Pen and ink, typewriters and wordprocessors

[sr71plt]

Again, I don't think you have any concept of the relative market share and ease of marketing between those two eras, but I see no need to pursue it. Either you're in the market and taking advantage of it or you're somewhere else. I have no need to pull more swimmers into the pool with me. It's just really weird to see these perspectives on an erotica writers site.

 

[NotWise]

One thing that electronic means of composition has had an impact on is an increased lack of insight into a writer's process by means of examining old drafts.

I don't know about other word processors, but LibreOffice (and I presume, OpenOffice) have a versioning system built in. You just have to use it.

I've never thought about using versioning for fiction. It's essential for large programming projects and I expect it would be useful for collaborative writing projects as well. For a short story? Eh -- I don't know.

 

[cfuhrer]

That's an awfully small set to build a sweeping generalization on.

True.

Beyond that, it seems to be claiming arbiter rights on what literature is, certainly what "good" literature is. I'd guess that to the multitude of readers who bought and enjoyed that series, it was a vast improvement over what they were doing with literature before, which probably, for most of them, was nothing.

I will agree with that.

Shades of Grey slamming by writers is pretty much an "It should have been me" sour grapes expression. You don't have to read it if you don't want to and if your position is that it took readers away from you, you are being horribly shortsighted. Shades of Grey opened up a vast audience for erotica readers. If you really are any good, you will most likely have benefited from it no matter how badly it was written. Shades of Grey just becomes a false excuse for writers who haven't found a winning reader-connection strategy yet themselves--and need someone other than themselves to blame for that.

I am not a writer, so no sour grapes here.
I am a reader and the volume of junk I have to sift through to find quality material has grown exponentially. Frankly I would take less variety that is of better quality any day versus the alternative.

 

[sr71plt]

I think in terms of erotica, "back in the day" that we're talking about here--when erotica material was only in adult book stores, to be fair, there was probably a larger proportion of dross in those works than there is in the erotica being published today. You have to wade through a lot in the mainstream to get what are, for you, personally, gems.

 

[le_kitty]

No.

Technology could not improve quality. That's education's job.

What technology does (on a positive note), is give everyone a voice/platform and access to an audience.

 

[Weird Harold]

Compared with the e-revolution, I'll stand by the claim that very little erotica was produced or bought before then. Where could it be bought other than furtively in adult stores and boutique mail order houses? Existence of a few classic "dirty books" does not a volume industry make. Certainly not on a mass basis or accessible in the open as the material is today. My first erotica was published in 2001. By then Internet advertising/sales was available. Still, I didn't try it again for ten more years.

I think you're overlooking "Pulp" erotica. I can remember finding my cousin's stash of pulp magazines in the mid-fifties and still have a couple of copies of Penthouse Letters from the 70's, 80's and 90's. I also have a couple dozen mass-market paperback erotica books, including a couple of shorter novels bound together like Ace did with science fiction novellas back in the 70's.

I haven't personally encountered anything from the 19th century and earlier, but pulp publishing, aka dime novels, was a thriving industry and I'm sure that there were "dirty book" just as there were "dirty movies" and "dirty postcards" being published.

Erotica and Porn are much more accessible, but they were being published for a long time before computers and the internet were invented.

ETA: Google is your friend -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_literature

 

[R. Richard]

A few years back, I received a "Wish you were here' postcard from Tahiti. The front of the card featured a topless Tahitian lady. A few more years back, the post office would have refused to deliver the postcard

 

[oggbashan]

A few years back, I received a "Wish you were here' postcard from Tahiti. The front of the card featured a topless Tahitian lady. A few more years back, the post office would have refused to deliver the postcard

One of my elderly great aunts was very friendly with a young man who went out to West Africa as a Christian Missionary.

He sent her dozens of postcards of bare-breasted native women (like National Geographic in the 1920s and 30s). She and he regarded the postcards as amusing. So did her postman.

He was sending them in the 1890s.

She showed them to me when she was in her 80s. I had already found back copies of the National Geographic.

 

[HeyAll]

Imagine how scary is was for a writer back then. If someone stole your stack of writings, or it got lost or burned down, you were screwed. No backup or anything.

