Writing popular fiction

age and fighting to achieve an adult sexual harmony with their peers. Just as with the BigSN, you should read a great deal of the field to fully understand how a RoughSN plot is structured and to get the proper feel for sex scene description. Any dozen titles published by Olympia Press and its subsidiary houses will properly acquaint you with the styles and language requirements of this kind of erotic novel.
    In the RoughSN, the heroine—unless her frigidity is the central story problem—should be every bit as virile and anxious for love-making as the hero. Indeed, she should be outright aggressive and should, at least half the time, initiate the sex scene herself. For the most part, women read the BigSN and they want the heroine to be the constant focus of male aggression, the recipient of unlimited sexual offerings. Likewise, the overwhelmingly
male
audience for the RoughSN wants the hero to be the focus of
female
aggression and the recipient of unlimited pleasure.
    Finally, when you choose a title for your erotic novel, you must carefully consider your market. The reader who buys the Big Sexy Novel wants a "refined" title, something that will not embarrass her when she buys the book, and something which she can unhesitatingly leave out on the coffee table to impress guests or generate conversation.
The Voyeur, The Exhibitionist, The Love Machine, Good Time Coming, The Rag Dolls, The Body Brokers
, and
The Ravishers
are all good BigSN titles, because they promise erotica without blatantly heralding the book's content. None of these, however, would be appropriate titles for the RoughSN, which must come on much more forcefully, as these several examples attest:
Share the Warm Flesh, Thirteen and Ready!, Swapper's Convention, Sextet, Thrust
, and
Hung
.
    Erotica is included in this book because—though it does not follow the category plot formula and is often lacking in the other four basic requirements of category writing—editors and publishers refer to it, handle it, and think of it in the same way they do any other genre. The form can be labeled, and monthly erotica lists can be established. This is more true of the RoughSN than the BigSN, but applicable to both.
    The advantages of the form are obvious. A BigSN author, if his book should catch on and make the bestseller lists, will earn far more money from far higher sales than he could with a bestseller from any other category. Even if his book only skirts the bestseller lists or receives no particular special attention in hardcover, it will generate larger paperback advances and sales than will titles in other categories. If he's lucky, the BigSN author can establish himself with a few books, and gain fame (of a questionable sort) that few other genre writers ever enjoy. Because he makes more money per novel, he can spend less time at the typewriter than the average genre author—or, he can spend the usual time and, working within the strict requirements of the BigSN form, write
better
books than he could if he had to churn out ten a year. Somehow, though, the successful BigSN writer never seems to take advantage of this last benefit.
    The disadvantages of the BigSN are also clear. You can rarely create anything meaningful within the genre, because of its sex requirements. James Jones, Joyce Elbert,
Gwen Davis, and a handful of others have now and then come close to bits of art in their BigSN work, but those moments are outweighed, by far, by the unusual BigSN content. Also, while the writers working in other categories are delivering average 60,000-word scripts, the BigSN author must put together a story at least 100,000 words long and preferably 150,000-250,000 words. A 120,000-word novel is not simply twice as hard to write as the 60,000-word book, but geometrically more taxing, because the plot and the character interaction must be several times more complex in order to support these extra pages. Only the profound novel with genuine insights and something important to say can carry this many words; profundity is ruled out for the BigSN author, by the definition of his field. Because the size requirement is difficult to meet, many writers tend to overwrite the BigSN, to puff it up. Often, they lose their perspective after a few books and no longer consciously realize that they
are
puffing.
    Since the advances and royalties in the Rough Sexy Novel field are lower than the average for category work, no one should set out to become a RoughSN writer for