Started on Lit, and still there. Added SOL on the advice of Danielle Kitten, and still there. I actually found Lush while doing traffic comparisons of text erotica sites on Alexa before Amazon put almost everything behind a pay wall. Those are the big 3 as far as traffic.
I personally feel they also provide all the versatility an erotica author needs to provide a home to any idea that might cross their mind. SOL's single content restriction means that more or less anything goes, so there's a home for ideas too extreme for the other two. Work shorter than 5k words ( including poetry ) simply doesn't perform very well on the other sites, while on Lush, it gets reasonable readership in comparison to 5-10k word stories, and outperforms even longer work. SOL's tag-based navigation and Lush's expanded categories both serve to prevent opposing camps from developing within categories as they do on Lit and trying to run each other off... *cough* Loving Wives *cough* or dominate a category so thoroughly that the second facet of the category is virtually eradicated ( & , which are separate here, preventing that from happening ) Lit's contests are major traffic draws, and there's just no comparison to the traffic overall.
Having all three sites in your utility belt means that you don't need to make your idea conform to any one site's content restrictions or readership preferences, which can stifle your creativity. Run with your idea, and then home it where it is within content bounds and will get a response that rewards the effort you put forth. Every site will organically end up with exclusive content from you, meaning your more devoted fans often end up contributing to all three sites as well, in at least some small way.
Remember, the description line is right there below the title everywhere it appears. You can have a nebulous or clever title and still call out the salacious details in the description line, thereby getting the best of both worlds.
It also becomes a job rather quickly, I should imagine. You have some element of that with camgirls, but they have a lot more leeway to just say to hell with it if they don't feel like performing that day, unless they're one of the rare studio girls, or foolishly trying to make a living of it.
That's exactly why I've never published any of my work for pay. As soon as I consider it, it starts feeling like a job instead of a diversion, and I sour on the whole process.
The girls who have either a studio address or a PO Box someone else can pick things up from ( if they're wise ) and have cultivated a following are often sent things as well. Off the top of my head I can think of several expensive lingerie outfits, a leather corset, a chainmail bikini, 8 or 9 nice necklaces/bracelets/ankle bracelets/hood rings that Bailey got over the years. Not to mention half a dozen new toys. They'll send stuff to see her wearing/using it, and after that point, it becomes part of her arsenal. Upgrades to cams, computers, etc. aren't unusual either. Some of the sites even have blind ways for people to order things ( usually toys and lingerie ) where it gets sent to the model by the site. The site naturally profits from directing customers to the sales site.
It's nearly impossible to make a living at it nowadays, but a girl who can pay her bills without it can pick up some nice perks. The money is easy for an exhibitionist with an outgoing personality, it can be done at home whenever they feel like it with a reasonable internet connection, damn near any computer, and even a webcam. They can almost make a living at it, but it's the almost that's the problem. Anxiety about paying the bills is a camgirl's worst enemy.
There is a degree of celebrity to it as well. It can be a thrill to have all these guys turning up every day for you on the site. Getting recognized out in public can be exciting, awkward, creepy, or even dangerous. Kind of a crapshoot there.
Girls in their 30s and 40s have a more specialized audience, but there are a lot more paying customers and fewer freeloaders among them. The freeloaders are all off perving on the 19/20 year olds, and the desperate girls finger-banging in free chat, while the lonely guys with money are often drawn to someone who is even slightly more "in their league". Just being hot isn't enough once they get a little older. They have to cultivate those relationships to keep the money coming in.
Most make the mistake of starting to "give it away" with lots of free peeks when the money slows down because it fills their rooms up. That just fills it up with freeloaders, though. The people willing to open their wallets can't have a decent conversation amidst that cacophony of "get yer kit off" "shoe my u oussy plzzzzz!" and that keeps them from pulling the trigger. The girls who do it infrequently ( or "accidentally" when they end up back in free chat after a private show ) and make the guys work for it do better because the freeloaders move on, and it encourages interaction, which is where the real income potential is.
I've been a chatter, a chat admin, and my Baileykins was a camgirl for years. I've been behind the curtain, and I know what those girls are saying when they shut the cam off, as well as what happens in the private shows.