 

[oggbashan]

Imagine how scary is was for a writer back then. If someone stole your stack of writings, or it got lost or burned down, you were screwed. No backup or anything.

That is what carbon paper was for. You kept a copy at a friend's house.

But if you sent your masterpiece to a publisher, and they didn't return it, you had to type the whole thing again (or handwrite it in earlier times).

 

[CeriseBuss]

Most of the world's great literature was written with some kind of pen on paper. More recently authors wrote with typewriters, and now we write with word processors. I've done all three. The progression in mechanics has been from slow and difficult to quick and easy.

Has the technological progression improved literature?

I still do much of my writing with pen on paper. I find my ideas flow better that way. I then edit as I transcribe my first manuscript into the word processor.

 

[sr71plt]

I think you're overlooking "Pulp" erotica. I can remember finding my cousin's stash of pulp magazines in the mid-fifties and still have a couple of copies of Penthouse Letters from the 70's, 80's and 90's. I also have a couple dozen mass-market paperback erotica books, including a couple of shorter novels bound together like Ace did with science fiction novellas back in the 70's.

I haven't personally encountered anything from the 19th century and earlier, but pulp publishing, aka dime novels, was a thriving industry and I'm sure that there were "dirty book" just as there were "dirty movies" and "dirty postcards" being published.

Erotica and Porn are much more accessible, but they were being published for a long time before computers and the internet were invented.

ETA: Google is your friend -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_literature

No, I'm not overlooking it and I think folks just aren't thinking straight on this. Erotica was a $1.4 billion (BILLION) dollar industry in 2013. The pulp works didn't come anywhere, anywhere, ANYWHERE close to this. Availability and distribution were miniscule (And the content wasn't any better than it is today).

 

[NotWise]

No.

Technology could not improve quality. That's education's job.

What technology does (on a positive note), is give everyone a voice/platform and access to an audience.

My thought that was a writer with the education would use the new tools to speed up the mechanics, take more of the available time to work on the story and ultimately produce a better result.

I'm starting to think that it might have worked in reverse; technology resulted in people producing stories faster, not better. The resulting explosion in the supply reduced the value, so the effort needed to produce a better result was hard to justify.

There are writers here who put an effort into quality writing. There are probably more writers who just squeeze out a story and slap it on the site without giving it as much thought as they would if writing required more effort.

Electronic media and the internet have made erotica more available and expanded the market, but it seems like many of the people in the market aren't very discerning. I don't know how many positive comments I've seen on terrible stories, and that just fuels the fire.

 

[sr71plt]

My thought that was a writer with the education would use the new tools to speed up the mechanics, take more of the available time to work on the story and ultimately produce a better result.

I think it did/does for serious writers. I think that it hasn't in the aggregate because it's enabled a bigga bunch of folks to take up writing who probably shouldn't have and wouldn't have when it was harder, mechanically, to produce. Even here on Lit., when someone posts the trouble they're having writing, the knee-jerk response is to try to help them to do it when the real answer might be to question why they're trying to do it at all if it's just not coming.

 

[Weird Harold]

No, I'm not overlooking it and I think folks just aren't thinking straight on this. Erotica was a $1.4 billion (BILLION) dollar industry in 2013. The pulp works didn't come anywhere, anywhere, ANYWHERE close to this. Availability and distribution were miniscule (And the content wasn't any better than it is today).

The mainstream literature wasn't doing near that kind of volume either. As for availability, almost any newsstand had a top shelf or under-counter supply of what passed for erotica or porn -- at least when I was looking for something racy.

 

[sr71plt]

OK, if you're going to choose not to understand the great disparity between then and now, that's your problem.

 

[oggbashan]

According to my bookdealer's trade magazine, more printed books were sold in 2015 than in any year ever, breaking the record set in 2014, 2013, etc.

 

[Serafina1210]

I read somewhere, a couple of years ago I think, that one big factor in the enormous increase in sales of literary erotica is the ability to buy online, not facing a frowning saleswoman or leering salesman in person. Another is the ereader, which lacks an embarrassingly lurid cover.

These things are especially important to women, who aren't supposed to like porn but often do. You can have your smut and your demure reputation too.

 

[NotWise]

I didn't actually post this thread with the idea of going into the status of the porn/erotica industry, but I looked into it .

