Erotical
Posted on August 17, 2010 by vicbooks

Everyone is playing the speculation game over possible fates of the publishing industry, scrying the interweb for ebook and readership trends. Such divination is varied and seems full of either melancholic nostalgia or a barely suppressed Schadenfreude. It can get tiring reading about the iPad vs. the Kindle (like they’re Godzilla and Mothra biffing it out in downtown Tokyo) but it leads to an interesting substrate of literary reportage on smaller trends and how they may affect technology and readership habits. These trends, against the wishes of many looking at them, promise nothing of the future but may be able to teach the astute something about it.

A current favourite in the field of micro-trends is the erotica market. Its growth over the last year has been pretty phenomenal, rocketing upwards at a rate around 60% per annum, fast enough that blood would drain right out of your head for entirely appropriate reasons. It’s quite noticeable in the industry due to the proliferation of erotica imprints amongst the big boy publishers like Penguin, Hachette, Random House and HarperCollins, etc (identifiable by fractionally risqué names like Forever, Delacorte or the anti-eponymous Virgin) established in order to cash in on the escalating sales – sales one might very well call engorged.



On the bookshelves at your local store you’ll find various forms of erotica, the thin edge of the blade being ‘Paranormal Romance’ (though many prefer euphemisms like Vampire Porn or Bite & Bonk), which come in varied temperatures, from the angst-laden but fairly chaste Twilight novels to the Wolf Tales series, 8 volumes and counting, which is completely wanton and unquotably explicit.

Read the rest of this interesting post at vicbooks.