The guys who are spending the money ( as opposed to the people there looking for free peeks ) are often very lonely for one reason or another. What a ( good ) camgirl provides is a pseudo relationship that helps to fill that yawning void. As often as not, those private shows have very little that's sexual about them. It can be hours of simply talking to an attractive woman, which is something they don't expect to ever experience in their real life.
The other thing is guys with kinks that they're afraid to reveal. A good camgirl has all sorts of weird accessories readily at hand to satisfy those. Baby oil. Balloons of every shape, size, and color. A multitude of outfits, heels, etc.
The rest is just guys who want to direct the action. There's probably something in particular that really turns them on, and doesn't show up very often in repetitive professional porn videos or poorly shot/lighted amateur videos.
As to the camgirls, the good ones enjoy the attention, and enjoy fulfilling the needs of the guys ( and a few girls ) who show up in their room. They know it's not a way to make a living, but rather a way to make some extra cash on the side. Unfortunately, a lot of them are trying to make a living of it, for a variety of reasons. They typically burn out quickly in today's environment where there is too much competition and too many sites spreading out the paying customers too thin. Cultivating and maintaining a large enough following to achieve a steady income is nearly impossible, and requires spending most of the day promoting themselves. They're working twelve or more hours a day just to barely get by.
The motivations are as varied as people. Some are desperate. Lost their jobs, or can't find one, or got out of a relationship and find themselves without support in a place far from family, etc. There's always a few who are on drugs, and using it as a means to support their habit. Some are simply using it as a safer alternative to straight up prostitution. Feeds coming out of other countries ( the former Soviet bloc countries in particular are bad about this ) may be either full on forced, or blackmailed into being on cam.
That's just the camgirl sites. It gets even weirder once you start getting into onlyfans, premium snap, etc.
Most girls are finding that the only way to make real money nowadays is to both be on live cam as well as producing custom/kink videos that are available for purchase. The days when you could make $600 a week after taxes just being on cam 6 hours a day are long, long gone. ( As are sites that actually pay models as employees as opposed to independent contractors )
Guess I'm going to be the odd man out here.
Yes.
There comes a point where you've been ridden hard and put away wet several times a day, by more than one girl at a time, in long sessions, for several days in a row, where the slightest rush of blood causes a sensation not unlike a madman is gleefully beating your junk with a rubber mallet. Add in facial road rash and chapped cheeks from having a face full of pussy on a near constant basis, plus sheer exhaustion, and there's absolutely a point where you have to beg off for a day.
One thing not mentioned here so far is mods checking for the story appearing elsewhere on the internet under a different name, which helps prevent people stealing work and posting it as their own. Because I have three different pen names that I use elsewhere to compartmentalize my stories, I've been asked about this more often than the average member. Fortunately, I have my own website where I can point to the connection between all my names, so it's a quick and easy process to prove they're all mine when I choose to bring a Les or Dark story over here under my RR name.
Even if it's only a small percentage of the mods taking the time to do a plagiarism search, they're doing erotica authors everywhere a great service by blocking people who are trying to capitalize on other people's work. Eventually, someone who is stealing from other authors is going to run afoul of a moderator doing such a search, and probably find themselves perma-banned for it.
While I understand it may not feel that way when you personally receive a rejection, there's also a lot more consistency with regards to content moderation on Lush than elsewhere, where you typically have only 1 or 2 people skimming a ton of submissions by themselves. A lot of things can slip through the cracks with such a rushed approval process, and knee-jerk rejections that mistake something acceptable for banned content are just as likely. The same holds true for grammar. While not every moderator may have a creative writing degree or be a professional editor, they're screening out a lot of painfully bad, almost illiterate dross that ends up getting approved elsewhere because the one person who is approving new content for the site can't take the time to truly read every story. On the flip side, one typo in just the wrong place could get an otherwise perfectly fine story rejected for grammar elsewhere due to the same speed-skimming process.
Having multiple moderators also helps eliminate category bias. When you only have one or two people approving stories, they're going to have things they find boring or even distasteful that are still within content rules. Such a story isn't going to get the same level of fair evaluation as something they enjoy. With a much larger moderation team, a mod can skip that story that gives them the creeps or puts them to sleep, knowing that someone else who is more comfortable with the content will be along soon enough to give it a fair evaluation.
