the topic of smut in books and the prevalence of it and the over-reliance on tropes leaking out of fanfic- there's one author who is a sort of personal heifer (not yet a cow) that i follow on and off to see how the women writers are doing, Willow Winters (penname, archive). She is a prolific smut author, with over 60 books (some collabs) since 2020. Her main 'bit' or selling point is her discreet covers- cutesy, colour coordinated novels, with the selling point being 'the darker the colour, the darker the trope'. Each order comes with a bookmark to help you navigate this multicoloured world, full of sexy billionaries, mafia romance, 'small town second chance romance', Beauty and the Beast retellings, BDSM sex auction clubs (her most popular tome), and full blown wolf and dragon porn 'with fire play'.
(censorship not mine, screenshotted from her IG)
She is apparently so popular, she has released a Kickstarter (archive) for the exclusive, sprayed-edge, floral versions of her covers, made in her garage by her slave husband. In fact, every book she has seems to have 3-4 covers, the usual naughty one, the discreet (coloured, or black and white), the fancy kickstarter, and some are getting fanart/artist editions.
Her OTHER selling point, is that she has so many books, and merch, she can offer book boxes- priced from $52.99 to $254.99- where you get 2-7/8 books and some 'bookish merch'. Some of these books in your box may be the 3-in-1 books she offers, or a full series (you can make requests for tones, triggers, etc). these are all helpfully filmed (another box here) for tiktok/instagram, complete with self-censorship newspeak like corn and bee-dee-ess-em, and show off the cutesy merch you can get, cups, mugs, bath robes, bath bombs, vibrators, and bondage gear.
I am an absolute techno-spastic when it comes to thumbnailing and videos, but she absolutely fascinates me for her sheer output, dependence on tropes, the shitty writing quality, and how many versions of the same fucking book she produces for the aesthetic. Got to have your porn be colour matching girls!
I think the main problem is that since at least the Millennial generation it has been burned hard into young men that if you ever touch a woman without prior affirmative consent, your entire life can be ruined.
However, women aren't ever told this (to the best of my knowledge). Over the years I've had women I've known get kinda handsy without any discussion of such ahead of time, and it is awkward as shit, especially if you aren't interested in them that way, and you never indicated such at any time.
A male friend of mine in HS who was objectively a good looking individual had major trouble with this even then. Girls in class slapping him on the ass, making inappropriate comments, etc... He always took it in stride (as you are supposed to as a guy, otherwise you are gay, right?). I got a call from him in the middle of the night once when we were in university. He was clearly very upset. He told me how he went to a party and this one chick kept hitting on him, getting handsy with him, even though he kept telling her no. He eventually drank too much and apparently passed out. He woke up later to find this chick he kept telling to leave him alone riding him raw. He freaked out and she said she didn't see what the problem was, he was hard so he clearly didn't mind it. It took a toll on him mentally.
Women need to learn that all the rules that apply to them also apply to guys, and just like how they don't like guys creeping on them, guys who aren't into a chick/aren't attracted to her also don't enjoy unsolicited comments or physical contact.
To this
In such a short period of time?
I always cringed walking by the book section in the store and seeing the Amish/Fantasy novels and thought it couldn’t get any worse…like it was kind of a Boomer thing that’d eventually fizzle out
Never would have guessed that it would get so much worse lol the porn brain rot is clearly just as alive and well in the female population as it is the male population. Which is by design
To this View attachment 7838567
In such a short period of time?
I always cringed walking by the book section in the store and seeing the Amish/Fantasy novels and thought it couldn’t get any worse…like it was kind of a Boomer thing that’d eventually fizzle out
Never would have guessed that it would get so much worse lol the porn brain rot is clearly just as alive and well in the female population as it is the male population. Which is by design
I am an absolute techno-spastic when it comes to thumbnailing and videos, but she absolutely fascinates me for her sheer output, dependence on tropes, the shitty writing quality, and how many versions of the same fucking book she produces for the aesthetic. Got to have your porn be colour matching girls!
She writes like she's never even seen a penis. It's not even bad woman think she's understands a man. It's insane woman with zero sense of men or masculinity tries to describe a vagina. "Found my own release buried inside her" is so feminine it has a barbie and a shoe collection.
Women need to learn that all the rules that apply to them also apply to guys, and just like how they don't like guys creeping on them, guys who aren't into a chick/aren't attracted to her also don't enjoy unsolicited comments or physical contact.
The rules sadly do not apply to them. They won't be punished, no one will care the man feels abused and any attempt to stand up to it will just get him mocked.
She writes like she's never even seen a penis. It's not even bad woman think she's understands a man. It's insane woman with zero sense of men or masculinity tries to describe a vagina. "Found my own release buried inside her" is so feminine it has a barbie and a shoe collection.
which is odd because she has a husband and you'd think a super spicy erotica writer would discuss ('research'?) these sort of things with her sexual partner(s). hell isn't it just basic human curiosity to know how it feels for the opposite sex? from all the wips/snippets ive seen on her instagram she writes mostly in the male POV, but theres no 'masculine' voice or anything to differentiate. ill save you from posting snippets of her work but its all the same quality, and always the exact same paragraph used to promote her books.
i've also just noticed she uses the phrase '[bury/buried] inside her' twice in the same paragraph. editing with one hand i see.