People don't seem to doubt that porn is the largest single source of traffic on the internet and possibly the most successful of all internet businesses.

By at least one source, the actual value of the porn industry is almost impossible to estimate. I've seen numbers all over the board. Probably the most common number I've seen is that the worldwide industry earns nearly $100 billion a year. The US part of that business is small; probably less than 10%. The US society has always been rather prudish, and it still is.

Things get more confusing when you look at the sources of income to the industry. Most of the money earned is earned by advertising. Relatively little comes from sales of content. The content is used to draw people to a site, then the site makes their money from the advertising -- and much of that advertising is for other porn sites.

Even the largest producers of content are having financial trouble -- at least as of 2014. They are merging and diversifying to keep their heads above water. The problem of course is that the content they produce is constantly pirated and released through "tube" sites and other free porn sites. The producers don't make much money from their own product.

It might be hard to compare the modern porn/erotica industry to the industry that existed a few decades ago. Except for popular magazines like Playboy, Penthouse or Hustler advertising may not have accounted for that much of the industry's income back then. Widely distributed, high quality movies made money. VCR and CD/DVD recordings made money. Paper back pulp made money.

I don't know how the comparison would work out if you narrowed it down to the income of content producers now and then. I suspect the change would be much smaller than the overall growth of the industry, which has been enormous -- 40% a year for a few years starting in 1997.

 

[Hypoxia]

According to my bookdealer's trade magazine, more printed books were sold in 2015 than in any year ever, breaking the record set in 2014, 2013, etc.

Where? In which nations and languages? Do those totals include comic 'books', road atlases, gov't publications, etc?

Brain fart: 'Twould be interesting to see books-sold-per-capita -- can increased sales be attributed to population growth?

 

[NotWise]

Where? In which nations and languages? Do those totals include comic 'books', road atlases, gov't publications, etc?

This was interesting, but nothing on the image limits the reading to books.

The US and UK are in the second-lowest and lowest categories in reading, respectively.

 

[oggbashan]

Where? In which nations and languages? Do those totals include comic 'books', road atlases, gov't publications, etc?

Brain fart: 'Twould be interesting to see books-sold-per-capita -- can increased sales be attributed to population growth?

UK based but the statistics are on the same base year on year.

Sales of fiction books are a subset. Their sales are at record levels each year, both for hardback and paperback, even though the trend is towards fewer hardback sales as a proportion of the total.

US statistics are similar. e-book sales haven't made much difference.

 

[NotWise]

I found this article in Fortune, dated last fall. This is largely about the US market. It doesn't really answer the question, but it does bring up some interesting points.

The article has some trends for 2014-2015, and includes (near the end) this quotation:

“The implication of ebook sales falling while remaining 20% of the industry is that the industry itself is in decline. Ultimately, in the grand competition that is the market for consumer attention, the fact that books aren’t really improving while everything else is getting better means the publishers may in the end be celebrating the most pyrrhic of victories.”

 

[Hypoxia]

The article has some trends for 2014-2015, and includes (near the end) this quotation:

“The implication of ebook sales falling while remaining 20% of the industry is that the industry itself is in decline. Ultimately, in the grand competition that is the market for consumer attention, the fact that books aren’t really improving while everything else is getting better means the publishers may in the end be celebrating the most pyrrhic of victories.”

I'll wager some in publishing are seeking ways to "improve books". New materials and technologies may help. Embed thin-film electronics in book covers, both hard and soft, for display and interaction. Produce books with features that can't be modeled well by e-readers. Or maybe a change of finances. Do better writers gravitate toward better-paying fields like games and TV? Publishers could boost author royalties to encourage better writing. Right.

We still possess an immense physical library. Paper everywhere! But we're rapidly phasing-out text-only (or slightly illustrated) books in favor of digital downloads. Books we keep are either 1) of sentimental value, 2) oversize and illustrated like atlases and coffee-table gems, or 3) unlikely to be digitized.

And the books we *buy* now? Well, we've always been thrift-shop and yard-sale denizens. Most books we've bought new in shops were as gifts or necessities. That's not changed. My rich sister-in-law may spend big bucks on signed first editions. Not us. Cheap readers remain cheap. Archive.Org, Project Gutenberg, and the local bookstore's one-buck table are our friends.