One of the letters I recently received for my Dear Della page was from a guy asking if erotica was a closed shop to men. He’d noticed that many erotica writers were female.
Interesting question – I know what he means. However, who writes what can be somewhat misleading in this field as practically everyone has a pseudonym.
In my experience from working as an editor for Xcite Books I’d say this is one of the fields where male and female writers are fairly evenly spread. In some of the niche markets there are actually more male writers than female. However, it’s actually quite hard to identify authors because so many of them use a pseudonym. These are often changed to reflect the type of erotica, for example, a woman writing for a gay market might well use a male pseudonym and a man writing lesbian erotica often uses a female pseudonym.
So no – this market is definitely not a closed shop for men.
If you would like to know more about writing erotica – whether you are male or female, please do check out my day course on How to Write and Sell Erotica on 2 February. More details here http://www.dellagalton.co.uk/?page_id=31