I can tell you right off to count your blessings on Lush. Lush has by far the best comment to view ratio of any of the big 3 sites. The last time I ran a full track on my numbers for all three sites, Lush generated a comment for about every 1500 views, while the average elsewhere was about every 4500 views. Feedback in the form of comments may be rare on Lush, but it's far more likely than anywhere else.
Keep in mind that a large percentage of your readers may very well be doing so one handed. Leaving a comment about a story that hit the spot may the the last thing on their mind at the bottom of the page.
I've never had any issue with my voice being diluted, or my odd turns of phrase being "corrected" — and I use a lot of them. I've had plenty of good communication with story mods when they felt something was unclear or caused a speed bump in the flow, though. I've had mods willing to pre-vet pieces that I was concerned might be dancing too close to content lines, and suggest tweaks to get them through the queue when they did stick a toe over the border with minimal impact to the overall story. Nothing but positive experiences with the verification process here.
63 already, huh? I only just caught up with responding to my comments from the last few days. I'll catch up with the entries on the morrow. With 100 word stories, I'm going to do my best to read everything this time around, even though I'm about 40 behind at this point. LOL
Mine almost always have at least a little dash of reality in there somewhere. It may be something as simple as a silly line about buying multiple copies of Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy out of a Toys R Us bargain bin in the 90s ( Golden Rolls ) or something that's entirely based upon reality with only a few tweaks for readability. ( Long Distance Lust )
Even my fantasy stories have tiny little smidgens of things that happened in real life in there, because those nuggets were part of the adventures in my custom-made PnP role-playing game that the stories are spawned from.
I wonder sometimes if Christi or Alicia have ever stumbled across my stories, seen their names, and connected the dots. LOL There's really nothing of either of them in the stories beyond their names and hair colors, because I didn't know either of them well enough to inject any of their personality/quirks into the characters, but those names are reasonably unique enough that they'd be hard pressed to rationalize it was coincidence. I would hope that they appreciate their namesakes being sexy badasses if they ever do stumble across them.
Any time there's a camgirl or other type of distance sex work in a story, there's a lot of reality in there. I have an infinite supply of real experiences I was either a part of in some capacity, or heard first hand immediately after the fact. Camgirls need to let off steam, and as the SO of a camgirl and an admin on the site, I was a preferred sounding board for that kind of thing.
Blood Island from Kindred of the Wood was a real place, and portrayed exactly as I remember it. Same with the waterfall camp. Things getting thrown "over the hill" in Steward of the Wood and at least one other story were taken from my grandparents' place, where broken appliances, farm implements, chicken heads, fish guts, and pretty much anything that wouldn't burn went over the hill into the ravine next to the garage, to be used as target practice for rifles and shotguns. Most anything with unmanaged woods comes from memories of the woods behind my grandparents' house.
I'm sure that the river community of Dodge City with stolen street signs of every kind ( including a sign on each end of the community stolen from the outskirts of the real Dodge City ) and quirky ( to say the least ) residents will eventually make an appearance somewhere. Same with the not far away "Stink Road" where everyone cleaned their massive flathead catfish after showing them to everyone they knew and taking a ton of pictures. The heads and bones were left hanging from stringers along Stink Road as macabre trophy gallery of generations. Some had names and dates scrimshawed into the skulls, and they were often rehung when the stringers rotted away.
It's not hard to imagine how Stink Road got its name. A lot of huge ( 40-60 lb. ) catfish come out of the river every year.
There's a lot of real experiences in the sex scenes. Being with a bisexual camgirl leads to a lot of wild and interesting times.
TL/DR, I don't write much in the way of true stories, but there's bits of reality in virtually everything.
Side note: The cool-down time limit between casting votes is a little frustrating when reading in the microfiction category. Acceptable and understandable because it's a necessary mitigation measure against voting shenanigans, but still frustrating.
I actually have a tentacle story in the pipeline, but it's chronologically indisposed at the moment, because I need to finish the next in the series first. I didn't leave any wiggle room to change the order of the stories at the end of the last one.
Like I said, it's a quick and easy clarification through my website. I actually get a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that even if it's rarely, the mods are looking out for authors by attempting to halt attempts at plagiarism.