He's just some guy she paid to dress up like the MMC of her novel, no clue where @WelperHelper99 got that the guy was an author from for the community features post, it's not true.
Another tale supposedly from the same convention:
And:
I love reading and hate graphic sex scenes in all the books now. A few instances is fine but its fking constant. Being in any type of book group can be cringe. Every other post people ask over and over for the most sexual books. Half the books or more are honestly hilariously bad.
He's just some guy she paid to dress up like the MMC of her novel, no clue where @WelperHelper99 got that the guy was an author from for the community features post, it's not true.
which is odd because she has a husband and you'd think a super spicy erotica writer would discuss ('research'?) these sort of things with her sexual partner(s). hell isn't it just basic human curiosity to know how it feels for the opposite sex? from all the wips/snippets ive seen on her instagram she writes mostly in the male POV, but theres no 'masculine' voice or anything to differentiate. ill save you from posting snippets of her work but its all the same quality, and always the exact same paragraph used to promote her books.
i've also just noticed she uses the phrase '[bury/buried] inside her' twice in the same paragraph. editing with one hand i see.
It's not even how a man sees a woman's body. It's describing how a woman sees another person's body. Men describing sex always describe the vagina and the boobs, which are where men mostly look. Even spending time with a man and just observing how he watches passing women you will notice his eyes go to those places naturally. If you're in bed with a woman and admiring the curve of her hip you're a faggot who's missed the bit straight men stare at. The vagina..
He's just some guy she paid to dress up like the MMC of her novel, no clue where @WelperHelper99 got that the guy was an author from for the community features post, it's not true.
The issue with “young adult reader” as a discrete market is it selects against itself. It requests a demographic that has advanced beyond children’s literature but not yet advanced enough to parse the base-level plot of adult books, a timeframe measured in in months if not weeks, while also being an avid reader, which would further reduce that gap. It can’t compete for the casual reader because a) that market simply no longer exists, having been supplanted by less participatory narratives such as TV and video games; and b) they would be competing against the century of top-of-the-bell-curve 100 IQ novels that were written before the YA genre was even a thing and to a (relative) height of sophistication YA could never hope to reach (because then they would just be in the normal adult category). So we’ve ended up with a genre that necessitates authors that are unable to compete with their contemporaries, but also to be unambitious in their craft! Even without the industry artificially excluding men, the best case for the genre would be a continuous revolution of new, inexperienced, male authors who very quickly move on to larger audiences, with the occasional established male authors dipping their toes into something different (which did happen but did so entirely before “young adult” became its own category). This also gets muddied in that the term changed from a target demographic to its own genre, especially post-Harry Potter (Of Micr and Men and other high school English class books get rolled into it for some reason). The modern iteration of smut ostensibly marketed to thirteen-year-old girls (but don’t think about it too much) but purchased by thirty-year-old cat ladies takes more from a fear of competing, taking refuge in a baser appeal than entertainment, than anything.
Her main 'bit' or selling point is her discreet covers- cutesy, colour coordinated novels, with the selling point being 'the darker the colour, the darker the trope'.
Shitty prose and extremely unsexy. What the fuck does he even mean by "push it out"?
Also any woman who unironically uses "pussy" in the narrative (I don't fucking care it's in first-person, MC automatically ousts himself as a jerk) is trash. Just go all the way and use "cunt", don't even bother trying to get all floral at this point.
I despise the use of first-person for this reason. Stop trying to write like you're in the very shoes of the opposite sex you are, you will never get it right. You'd think fanfiction would make great practice with this since you're already writing established characters, but they're fucked in that tone-of-voice as well. And unless you absolutely obsess over a single character to be able to study their thought process that gets them from one scene to another, it is extremely difficult to get yourself into a mindset you have no access to such as a woman trying to envision how a man thinks and speaks, and that's before you get to the sex scene. Even accomplished writers have trouble with this, that's why they tend to just stick to having the MC be the same sex as them. They also will just skim over the sex or just fade to black, but whatever pays the bills I guess.
Obviously no one ever told this woman her writing is terrible. At least Stephenie Meyer went to university for a BA in English literature, what's this chick's excuse?
Oh my God, I despise this woman now. Wasn't very hard to do to begin with and got obvious very quickly, but this explains so much. This woman clearly sucked off knew someone to get herself published because no serious editor would've passed her.
You can't look at the vagina unless she's straight-up presenting herself, my man. And what if the guy has a thing for hips? Apparently birthing hips are sexy.
You can't look at the vagina unless she's straight-up presenting herself, my man. And what if the guy has a thing for hips? Apparently birthing hips are sexy.
Niggers like fat women and claim it's hips, but it's being fat. A woman can have a nice shape but hips are not where you look. There's better places than hips to look once the clothes are off.
