Wade is hardly the only author who has made a mint writing about monsters and the women who love them (or at least submit to their sexual appetites). She’s part of a burgeoning literary genre that’s found a wide audience online: monster porn, otherwise known as “cryptozoological erotica,” or as some of the authors prefer to call it, “erotic horror.” Their self-published books feature mythical creatures of every possible variety, from minotaurs to mermen, cthulhus to leprechauns, extraterrestrials to cyclops, who become involved in sexual trysts, often non-consensual, with human lovers. They have titles that are often more silly than sexy — from Demons Love Ass, part of Trisha Danes’ “Beasts & Booty” collection, to Frankenstein’s Bitch and Sex With My Husband’s Anatomically Correct Robot — and the plots are never less than imaginative. A feline shapeshifter might be saved from a tree by a firefighter with a cat fetish (as in the ebook Out on a Limb), or a buxom cattle rancher might be abducted and kept enslaved “in a strange, perverted alien zoo” (Milked by the Aliens).
It’s easy to snicker, but somebody is buying these things. Authors of monster porn may not be notching sales to rival E.L. James or Amanda Hocking, the trailblazers of self-published erotica, but they’re making more than enough to survive. That’s especially remarkable given the low price tag on many of their books. “Amazon pays a royalty of 35 percent for books listed below $2.99,” says K.J. Burkhardt (a pen name), the 45-year-old author of Taken by the Tentacle Monsters and Bred to the Creature. “For those listed at $2.99 and over, I can claim 70 percent in royalty payments. But I didn’t feel comfortable nor right in asking someone to pay $2.99 for a five-to seven-thousand-word short story.” So instead, the majority of her titles are listed at 99 cents, the minimum allowed by Amazon. “Even with the small prices that I was asking,” she says, “it doesn’t take much imagination to guess that I was selling a lot of books to earn $4,000 each month.”
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